Way of the Runner (Part 1)

(Part 1)

Written and posted in 2000 AD by Elias Alias, aka Franklin Shook, with an extensive prologue to create social and cultural background in which I learned the way of the runner for myself. Edited for publication in August 2024.
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Prologue

I recall my high school days — 1961, ’62, and ’63

Being much older now than I would have projected for myself back then, I find that many of the memories are lost, and what few remain seem to cluster about the more significant events. Perhaps that is as it should be; perhaps it is just a natural erosion of so many details which, in their fading away, leave room for a greater value of prominence in the more significant moments in one’s life.

What today would be seen differently by my same self at seventeen, competes with numerous perspectives from my twenties through present old age. At seventeen I was quite sure that life would never require of me to know what old age might feel like. Somewhere along the way I would, I fancied to myself back then, find the opportune moment of life-and-death climax and make of my inevitable death an honorable thing, well before eightieth birthday could taunt me.

But also at seventeen, I found that I had much more interesting things to do than to precociously rationalize the fact that death awaits us all.

For one thing, there were the girls. Amazing living mysteries! How perfectly configured was Nature that I should be born into a world containing women. Oh my! At seventeen the mere sight of a girl across a classroom or a hallway, or across a football field caused immediate chemical reactions in my endocrine system. My blood chemistry was effected by just seeing a woman, but I preferred to experience the rush of whatever chemicals were oozing into my bloodstream and causing such amazing physical reactions over any scientific query regarding how this was happening.

The “how” and the “why” of things was of little interest to me. At that age, I was the intent of bodily chemistry, the purpose of that chemistry, and I knew that I was to express that vibrancy of beingness with all the affectations conjurable in my idealized synthesis of Sophia Loren’s indescribable grandeur. I simply felt that I should acknowledge the glory whenever a woman smiled or tossed her head in merriment, or paused privately with me in a portentous, full-bodied honeysuckle sorghum-dripping silence of shared affections and awakening feelings.

At seventeen I was aware that not only I, but my peers alike were finding ourselves on an enviable cusp of human evolution’s accelerated unfolding. We not only had girls; we also had muscle cars. Big bad engines, which we called “mills” were the order of the day in the early sixties. And we had radios and “in the jungle the mighty jungle the lion sleeps tonight” and unchained melody and all the rest of the rock-a-billy/folk-minstrel preludes to Elvis and the Beatles, Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead. We had the original “rock-n-roll” on plastic 45’s and in our cars, thanks to radios. We had telephones with which to visit our friends when we couldn’t be out and about. We had television sets which were quickly ushering into our young lives a new perspective on what America might be all about and could be all about. Ozzie and Harriet, Dobie Gillis, and “westerns” were the order of the day.

Looking back, I realize that I never had a moment’s boredom, unless perhaps in a math class at school. Society itself was changing as fast as I was charging through the awkwardness of puberty and adolescence. America, as a “society”, was growing up in a new way, and it’s earmarks were things like pleasure, comfort, convenience, enjoyment, personal discovery, opportunity, success, mobility, adventure, communications, cultural change, and, in general, just making it for oneself in the most exciting times since the nation had been born. The fifties gratified finally the spillage of our founders’ bloody Revolution. The fifties were celebrated by an economic growth which spread outward from Wall Street into the Pentagon’s propensity for issuing government contracts to private business and private industry into even the rural sectors of sparsely-populated states.

I had been a part of the “baby boom” which came on the heels of our victory in World War II, and for more than thirty years American industry and business would hasten to take advantage of the most market-friendly batch of consumers our country had ever known. Foresight told the builder that by 1965 there would arise the largest demand on housing the country had known, and the auto industry knew well in advance that those babies of the late forties and early fifties would require transportation. Business-minded men with foresight knew that the baby-boomers would need refrigerators, dish-washers, laundry appliances, telephones, electricity, running water, energy of all sorts, and a host of things from hula hoops to plastic-nippled baby bottles for their own new broods of future consumers.

The era was good to one whether one farmed, was dealing in concrete or forest products, was a builder, a banker, a dentist or whatever else one may have chosen for one’s career or business. Everything was expanding profitably in all directions and if anyone simply wished to become financially successful, abundance was there for the taking.

Few ever asked what such momentum might do to the nation’s supply of clean water, clean air, or forests. When the farmer swore at insect damage to his fields, the chemists gave him a selection of chemicals to use in his war against bugs, including DDT. They never worried about what DDT might do to the environment or to the eco-food chains which throughout Natural history had sustained an evolutionary pattern of development, change, and fertility in which our participation in manifest reality was borne and then flung by time across the ages so that we, you and I, might stand here now and reflect upon the obscurity of human origins, sharing the query to know whether humankind indeed did precede any given Government or Corporate Entity.

Old ties to Nature were largely left by the wayside in the fifties, from the Farmer’s Almanac to home-remedy treatment of most ailments. Such were replaced by the Drugstore, which was itself an end-sector instrument of distribution for the pharmaceuticals empire which hoped to conceal or dress said liaison under a cloak called the FDA. It was a cultural manifestation. But as we would learn, that manifest sublimity of imperial form was a facade.

My parents’ generation, having lived through the Great Depression and World War II, knew in their hearts that “the Lord wants America to prosper”, and with but few exceptions all Americans joined in the parade of cultural events which led ultimately to our estrangement from natural origins.

The Occidental Mind found mobility on land, mobility in air, and mobility in and on water. This mobility could be discussed over phone lines and in air waves which could be tuned into by radio and television. Communications systems erupted, billboards arrived like mushrooms after a rain.

A neon-plastic-syntho-elastic alloy of a benevolent and thrilling life pulled the eye of man from the boring simplicity of sensory based perception and plopped him down kerplunk, right into the soup of a corporate-projected social analysis while a grateful public embraced the lie with the purchase of auto-gratification’s curiosities, dispersing them dutifully if somewhat gleefully like a full-time pay-master on a good day.

