Treasures

Sometime during the night I had decided it would be a good idea to walk on the beach all the way to Fort Macon this morning.  I have somehow pulled a muscle in my lower back - probably as a result of doing some new core exercises yesterday morning on the yoga mat - so I knew it would be good to walk it out.  Yesterday morning I ran a little over four miles and it felt better with every step.  And it was the same today; I stopped to stretch from time to time, and each time I could feel it getting looser, so that by lunchtime it was almost back to normal and I could keep up with Martha.

Low tide was at 10:17 a.m., and not by design but by coincidence that is exactly the time we set foot on this flat, wide beach.  It is so easy to walk on, or run on, at low tide.

There is something therapeutic about a long walk on the beach beyond the merely physical, just as there is on a long run.  We talked a little about the increasingly disturbing decisions our new President is making day by day from his retreat in Florida (while his Slovenian Queen is locked away in her golden tower in New York); we talked about family and friends and the struggles they are facing; and we talked about the struggles in our own lives.  But step by step the tension began dissolving, like the footsteps we left behind in the sand as the waves softly washed in.

Rocks with long green mossy hair combed by the waves; a sand dollar with a bite taken out of one corner; the shell from a horseshoe crab; and one perfect sand dollar that Martha found that, sadly, broke in half while she was carrying it in her pocket with another one.  I could hear my own little collected shells clinking lightly with every step like change in my pocket.

We stopped at Fort Macon and realized we were hungry and thirsty, but we had neglected to bring any money at all.  They had a water fountain there and we drank heavily, and Martha said they sold some snacks in the gift shop, but I don't think they would have accepted a handful of shells.

On the way back, a man was sweeping a metal detector back and forth, back and forth, hoping to find something more valuable than shells.

And these gulls perched on the roof at the picnic area were carefully watching nearby picnickers with their usual greedy eyes.

As we neared the end of our walk, Martha looked back and saw a massive freighter sailing out from Morehead City port, carrying treasure of its own, I suppose.

Everybody seemed to be looking for treasure this day.  We were happy with what we picked up on this peaceful beach - plenty enough for us - and what we left behind.

Succulent Seafood

This afternoon we attended a special program organized by the N. C. Aquarium called "Succulent Seafood."  The program takes place at several different local restaurants each year - "Local chef's demonstrate how to prepare fresh local seafood with a flourish," in the words of the Aquarium.  We tried to get into these programs last year but they were already sold out.

Today's program took place at Amos Mosquito's, located less than a mile from us, and was introduced by the Special Events coordinator at the Aquarium; he provided us with an entertaining and knowledgeable and wide-ranging overview of the local fishing industry, focusing especially on shrimp, and he fielded questions about sustainable fishing, coastal geography, "suspicious shrimp" (i.e., imported shrimp, which we did NOT want to eat after hearing about the industry), and efforts to reduce "by-catch."  This guy was good!  And he also was a fisherman himself who liked to eat fresh shrimp, straight from the docks, and maintain a good supply in his freezer.  "I hate to eat chicken!" he said.

I learned later from the internet that this restaurant's interesting name originated in a brain-storming session.  "Someone suggested Skeeter’s because of the decor and location on the sound, and the owner remembered the knock-knock joke she always misquoted:

 Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Amos.
Amos who?
A mosquito!

Head Chef Luke McGuire was young and energetic, and he told us more than I think we had ever learned about cooking - how hot to get the pan, how to hold a knife - and then we all got to sample the delicious recipe for the day, Shrimp and Grits.  Martha likes to try this dish at many different places and she pronounced it wonderful.

So much succulent seafood!  And so little time . . .

Choose Life

Yesterday was a full and active day!  After completing the 5-K (awaking at 5:00 a.m., and sleeping as  poorly as usual the night before a race), we ate a hasty lunch, went to the matinee in Emerald Isle, and watched a touching little movie called A Dog's Purpose.  The movie was panned by the critics but will be appreciated by any dog lover; Martha and I have owned several dogs, one in particular, who we loved, and there is nothing like the unconditional love a dog can have for a person.

