January 5, 2006 - Sojourn into the Past-Day 3

January 5, 2006 - Sojourn into the Past-Day 3

Sunday December 25th—Christmas day, IM and I wake relatively early, around 8:00 AM and I don my running suit and run up to McKelligon Canyon Road for my morning jog. Imagine a grade that climbs continually up the streets of Morningside Heights, the El Paso neighborhood where my folks live, from Dyer Street to Alabama Street, roughly 13 blocks. You’re heading due west running up the foothill of the Franklin Mountains. This is the mountain range that gave El Paso its name “El Paso del Norte” since the city is built along the pass between the 15-mile long north-south Franklins and the 7-mile north-south North Franklin Mountains.

When you reach Alabama, you’re near the base of the Franklins and from there McKelligon Canyon Road extends a miles and three quarters before dead ending. Soldiers from nearby Ft Bliss routinely run from the base into the canyon and back, a little over 10 miles round trip. My morning effort will not be as ambitious. I content myself with cresting the grade that guards the entrance to the canyon, about a third of a mile along McKelligon Canyon Road from Alabama Street. The only way to describe the grade is to liken it to running up Powell Avenue from Market Street to the top of Nob Hill in San Francisco. I take pride in still being able to do it without stopping, though the spring in my stride is not as young as it used to be. Halfway up the grade that grows steeper as you ascend, I hear footfalls behind me and to my right—I’m in the on-coming traffic side of the road. It’s a young G.I. with backpack only pumping his finely toned, young, muscular legs up the grade. He passes me but the gap between us doesn’t widen as quickly as the grade slows his ascent, though he is still outdistancing me easily.

In that one moment watching that young man easily stride past me, I have an epiphany about myself and my place in the world. Since I started running in the late 1970s, the hour-long run has become my metaphor for life. It is the ultimate expression of being alive and willing to struggle. First, you have to wake from your slumber and drag on jogging togs. Next you have to shod your feet in running shoes and then convince yourself to leave the house in the dark when there are precious few souls stirring and begin an hour-long seven-mile journey out and back with only the sound of your steady breathing, rhythmic heartbeat, and the constant sound of your own footfalls for company. And you have to do this day in and day out without end. If that isn’t the perfect metaphor for life, I don’t what is. The epiphany however is in that young man and his ease and grace ascending the hill; I recalled a younger me doing this same run up this same grade with equal vigor. My younger self would probably have had trouble keeping up this young man’s pace; but that other me would have had more resources to call upon to give it a game try. All of us come into this world with a finite amount of miles to run before we can not or will not make the effort. I figure as long as I can still make it up the hill, I’m still in the game.

This revelation was particularly poignant to me because of what has happened to my father and mother over the years since the turn of the century. It is particularly acute with my father, who after years of suffering with a painful hip and knee decided to have a hip replacement followed a couple of years later by a knee replacement. Both curtailed his ability to move freely as he had before the surgeries. His freedom of movement was later further curtailed by a fall that shattered his one good leg, an accident he is only now recovering from sufficient that he can walk with the aid of a cane. He tells me that the cane isn’t to get around but rather to help him to get up after being seated of kneeling to retrieve something from the floor. His gait is the slow, measured pace of an elderly man—he’s in his mid-80s. I keep thinking of that hill and how it has steadily been slowing my ascent over time. I tell him he needs to exercise his legs more and he agrees, but it gets harder to do when you stop seeing the reason for running the race. As a young man I would have challenged the solder with the backpack. Though I stiffened my will and dug deeper to keep up with him this time, it was harder to command myself to do so. I keep remembering the migrant African tribe featured in a documentary I saw many years ago, who lived their lives moving constantly. The elders unable to maintain the pace would simply drop out and let the rest of the tribe abandon them. I can’t remember how they died. If this were a story, though, I would have the old man take on a lion and die a noble death fighting to the end.

Neither my dad nor my mom have given up and let the rest of the tribe abandon them. They both seize each day and ring a day’s worth of living out of it just as they’ve done for all the years they’ve been on this good earth, but they take their time doing it now. Like my father, my mom has a stern will to survive and endure. The two of them feel a deep-seated obligation to one another that neither could conscious leaving without the other. A symptom of old age, my mother is a walking chemical experiment, pills to regulate blood pressure, others to maintain her sodium level, others to regulate her sugar level, still others to thin her blood. She despairs of the drug regimen but consents because her children all believe that her doctor’s prescriptions is how best to maintain her health. Just before we arrived, the drug combinations had failed to do their job. Her sodium and sugar levels had fallen out of their nominal range. She went to the William Beaumont Hospital to get re-regulated and caught whatever bug everyone in the waiting room happened to have. When we arrived she was coughing and generally feeling miserable and still had not managed to get her sodium and sugar levels back in range.

Nevertheless, she sat beside my father at the dining room table next to the decorated Christmas tree filled with presents from her extended family and network of friends. She opened her gifts and complained that we shouldn’t have. And we shouldn’t. My parents have a house full of things, gifts received over the many years, all tucked in cabinets for display or drawers for safe keeping. But the gifts are the only way we have of showing our concern and love. We siblings all have our own lives and spend quality time with our folks only at these holiday gatherings. With our separate lives, about the only thing we all share is our common past. Just before coming home this year, I sent away several rolls of 8-mm film to a service bureau that specializes in digitizing this content. I received a DVD containing all the film in digital form and went about turning the old movies into videos using iMovie on my Macintosh.

One strip of film recorded a party held at our house in El Paso in the 1970s to celebrate the baptism of my niece, the daughter of my oldest sister’s—she younger than me—now a beautiful young woman older than her mother was in the film. I’m absent from the movie but the film shows my three sisters as they took turns holding the baby and taking Polaroid still pictures and the 8-mm movie. I added Barbra Streisand singing “The Way We Were” as the audio soundtrack to the silent movie. It worked. There were many moments in the 8-mm strip that each of them smiled and I slowed them down to savor the moment longer. As they saw their younger selves in the past I wanted to ask each what they thought of how their lives turned out, but it wouldn’t have been a fair questions. Our lives are what they are and no amount of wanting a do-over will do anyone any good. We are who we are.