The nation had learned that it could create amazing quantities of wealth in all fields of human endeavor when it had congealed it’s will in mobilizing for the war effort in the early 1940s. The public liked disposable bottles, disposable kleenex, disposable diapers, and they accepted, though with some slight degree of apprehension, the controlled obsolescence introduced by the automobile industry. One could purchase a new car, and when the new smell wore off it, simply trade it in for another. Let the under-privileged have a shot at a good used car without paying new-car prices. That seemed to be the consensus.

As I now recall from back then, it seems that by the end of the 1950s and into the early 1960s most of America embraced the new lifestyle which mass-production was ushering into society, and most of us found ways in which to claim for ourselves our own little piece of the pleasure pie. When the car began to wear out, take a new one and pay the difference. One of the ways we could know if we were making it was the ease with which we could snap up the latest style design or drive-train features offered by Detriot.

No longer were the devices of wealth reserved for the Vanderbilts, Morgans, Hearsts, Fords, Du Ponts, Rockefellers and the likes. Now the sky was the limit for all of us, and if a man wanted to sincerely enough, and applied enough dedication, he could amass his own fortune in a single lifetime. And he could see that the finest education ever dished out to any culture in history was given somewhat freely to his children as local and county governments benefited from the huge tax yields on the bulging economy. Back then, most of the fruits of that tax base remained in the states in which one lived and produced one’s share of that wealth.

At that time the Federal Government had only begun to look into it’s ill notion of gradually easing the nation’s children away from what had always previously been acceptable parental influence. It was not really the moment in which the entity-ship of socialism’s totalitarianism first struck with imagery the minds of bought politicians, but it was the decade in which socialism’s ghost-like cloud of Statism was seen hovering in the language of Capitol Hill’s government-sponsored legislation.

To many who heard Eisenhower’s farewell speech with its admonition regarding the military-industrial complex and the dangers posed thereby, a word to the wise was sufficient. But some saw it as a directive on how to capitalize on a burgeoning relationship between the military and Wall Street, and the resultant lobby was born which would bring America down in a fast-paced half-century of corruption, greed, and financial licentiousness.

An emerging Corporate Dynasty shyly downplayed a superior tactical capability in the manipulation of the public’s collective consciousness, and the national government bought into it under a proclamation of material prosperity for all. To sell this illicit marriage between government and private business to the public, the government promised to cure the social ills of poverty, illiteracy, caste traps and crime, hunger and ignorance. Christian America said yes to the idea, having at that time no precedent from which to draw fear and suspicion. After all, “In God We Trust” was on the nation’s money system.

For its part, the Corporate Dynasty was to receive a patriotically-oriented national workforce which public education, managed by the centralized national government, the NEA, and, largely clandestinely, by the great tax-exempt Foundations, would condition to be compatible with an unspoken miracle… the miracle of the creation of a double-tiered economic cycle in which labor produced the wealth and then simultaneously, as if by magic, converted itself into a millions-strong throng of consumers to purchase whatever wealth was produced, sharing generously along the way by accepting Corporate Welfare and an ever-increasing and burdensome federal taxation.

By perverting the people’s own wish to improve their lives materially, it was hoped that Americans en masse would forget their biological natures and would make of alarm clocks, traffic jams, fast-food and weekly paychecks the sacramental habits of a newly-emerging societal order. That society would bind the people to jobs and careers, preventing and/or interdicting traditional notions of individual sovereignty with regular infusions of comfort, convenience, and entertainment. It was the soma of Brave New World. As Franklin Sanders has put it, America, as a nation of freeholders, would become a nation of job-holders.

Should any part of the public awaken, big government would simply create an agency and relieve whatever oversight had caused the disillusionment to stir. Whenever that may not work appropriately, government would simply institute laws permitting and justifying its intrusion into the community as an enforcer. And the factories carried on, manned by a relatively healthy, entertained, and distracted force of money-making Americans who carried in their heads and hands a number given them by the State, a number which would entitle them to serve in the Corporate-owned workplace and without which any non-conforming citizen of sovereignty would be denied the common avenues of material success.

It would be a number which would entitle an individual to buy and sell. A number by which the State could magnetize the significant characteristics of anyone’s life from DNA signature to urine testing results, from medical history to patterns of domestic behavior. A number by which a more powerful and coercive U.S. Pentagon could, as if it were nothing more than a globalized police force for the Corporate Dynasty with a wish for domestic exercise, ensure that anyone’s life-force and energy would assuredly and dutifully devote itself to a job or to a career.

On its side of the arrangement, the government was to get a satiate citizenry with money in their pockets. Money which could be taxed out of their pockets and then used to strengthen the ties which bound the workforce, one person at a time, each and each, to corporatized cooperation.

Gradually, Americans saw a significant percentage of their taxes ascend to the national government instead of to their respective State and local governments. Fedgov would then amass the tax of the combined fifty States and dangle that wad back in the faces of the States, after letting a bit of it fall to public floors, offering to return it to each State if only each State would comply with newly defined federal mandates, such as enforcement of a fifty-five-mph speed limit on highways or a seat belt law. States not writing a federally discerned quota of speeding tickets, or seat belt-law violation tickets, might lose their rightful share of federal highway funds. A sleepy and somewhat satiate public has allowed this trend in political thought to continue to evolve in national government.

The marriage of the Corporate Dynasty and the national government conditioned the coming generation’s mentality with seemingly innocuous or benign programming techniques known to any intelligence agency, thusly grooming a generation of consumers to not only drive themselves admirably in a national quest referred to as “bettering one’s position in life”, but would also then be easily shown how government, in cooperation with corporate expansionism, was the key to continued economic growth for one and all.