On the way back, we stopped at the N. C. Aquarium in Pine Knoll Shores for an hour or two, which is one of the nicest aquariums we have visited and which we toured more extensively last year.  It felt good to move those tired legs after sitting motionless in a movie theater, wandering from room to room and marveling at the strange aquatic creatures that inhabit this infinitely interesting world; I gaze out the window on the wide ocean as I am writing this, and it catches my breath to think about that unseen underwater life teeming out beneath the shining surface.

Hundreds of species of little minnows and chubs and shiners, schools of small fish swarming in circles in the deep tanks, like rush hour in a big city yet somehow never colliding; a big shark with jagged teeth gliding slowly past, evidently well-fed or he would be feasting unfettered before the horrified eyes of spectators on this buffet swirling all around him; rays gliding like space creatures fallen into the sea; horse-shoe crabs with blue blood, that we found is used in medicine to detect the presence of  bacteria in new drugs; and some fishes with faces that look uncannily like people I know.  And lion fish, and strange diaphanous jellyfish, brainless and spineless and eyeless, floating in the depths.  It is like visiting another world, and yet it is our world, right here and now.

Another beautiful sunset called to graceful and beautiful conclusion this active day.

I read The Likeness in the evening until I became so sleepy that I realized I had missed something, so I put it down and re-read parts of that chapter again this afternoon, catching all of the tell-tale signs.  Tana French is skilled at casually dropping sentences like, "And that is the first mistake I made," and the reader sits straight up and asks himself, "Wait what?  What mistake?!!"

Jason preached this morning, and we are starting to appreciate him more and more - so earnest and so young!  At the beginning of the service, smiling uncontrollably, he read Luke 1:41 - "When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit" - by way of announcing the news that his wife was pregnant with their second child.  Today was Communion Sunday, or "Service of Word and Table."  I have always enjoyed watching how different churches celebrate the Lord's Supper; here, the congregation goes to the altar and kneels (if they can - one distinguished gentleman with a cane carefully and stubbornly lowered himself down, and then struggled back up again) and there are bowls filled with wafers all along the rail; you take a wafer yourself, and the Pastors carry trays down the altar rail from each end with the wine/grape juice.  Martha noticed that some worshipers were leaving money, little rolled-up bills, in some of the many empty holes where the glasses went.  

It is always moving to think that on this first Sunday in the month, so many Christians around the world are celebrating this ancient mystery of Grace, perhaps shoulder to shoulder, perhaps standing around a little table breaking a common loaf, perhaps bowing their heads in a pew, or on a kneeler - brothers and sisters in Christ.  Jason preached about "Choosing Life," and there was an undercurrent that made it clear that he, too, was torn by the divisions in our country where so many are saying that we should be building walls instead of bridges, and keeping out those who yearn for freedom instead of welcoming them.  He described riding in a car on a long trip with a friend with opposing political views, and how both of them ended up unchanged in opinion but realizing they still loved and respected each other.  "We are called to choose life with our relationships with others."  Well said.  And now he and his wife will be bringing new life into the world.

And for our closing hymn today, let us sing:

Beautiful words, wonderful words,
wonderful words of life.
Beautiful words, wonderful words,
wonderful words of life. 

Cocoa 5-K

The changeable weather has changed again.  We took a look at the forecast last night, which called for a temperature of 33 degrees and a brisk 15-mph wind on Saturday morning, and decided that it was just not worth it to run a 5-K in conditions like that; both of us have run marathons in colder temperatures and in rain, but this was not a target race at all.

But during the night I awoke once or twice and had some second thoughts.  Why not give it a try?  I am, after all (as noted in a previous post) not right in the head.  Martha knew her asthma might give her problems in the cold, dry air, and she opted for the treadmill; but I dressed out and headed over the bridge to Morehead City, our car buffeted a little in the sharp wind.