The generation which fought fascism in Europe never recognized the birth of fascism in their own country – but fascism did indeed usurp the American dream just as Mussolini had defined it to be, which in his definition of fascism was the union of the government with the corporate state.

Back then, in the early 1960s hardly anyone saw the above as I’ve just described it here. But as mentioned above, I’ve offered it as a context of when I was in high school, which was where and when the following story happened for me. I’ve not figured out even after all these years what it might mean.
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Obliviousness

Suddenly, by the early ‘sixties, an entire new generation was looking at affordable college. It was the grandest of times.

Everything was an excitement, and whatever bits of education we had managed to absorb sent us all a clear message….. This is “it”. All anyone expected of us was that we behave in acceptable manners, and given that, we were in return free to pursue our dreams and the opportunity that stood before all of us.

I had entered this world through parents who were practicing Seventh-day Adventists, and as that Christian sect does, I was sent to it’s private bible-studying school system. This was a time in the history of that church when vegetarian concerns were positively upheld. It was a time when Seventh-day Adventism denied it’s members the wearing of jewelry. Also restricted were pool halls, gambling of any sort, dancing, bowling, and a number of other “questionable secular activities”. Nowadays, the general Seventh-day Adventist religion has relaxed some of its earlier behavioral standards.

My inner eye was conditioned to put the church’s explanation of Jesus Christ at the center of my heart in all things. I was very selfless in my religious experience, and took great pleasure in seeking God’s will for my every day, my every year, my life. It worked for me, and I felt insulated and secure in my faith. I believed everything the church told me, as it was reinforced both at school and at home. I understood that to question it at all was to invite temptation, and temptation was something I wanted no part of. I was secure in my beliefs, even as a young teenager. Jesus lived in my heart, and I knew that Jesus was invisibly with me every moment of each day. I took that very seriously. I enjoyed Jesus’ presence in my life, and molded my actions accordingly.

Fortunately, Jesus, being part of the God-head/Holy Trinity, had a second “book”, and that book was Nature. So I could be completely, peacefully and safely comfortable when I was down in the river bottoms fishing or hunting or just running in and exploring the fields and forests. There was no sin in collecting snakes or turtles or insects, and, if I did it properly, there was not even any sin in playing “Cowboys and Indians” or “War” with the other boys of the neighborhood who also would play in the river bottoms fields and forests.

All I had to be careful not to do was to use the swear words my Jesus would disdain. Back then, there was a lot of “golly”, “gee”, “heck”, “gosh”, “durn”, and “well-I’ll-be!” Most of my peers also refrained from vulgarities, though we’d die a thousand times at the hands of the “enemy” in our bottom-lands war games. It would be more than fifty years later that I would encounter, in Bozeman, Montana, a bumper-sticker which adroitly announced: “Heck is for people who don’t believe in Gosh”.

A part of the Seventh-day Adventist programming for it’s lay constituency was an accented understanding that one’s true home was in heaven with one’s Creator, and much was made of the notion that we were merely souls sent here to exemplify the nature and the character of our God in all of our actions as people. To further entrench this notion into our young minds, we were given a segregation from what was called, “the world”. We had our own extended family and it’s own circles of friends. We had our own church to attend and serve within. We had our own schools, without all the ego stuff of sports and a thousand other popular distractions of worldliness. I was truly happy with that for so long as it held.

Through our mutual denial of the impulses of the biological body, which we were shown was merely a transitory vessel in which we awakened as human souls, we repressed un-naturally, in a way perhaps best illustrated by something unique in the historic British attitude on life, our body-chemistries and the inevitable temptations to slip downward into a more physically-orientated view of life. A view which might allow for the violation of social taboos as demonstrated by our parent generation.

We did actively try to repress desires, yet we marveled in their persistence and in their attractiveness. But we knew that the demons which hide behind a veil of desire led straightforward to an inheritance of hell. And, at that time, for me, hell was a feared reality in God’s world.

So when the inevitable moments of releasing passions were shared by myself and a girl, I found that I was easily and happily glad to abstain from forbidden relations, feeling fully satisfied with the holding of hands as she and I might walk down a tree-lined lane for a rare moment’s bonding away from the eyes of the church or the school.

I do know that one of my earliest girlfriends moved on and left me behind in her life because I would not do it with her. It was the first sign of a crack in my cosmic egg. I could not understand her. Her mother approved of my being her boyfriend, and my parents shared that view. We were acknowledged as a couple, at church, at school, and at home. I already had hopes of living my life with her as a legally married couple, after college. We both attended the same church, and surely she knew why we couldn’t make love “all the way” before we were actually married. I prayed for her weakness, that she might find the strength to persevere in our esoteric matrix of morality. Yes, I wanted her carnally, but would not even let my mind entertain the first projection of such imagery, as such would certainly be an unfortunate dissipation of the Holy Spirit’s control over my life. That would offend Jesus, who was ever with me.

I would, however, allow myself some very racy adventures within the safe circle of forbidden behaviors which fell more gray than black when one considered that God had already shown a predisposition toward forgiveness in such men as Adam and David for worse than I allowed myself. Heavy petting, always stopping well short of behaviors which would cast us into the flames of carnal damnation, was something which I felt comfortable with, though such moments always brought physical frustrations to both of us.

I felt that I was being responsible, and that the best man a woman of our belief could have would be a man who would stand on his moral, spiritual, and religious principles. A man of Christian dignity who was in the world, but not of the world. I could be that very naturally and easily when I was seventeen.

My girlfriend was not amused, neither was she impressed. Unfortunately, I never actually gave her the chance to tell me directly why she wanted to close our relationship. I think she figured she was up against a will she could not tempt. She just quietly let it die between us, though I made such a deal of it that she finally had to say the wrong things, hoping to shock me out of my inner holiness long enough to be able to hear her saying, “Good bye!”

It worked, finally. I tasted my first heartache, and in my solitary way I took that pain of loss very deeply within myself, and I politely after that went wild.
Not wild as people today might imagine it to be, but wild as a teenaged Seventh-day Adventist might imagine himself to be when all was painfully hurled before his innocent face to mock him and his eccentric repression of what can be beautifully expressed in a love between a woman and a man. I still would not have sex with any of them, but I definitely decided to date as many girls as I could. That would teach her, I inwardly mused to myself, though I would not actually allow myself to register such thoughts. If I was not to have my chosen woman, then all the others were available and I intended to pursue and prove that thought as vigorously as I could by dating all of them I possibly could.

Boys will be boys, after all, even boys in unusual religious beliefs.
I mention this about my youth and my experiences with women for a reason. There was another factor in my life at that time, and it had happened in my junior year without any planning on my part whatsoever. That year, I no longer could continue my education in the Seventh-day Adventist private school system without moving out of town into a boarding- academy’s expensive tortures, and my parents allowed me at that time to chose between finishing high school away in a dorm some hundreds of miles away or transferring to public school for my last two years of high school.

In choosing to stay at home and attend public school, I knew that I would still, after graduation, enroll in Southern Missionary College, near Chattanooga, and ultimately my life would follow God’s will, which to me at that time pointed to the missionary programs of the Seventh-day Adventist denomination. Any fully-convicted Christian knows the same certainty I held in my heart.

Aside from whatever secular activities were deemed necessary to getting along with others who shared this same consensus world, and the occasional body-chemistry rushes which sometimes nearly would overwhelm me, (causing me to forge ever more tightly the resolve to be not deceived by anything so obvious as carnal desire and lust), I was focused on ordering my life to the best of my ability as a constant, unwavering beacon of celebration of the Holy Spirit of Jesus Christ and God the Father.

This was not all that uncommon back then, in the innocent phase of the initial afterglow of America’s having won World War II. Perspective, especially as relates to tenths of Centuries, does after all have much to do with much.

This thing about the way of the runner has to do with all the above. It has to do with that fateful day I showed up at Treadwell High School to register for the coming school-year, my junior year. It would be my first year in the Memphis, Tennessee, public school system. I was quite shocked by the huge number of students and parents who over-flowed the school’s gym and various other halls.

I found that challenging, and felt detached at the same time. I did catch myself noting as an aside that apparently this coming school year was going to be more colorful and entertaining than I had guessed. I felt a twinge of release as I knowingly entered the outside world by registering for public school. I also noticed that there were numerous pretty girls there, and that everyone but me seemed to know just what to do and where to be. I didn’t really mind not knowing how this was done so long as I could not know with so many pretty girls around. I asked politely, but much too politely to be in good form, one girl after another for directions or explanations, enjoying their openness to speak with me and, upon their queries, answering questions about where I came from.

I quickly learned to leave out the part about “private school”. It seemed to remind them of some sort of jail sentence served, and they would tell me to enjoy my new lease on life at good old Treadwell High. Presently, I had interacted with enough of the girls there to figure out that I knew nothing about their ways. I began to realize that I really was fallen off the safe limb of some sacred oak and was now fated to begin splashing about helplessly amid the throngs of lost humanity. I resorted to “shy mode”, and finished registering as best I could.

It was at that point that temptation approached me. For all my study and training, and for all the devotion to my God which I could muster day by day in my life, I had no way to foresee that the grinning face of the boy who sauntered over to me as I stood confusedly looking between two tables bearing two, in my understanding, conflicting messages, was to become the embodiment of evil. Apparently I looked somewhat lost, and this new friend walked right up to me and stuck out his hand for a greeting hand shake and said, “Welcome to our school. You’re new, ain’t you? Got all registered-up already? Is there anything I can do to help you?”

After that gush all I could do was nod my head and say thanks for the welcome. I explained as best I could what my current dilemma was, and he took me by the elbow and guided me to the right table, where he waited beside me in line and helped me answer questions by the administration person sitting behind the table.

Next he asked me if I played any musical instrument. I told him I played b-flat clarinet. He marched me right over to the band building, which was adjacent to the gym, and introduced me to the band director, one “Doc McCall”, who he told, without ever so much as asking me about it, that I wanted to sign up for band this year. The band director thought that since he was with me, I must be legit, so he signed me up without a question and told me when our first class-meeting would be. My new friend and I walked away, back into the crowds of busy people.

His next question was more a directive than a question. As we passed under a large tree beside a concrete walk between the gym and the band-building, we had passed the sign-up table for ROTC. I had paused to look at the artwork of the patches which students in that program would wear on uniforms. It all looked very military-like, and as I had seen a few war movies on television, I was a bit curious. My friend urged with more elbow-guiding and a stern dislike for everything military. He said, “Man, you’re not really seriously thinking about going into the Army, are you?”

I had not made the connection. I had made the association of ROTC with ARMY, but it had not occurred to me that anything I might encounter in high school could really, in any meaningful way, be connected with THE ARMY. So in my naivety I had felt obliged to pause there and look at their stuff. They had a brass-buttoned uniform displayed there, and a crew-cut sergeant-type was there bubbling manly pride and national “duty”. My new friend quickly enough whisked me away to a quiet place where he could explain that I had come close to signing over my life to the government, to be a gun-totin’ pair of boots, nameless and naught-but-a-number evermore.

“Well, thank you for telling me about how serious that class is. But don’t I have to take it in order to graduate from this school?” I was honest. The instructions/requirements lists specifically said that each graduating male senior would have earned at least one year’s credit for ROTC.

“Well, my new strange friend, it’s like this…..” he said back quickly. “If you letter in a sport of any kind, you are exempt from having to take ROTC.”

“What’s that mean? What is a letter?”

“Oh, jeez! You’re really dense. Okay. I keep forgetting you’ve been in a social version of solitary confinement. But didn’t you guys even have sports?”