The Cocoa 5-K was a low-key event last year, and it was the same this year, but the course seemed to be pretty close to five kilometers (I registered 3.12 on my Garmin) and I was looking at it as a hard training run.  There were plenty of strollers and small children milling around, and the start/finish line did not materialize until the very last moment.  A woman (the Race Director?) thanked us for coming.  And suddenly we were off! - a stroller bumping up against the back of my legs, two parents holding a three-year-old between them by the hands in front of me, and many children sprinting and stopping, sprinting and stopping, stretching out in single file on that winding sidewalk, finally warming up a little in the morning sun, until we reached Evans Street and could spread out.  There must have been 150 of us, and half of the children seemed to know one another; when we turned around the barrel at the end of the street, I discovered that I was in the front third of the field.  I was happy with my time of 31:25.

There was, as promised, a crowded little tent at the finish, but it was heated and there were bananas and cups of hot chocolate, a pretty good combination.  The wind picked up even more as I cooled down, ambled over to the finish line, and started chatting with those standing there.  I love watching runners finish a race and talking to the finish-line volunteers.  A man about my age told me I had run a "blessed" race, and then I discovered he was a youth pastor from the Swansboro Church of God.

"Can you imagine how hard it was to get seventeen teenagers together and loaded into a bus by 7:30 this morning?" he asked.

"That must have been harder than running 3 miles," I said. 

I left before the awards - 10-year age groups, and if I had managed to place, my "trophy" would have been two tickets to the Carolina Chocolate Festival soon to be underway in the Civic Center.  But it was a good day, as it always is at the end of a race, people laughing and applauding their friends crossing the finish line, the sun rising higher and higher, and that warm, satisfying feeling of exhausted legs.

And hot chocolate!  I returned with that coveted Cocoa 5-K shirt featuring the happily running chocolate bar with a ragged bite taken out of one corner, which I absolutely love.

A Good Day to Read a Book

There could not have been a starker contrast between yesterday morning and this morning:  the bright sunshine and mild temperatures, the long sweet afternoon on the beach reading books, the glow of slight sunburn at the end of the day, suddenly replaced by a grim and rainy February day.  I went out to do my Tai Chi and realized that the wind had sprung up again overnight, out of the north, and on the way out to the dune-top deck a light rain began to spray fitfully on me, freckling the boardwalk. 

This is the kind of day that I would imagine a detective from the Murder Squad might be called out to investigate a murder on this same dune-top deck.  There would already be yellow tape stretched across the walkway and men in white coats would be bent over, carefully combing the sand dunes for evidence.  I would nod to the officer as he lifts up the tape and I duck under.  "What have you got?" I would ask curtly . . .

But thankfully I am not on the Murder Squad!  Instead I was glad to tie the hood of my sweatshirt tightly around my head as the rain intensified, and to return to the warmth of the condo and the sweet smell of coffee where I intend to merely read about murder most of the day - a good way to rest up for tomorrow's race.  My new book is Tana French's The Likeness, and the cover blurb describes it as "a nearly pitch-perfect follow-up to her debut thriller, In the Woods." That is exactly right.  And I am forbidden to say anything more about it because Martha will want to read it next.

 
What a wonderful thing it is to read a book!  I feel sorry for young people today who know nothing more about reading than that little device in their hand and its tweets and posts, or (worse) that television screen and its loud flashing horrors.  The next best thing to a book is a Kindle, I suppose, which allows a reader to easily pull hundreds of books like this as if my magic through cyberspace into a comfortable little tablet on one's lap.  I do understand its advantages, but I love the smell of real paper, musty and sweet, the ability to flip back a page or two and re-read something I might have missed, to dog-ear a page I might want to return to. 

And the talent of a good writer of fiction like Tana French who is able to effortlessly transport me to the Irish countryside and its driving rain - I can almost smell it! - evoking so well the little village there and its inhabitants, and creating out of nothing real flesh-and-blood characters who think and feel and whom I come to care about by the end of the book.  And a plot that twists and turns like a maze of country roads, leading the reader deeper and deeper into the woods. 

Groundhog Day

I've been getting up pretty early every morning, but this morning I found myself awake before 7:00 a.m., the lights lining the walkway still burning, the sky just beginning to turn pink.  So I went out and did my Tai Chi before sunrise, and then watched it rise out of the ocean in a perfectly clear sky.