“We played football and baseball at recess.” I ventured.

“Do you mean you didn’t have a school team, and you didn’t ever play other schools? Oh God what a miserable school you must have been trapped in!”

I had not thought of my previous school as being miserable at all. It was the only school experience I knew, and I was very comfortable within it’s parameters. There, I was considered to be “normal”. It had never occurred to me to question why the school had no athletic department like public schools did, as I was never concerned with the doings of mere men anyway. Sports was a topic which had been explained as a healthy-enough program for perfecting one’s body, but sports contained an attitude of competition which distracted one from one’s non-competitive relationship with one’s Creator.

Sports had simply been seen by myself as something else by which to gauge the folly of mankind without God’s salvation, and I had never bothered to learn the first thing about sports. My focus had been on the sublime, the eternal, the just joys of life through God’s own direction for living a life in this world. Competition was not condoned by my church.

My friend told me that if we hurry we could still catch the cross-country coach before he folded up his registration table over at the gym. When I hesitated, he merely laughed aside and pulled me into a jogging run and said, “man, can you run?”

“I guess so. But do you mean, like, run in a race?”

“No, dummy! I mean like running while you’re watching the movies this weekend and eating popcorn! Of course I mean running in races!”

“I’ve no idea about what that would involve.” I volunteered, in hopes that I could say something which might dissuade him from this newest mission to save me from stupidity and the ROTC.

“Come on. Hurry. It doesn’t matter if you know anything about it or not. The important thing is that anybody who makes the team automatically ‘letters’ for cross-country, and that is a valid sport, so you then won’t be required to take ROTC.”

To my new friend, this logical reality left no choice for me but to resister for the cross-country team. I couldn’t argue with him, being already confused about all the decisions I’d made thus far that day. I hoped to at least save face by acting normal. This new friend seemed to be wanting to help me, and the good Lord knew I could use some help, so I reacted with acceptance toward his overtures of friendship and played with him in like manner as he joked his way around the high school grounds.

He was a man with a purpose. He had already added a new bandmember to the large school band, (in which he was a drummer), and he had narrowly saved me from signing my life over to the ARMY via a class in ROTC. Now he was gonna bring coach Blevins some fresh meat.

My friend was already a member of the varsity cross-country team. He promised to show me his school jacket, on which he had several letters sown already. He said we’d naturally sign up for the swimming team between cross-country season in the Fall and track-and-field season in the Spring. “You can swim, can’t you?” was all he offered me by way of choice on the swimming team matter.

“I guess so.”

“Good. Now, turn here, go through that door there, ah, yes! Coach! Coach Blevins! here’s another ‘tryout’ for you!”

The coach didn’t bother looking up from whatever papers he was going over.

“Awright. Fill this out. Be here next Thursday for tryouts. If you make the team, I’ll work your butt into the cinders on yonder track. If you’re lucky, you won’t make the team and that’ll be all of me you’ll ever have to deal with. Be gone!”

No handshake, no “welcome young aspiring student and please allow me to thank you for your excellent school-spirit which obviously prompts you to want to carry your school’s banners to victory over the un-lordly hordes of rival-swine”. No nothing. Not a raised eye. Not even a glance. I did, however, imagine I caught him eyeing my legs while he was telling me the drill. As my friend dragged me out of the gym, I felt like I had all of a sudden been fortunate enough to get myself installed into this new school in good style. The only problem was, what the heck was cross-country?

I hadn’t worried a bit about being ushered into the marching band. I was a good musician, having played solos and duets for years before the church congregation at not only the Sabbath morning services but also at other church events and at school gatherings. I of course had not connected the term “marching band” with Friday night football games and basketball pep rallies and the likes. Such sobering realities would unfold all in their good time, which they did much like an avalanche that prepares itself for many silent centuries before springing into the burly reality for which they are known by survivors.

The big question for me had to do with this cross-country thing. “What do cross-country boys do?” I asked.

“They run all damn day and night, that’s what!” he smiled and butted my shoulder playfully. “Can you really run? You don’t smoke do you? Can you hold your breath for a long time? Haven’t you ever heard anything about running cross-country?”

All I could do was guess. The name implied that one would begin a race at some point in a field or forest, and that the race would be run over a prescribed course for several miles, with the first entry to cross the “finish” line being the winner of the race. But that did not really tell me anything.

Apparently, there was a league in the city among all the high schools, and each school had it’s own cross-country team. My friend began to understand that he would literally have to walk me through this step by step, so he began telling me the basics. I went home that evening not knowing at all what I’d done that day, and hoping against hope that my parents approved of my new schedule and class load.

After dinner that night, when my brothers and I had been excused to play outdoors briefly before being sent to bed for the night, I imagine this conversation, or one similar, transpired while a mother’s hands washed the family’s dishes and a pensive and mooded father leaned back against the refrigerator with his arms folded across his chest.

“Well, at least he had enough sense to get into that band. Hon, did you know that that band is one of the best in the state? I’ve read very good things about it in the papers. I’m sure he’s as good as any other clarinet player there, and when it comes to marching at games, he’ll have to work through that for himself. I just do wish Satan wasn’t always so omnipresent, so ever-ready to pop up on every turn and tempt our youth. Sometimes I wonder if life here is really fair.”

“Oh, of course it’s fair. This is all in God’s plan for the boy. My word, we can’t keep him and his brothers in a closet forever, as you well know.”

“I’m just thankful that they are such good boys,” she continued. “And he seems to be very genuine about his dedication to Christ. It’s just that there is going to be the conflict when he finds out what happens on some Friday nights, and I’m afraid it’ll hurt him when he has to choose.”

“I know, mother. I know. We will pray and look for the Lord’s guidance. You know our boys are just on loan to us from God, who is their real Father. I think we’ve done a good job for him so far, and I’m sure he won’t fail us over this thing with the band.”

“O, hon, I hope you’re right.”

“Let’s just leave it in God’s hands, alright? I’m sure the boy is ready to be tested, even if I’d have liked to put that off until he was ready for college. He does show good intelligence, if he’s slow in some other ways.”

“Roy! How dare you say something like that?! You take that back right this minute!”

“Well, you know what I mean. It is true, ain’t it, that he’s a bit asleep at the wheel in some ways?”

“That’s just your fatherly way of seeing him. To you, he’ll never be perfect; he’ll never be the same quantity and quality of manhood with which you pride yourself. There’s not a cotton-picking thing wrong with that boy. Not one thing!” She looked at him with earnestness, and he knew he had been whipped, or at least had now been forced into acting as if he’d been whipped on this topic once again. He changed the subject.

“What do you suppose this cross-country malarky is? Do you think it’s required or something? What is cross-country? Have you ever heard of it?”

The mother continued to wash and rinse and stack dishes. Roy moved in behind her and put his arms around her so that he held her belly. He pulled her to him gently but firmly. She said without turning either side while she picked up another plate and began idly wiping the dishcloth in circles around its form, “I’ve never heard of it, but I’d guess it’s some kind of racing over distances, in which case he’ll do very fine with it.”

“Yeah, the little fellow can run on and on, can’t he?” Roy smiled, recalling the countless memories of seeing his oldest son running freely and gracefully across farmlands, fields, and forests, dipping, jumping, leaping, side-stepping, and cutting this way and that, ever taunting his best friend, Boots, the German Shepherd who’d grown up with him and his brothers. He looked so joyful and free when he ran. There was something uncanny and unusual about his son’s liking for running and the way he sprang to it at the slightest opportunity.

Living on the outskirts of town had provided the boys with river bottoms and marshlands in which to play their long summer days away, and it seemed that their eldest son really could run from sun-up to sun-down, and then some. Of course, that wasn’t worth a hoot when it came to earning a living in the world, so it was a relatively unimportant grace upon an otherwise very conformed young life.

The world, my world, and the world of my parents was wobbling even then, but neither of us knew it. Neither of us felt the slightest tremor as parallel orbits suffered an engaging shock that would alter forever three quite wonderful realities. I was about to learn the way of the runner. The distance-runner. An individual’s sort of sport, which in the early sixties was relatively unheard of by most Americans but which was gaining acceptance in school systems in the nation’s larger cities. Memphis had at least 15 schools that fielded cross-country teams each year.

I was still quite in the dark as to what would be expected of me in joining the cross-country team, but my new buddy made sure I attended the opening class with the coach at his drab office in the gym. Along with the other boys, I was given a jocky-strap, a pair of running shorts for competition, several other pairs of running shorts for working out as a team both home and away, various sample bottles of liniments and muscle bandages, a huge container of salt tablets, a bag of sugar packets, a brilliant red blazer top for competition racing in public, several towels, pairs of socks, and something I had only ever dreamed about with never actually feeling that I wanted them, all the while being aware that it might be nice to find them on my feet as I cleared a fallen log while parting ferns and overhanging limbs of some deep forest. …..real track shoes, cross-country running shoes!

When the team’s locker boys passed the goods to each of us as the coach called the roster, everything in the bundle was a gray blur as soon as my eyes saw these running shoes! Real competition shoes, designed to weigh next to nothing, with the most respectable-looking spikes anyone would have ever imagined. Low-cut, they almost were shoes without being shoes. They were more like a fine calf-leather glove for each foot, and I instantly knew that as I ran in them they would take on the shape of my feet and would make themselves one with my feet. I felt the most pleasing sensation from deep within myself as I held them and turned them every way, almost stricken with their perfections. Oh my! I could barely wait to get them on my feet and feel their long, slender cleats (spikes, if you will), insert their authority into the yielding earth, giving me all the grip any man could ever want, making running a pleasure.

I had not long to anticipate. We were each assigned a locker in the gym’s small section of running-sports changing rooms. We were told to strip and rip, and what the hell were we still doing in his gol-dangged gymnasium? The last man outside the starting line was automatically off the team and would be the waterboy. I could understand that much, so I moved smartly, quickly, to join the first runners at a marked line out beside the cinder track.

The day was warm in September and was blue and green in it’s dance with the world of humans. I felt a mild excitement at finally getting to run and was noting inside myself that I would even be getting some sort of credit for my graduation by running with these boys. I only wished all my other classes could feel so natural for me as did this cross-country class. As yet, I had not fully figured out the coming clashes with rival runners from other schools.

I had to first learn, both in band and also in cross-country, who our arch-rivals were. I would learn which schools had the toughest cross-country teams, as well as which schools excelled in each of the recognized and credited athletics program sports leagues. I felt that would all come in time, but this first day on the team required that I at least act like I knew what we were about to do, even though I didn’t. I watched and tried a few of the loosening-up exercises I saw some of the boys doing before Coach Blevins blew the whistle, calling for our attention.

“Awrite, ladies, gimme three laps around the long way, and woe to the last bastard back here!” With that modest outburst, he raised a pistol in the air and fired the gun. I jumped, but jumped the wrong way, which was straight up. I caught my balance amid the sudden flurry of flying elbows and kneecaps, heels, and heads. I was the last one off the line, and I immediately felt as if I’d been released from a prison of restrictions. I was always at perfect peace within myself when I ran, and this moment’s exciting group run as a part of a team of peers felt as reconciled within my blood as it did within my heart and my mind. Running was, in every way conceivable to me, acceptable under God. I felt a beingness with my Creator as I got my legs into a rhythm of balance with my thrusting arms.