The surf was very calm and the air was mild, and I walked up and down the beach a little ways just savoring the peculiar, magical, slightly misty pink and lavender light all around, the colored water washing in gently and the shells gleaming.  The only other person out was a woman and her dog, disappearing over the dunes into an adjoining house.  So very peaceful!

This is Groundhog Day, and I don't know what the weather was like where Punxsutawney Phil was, but I don't think he would have been frightened by the sunshine on this mild and cloudless day.  He might have even basked a little bit out on the beach.

It was Martha's idea to preview the Cocoa 5-K course, so we drove to the Convention Center five minutes away and did exactly that.  I have always  marveled at how runners can remember a course run in the past down to the tiniest detail; it all came back to us, including that winding sidewalk (not as long as I had remembered) and that long, straight, flat stretch down Evans Street, lined by pretty residences backing right up to the sound and shaded by big live oak trees.  It is a beautiful course, except for that 0.68 mile on the sidewalk.  Martha fell hard back in September and her knees still feel it, so she was wary of every little change in elevation at the sidewalk cracks, every water valve cover in the road, every tiny pothole, marking in her mind where they were.

We returned to a beautiful, mild, sunny day, so mild that we sat out on the balcony; and then we got our little folding chairs and walked down to the beach, and sat there all afternoon, just the other side of the dunes, reading our books.  My new Tana French books arrived yesterday - I love buying books from one of the few independent bookstores left - and I have been engrossed in The Likeness just as I was with Into the Woods, which Martha has now begun.  These books are very addictive!  The interesting thing is that, unlike most "murder series," the point of view of the characters changes with every book.  The narrator of the new book was a supporting characters in the last one, and sheds in retrospect a sightly different perspective on what happened. 

But I must say no more!  Martha must be kept in suspense until the final stunning revelation!  Shhhh!

And now as I am writing this I feel that slightly wonderful glow of perhaps getting a little too much sun.  I am glad I was not frightened by my shadow.

That Old Train Keeps Blowing

The race I am planning to run on Saturday - the Cocoa 5-K - is going to be just a fun run.  We ran this race last year and quickly realized that, with its winding sidewalks and parking-lot crossovers, the course was probably not accurately measured, and I remember that there was a problem with the results, too; someone mistakenly drove off with them, not realizing that the finishers might want to know how they placed.  But if the course is short or long, it will be the same distance for everybody, and unlike some runners I know I will forgive volunteers who are simply doing the best they can to organize a small fund-raising event.  No chip timing, no likelihood of setting a record of any kind, lots of kids sprinting ahead and then suddenly stopping ahead of you.  There might even be Gatorade at the finish line, and T-shirts.  And I hope neither of us will get injured on the uneven sidewalks.

Still, I am training to do the best I can - what else can a runner do? - and have been running these "intervals" of unknown distance every week.  Today I completed four miles and included two of them (1:01 and 0:59), the last "speed" work I will do before the race.  Three days before a race all I want to do is briefly remind my legs what 5-K pace feels like.

As I was on my way to the picnic area I could hear, across the salt flats and the Sound, the moaning of a freight train, and I remember that I had heard it during the night last night, and from time to time wavering in the distance since we have been here.  There is a railroad track originating at Morehead City's port, where all those freighters we see on the horizon at night from time to time are going to and coming from, and it runs straight down the middle of Arendell Street, a surprising sight to see!

On Sunday mornings, worshipers at the two or three churches on Arendell park startlingly close to the tracks, although I have never seen a freight train run on Sunday morning, nor come to think of it at any time at all.  I just hear them in the distance, and it is somehow very reassuring to know that commerce is taking place while we sleep and while we run.

I am reminded when I hear the freight train of that beautiful song that not many are familiar with by Chrissie Hynde, a woman who has aged as gracefully as Emmy Lou Harris:  One Thing Never Changed.

That old train keeps blowing
Through the center of this town
Restores my faith
When the chips are down

It don't take no passengers
Since the streets got re-arranged
But that whistle still blows
Because one thing never changed

.   .   .

 That old train keeps blowing
I can hear it in the night
I hold onto myself
Its gonna be alright

People come and go
Like cars changing lanes
But that whistles gonna blow
Because one thing never changed.