I was not in a hurry, not desperate to make up the lost ground of my errant start. I just relaxed into my normal state of mind, as I had always done since I had been old enough to run around the orchard or gardens of our rural home before my parents had moved to the outskirts of the city. I ran for myself, for my pleasure, and it felt perfectly fine for me to run all I wished. There was no possible connection with sin attached to running, so far as I knew. Running was something God gave as a gift to myself, and I had grown up running in forests and fields, running naturally like a deer or a lion or a horse.

When running, I was “safe.” My mind was always clearest then. My will was unified with physical reality, and my moral code was suspended and irrelevant, but in a fully benign and acceptable way. I knew that God wanted me to run, and I was grateful that he did. It was the only thing I felt I could do without flaw, without error, without risk of sinning. I always felt a lightness settle around my feelings of self when I ran, and that feeling of lightness is what I was carefully seeking as I let my stride stretch a bit now, kept my hands relaxed and low, and amused myself counting heads of the team before me, behind whom I had just started my somewhat meek identity as a cross-country runner.

I played along leisurely, figuring that we’d be running for some length of time and understanding that I could benefit by following the forerunners during the first time around the course. We would run three long laps around that course, so I could excel after I learned the course the first time around. The course was not marked, so the front-place runners simply had to know the course or they’d soon be missed by the race. I watched and noted each turn, each clump of campus shrubs or trees, each crossed roadway, the high places and the low places, the grades and the downhills. I noticed that, way up ahead of me, my new friend was leading the pack with a staunchly-steering head intent on mastering any and all exceptions to the ideal running posture for the successful distance runner.

I watched him for some time, noticing that he sped up when challenged by another. He ran with authority, and I thought to myself that he certainly appeared to like this running business. His legs were muscular and hairy, long enough, as I would learn in the passing months, to carry him effortlessly to high-up roster finishes in race after race. He never actually won a cross-country event, but he was always close to the winners. He made a valuable member of the varsity team, as team totals were figured on the first five team-mates’ finishing records, with the lowest totals being the winning team.

A runner’s score was whichever number behind the winner he was when he crossed the finish line. The winner of the race would count for one point; second place counted for two points; third place had to be three points; tenth place equaled ten points; and fourth place got four points. The perfect cross-country team total was 1+2+3+4+5 = fifteen points for the team’s having sent the first five finishers of the race across the finish line ahead of all other runners.

An individual could win any race, but how his team fared depended on the strength and depth of the team’s combined talent. My friend was one of the coach’s favored assets. That, I figured, could explain why he admitted me to the team without so much as even taking a look at me. If my friend said I was a runner, then the coach knew I would be a runner. That was that. Neither my coach nor my friend, nor indeed myself, had any idea what was going to happen to our cross-country team that year.

With no thought at all in my head, and after having made the huge circle around the school’s properties for the first of three times, I saw no reason to follow further. If they wanted running, then let them have running. I was shortly running beside my new friend, cheerfully talking as we matched strides. At first he thought I wanted to pass him, and he spurted forth a bit only to see that I matched him stride for stride effortlessly. He would not turn his head aside, no matter what sort of comment I chanced to make. I kept looking over at him, watching him run, studying how the balls of his feet helped launch each spring-like bid for another few yards of distance toward that far-away finish line. I saw that he liked to keep his head level and that he sometimes displayed a brief exaggeration of arm movement, which I thought was unnecessary to his stride, to keep that head on an even plane.

Together we ran side by side for perhaps a half mile, and presently we rounded the turn, which would mark the beginning of our last lap around the grounds.

My friend poured it on noticeably, and I hastened to keep up with him. I noticed the determination in his mildly clenched fists. He would not be outrun by a teammate, and most especially by one who had not even the courtesy to have heard of this sport before meeting him. That would be unacceptable, and to my good humor, I noticed that he was fixated on outrunning me. I slowed just a bit, almost imperceptibly, so as to let him have three strides ahead of me, then kept up with his pace the rest of the way home.

He led me past the coach, who was watching a “chalked” line that stretched before his feet to mark the finish. He clicked a stopwatch as my friend’s feet passed that line three strides ahead of mine. I followed my buddy as he wound down from his closing “kick” to the finish, and we each fell into a rhythmic jogging pattern, which allowed our breathing to return to normal. For him, that took a bit of time; for me, it was almost instantly. My friend noticed that too.

Finally, walking with our hands on our waists, we visited calmly. He was not at all sure that he had outrun me, and he asked me if I had been telling him the truth about not knowing what cross-country was. “That was darn good, man, to push me that hard the first time you ran with the team. I was not expecting it to be you!”

I said nothing serious but joked lightly with him about how far back the number-three runner had been. “We must have had him by over forty paces,” I said.

“Yes, but this is just the first day. You’ll see that there are some here who will study what I do and devise ways to beat me. If they can! Ha! I do my own kind of study on them too, you know. Take that Martin boy. He laid back in the middle of the field all the way around, but he did that on purpose. You’ll see what I mean when we have our first meet.”

“What is a meet?” I had to ask, though I figured it must be another word for a competition. I still needed any image a friend might produce in my mind by talking about the competitions. He looked at me incredulously and just shook his head.

“You’ll find out soon enough.”

But “soon enough” didn’t happen soon enough and was jeopardized seriously when at the end of the first week’s workout the coach passed out our team’s fall schedule of meets. I looked at the list and was stunned. With but one exception, every meet we had scheduled for the season was on a Saturday! My heart raced! This must be some kind of joke, I gasped. My friend noticed that I was having difficulty and asked what the matter was. I hesitantly asked if this was the whole schedule for all of our team’s meets. He confirmed by way of asking if I thought we should run double that number of meets or what.

I realized that I couldn’t compete in the Saturday events, which was really the entire season, excepting only the Turkey Day Run at Thanksgiving time. Everything else, the whole season of competitions, fell to Saturdays.

Something was crashing inside me.

I was a Seventh-day Adventist. Saturday was the seventh day of the week, according to my conditioning on the matter, and therefore Saturday was God’s Sabbath, which was a day in which no secular pursuits should rightfully be entertained. Saturday was my God’s day, and I made specially focused vigilance from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, being ever alert to any temptation from my base nature that might conflict with my meditations on my God and his will for this world. Of course, running races in competitions was simply not a debatable variance in my customs for Sabbath observance.

I was disappointed. I had so hoped to fit into this team, to have this one thing in which I knew there was no danger for my soul as I enjoyed it to its fullest measure. And I already knew that no man on that team could hold a candle to my feet. I knew that on this very first day of workouts. None of them yet knew the truth about me, which I had already planned to reveal to them gradually. It was a thing that I had already envisioned during the second and third laps of our training that day. What they didn’t know about me was the unlikeliest thing: I could “kick” for a couple of miles or more.

I was an oblivious if natural-born winner at cross-country, by virtue of having grown up running all the days of my boyhood. It was not so much a thing of strength, but was a matter of willed control of one’s respiratory system, one’s breath. I could exert high levels of muscular demand without letting my breath get out of my control, which translated into the runner’s reality as a formidable competitor. What other distance runners refer to as their “kick,” which they hope to save until the last few hundred yards of the race, was mine for the duration of any race I might find myself in.

As I would learn, only at the State level would I encounter runners who could give me concern. I knew after this first practice as a member of a team that I was the newest gift from life to this coach’s career in cross-country coaching. That man was bound to like me, and I would get the respect of the whole team. My only concern was not to let this cat out of the bag too quickly. It would be better to give myself some time to form friendships with my new teammates.

And now this: All but one of our races were to be held on Saturdays! What could I do?

My friend, as soon as he heard my conflict, yelled for the coach to “come over here quickly!”

As Coach Blevins walked up to me, he grinned and said nothing. I did not, at that first day of practice, know what was carried in the glint I saw in his eyes. That I would figure out later. But his face fell a bit when he noticed the expression on my friend’s face, and it fell some more when he looked to my face and saw the same gravity. “Awright, you silly girls, what’s this about?”

“Um, Coach, we got a problem.”

“Is he picking on you for keeping up with him today?” The coach smiled at me as his eyes questioned mine silently.

“Uh, sir,”” I began, “Uh, well, um, I’m a Seventh-day Adventist, sir. I’m sorry, sir! I didn’t know anything about all this when I joined the team.”

“What the hell are you trying to say? Who the tarnation is Seventh-day Algorhythms or whatever it was you said you were? What has that got to do with anything? Don’t your shoes fit okay? You need some extra salt tablets or something? Talk to me, dammit.”

I was humiliated. I realized that I had teased this coach, who I was already beginning to sense was figuring me out for laying back so as not to outrun my new friend, and was now about to tell him that the fastest runner on his team this year couldn’t race in the meets. Coach Blevins, as he revealed with a resonance that a bull elk might use to kill a dozen challengers, did not like the first effort I made to explain my predicament.

“Of all the hooten-hangin’ horseshit I ever hearda, this tops the cake! Seventh-day what? By God, boy, did they send you over here from Kingsbury just to ruin my life? What the hell do you mean, you can’t run on Saturdays?”

He ranted, blustered, gestured, and generally drew the attention of the entire team. My face was by now a brilliant crimson. I could feel every boy’s eyes bearing down into my oblivious soul. I stared down at the earth, ready to weep as I saw my feet in these most perfect of all running shoes ever made, fearing that I would never be permitted to wear them again. My fears and regrets were drowned in waves of estrangement and bitter embarrassment. I so wanted to become nothing, to not be there, to not have ever met this team of distance runners, to be anywhere except here in front of the coach’s uncontrollable rage at the irony of this.

Finally, Coach Blevins looked dead at me and said, “Get your ass to the showers!” Then, to the rest of the team, he said, “Awright, you squirts of shit, get your butts over here for a pow-wow.” That did it. The spell of humiliation was now cast. I was sent to the showers while the “team,” of which I apparently now was not a member, was called to huddle. My eyes were more than moist. I fought to retain my composure. This hurt.

But Coach had a plan. He got my friend to chase the team around the fields for one final lap, which would give him time to confront me privately. Coming into the showers he hollered over the running water for me to get my ass out of there and stand before him. I grabbed a towel and stood there with that towel and nothing else wrapped around my life. I had to explain to this full-blooded Indian ex-Marine geography teacher called cross-country coach just what my religious views on keeping the Sabbath as set down by our Maker entailed and that there was no way which I could see from here that would let me change the fact of my vow to keep my God’s Sabbath to the fullest of my conscience.

Coach just stood there as if thinking of a barbeque with a bunch of BAMs on some distant Guadalcanal or something. He let me finish my desperate efforts to explain, and when I finally fell silent, he raised himself up on the balls of his feet and stretched his frame to the fullest and said, “Boy, I’m sure you think you believe this crock of shit, but I can’t buy it for you or for this team either. Now your own God has given you the ability to run circles around the best runners I got, and I’m not going to stand by and watch you make up some lousy excuse for taking that away from me, this school, and these teammates. Besides, for crissakes, you’re our only chance for paying back East High. Now you and me, we’re going to sit down here, and we aren’t getting up until we figure out some kind of loophole in your church’s rules about this Saturday business. Got that?”

“Sir, it’s not about rules. It’s how I love my Creator, and it’s a way of honoring him by respecting his expressed will for my behavior as a man. The problem is not that I can’t find a loophole, as you said, but that I don’t want to find a way around this. I mean”, (and the absurdity of this reeled me in as I said it), “Coach, is there any way we could get the city to change the meet days to Sunday or some other day?”

“Fat chance, boy.”

“Well,” (groping now), “Coach… I know that this is way off normal expectations, I mean, for a student to be asking his teacher for special consideration, but would it be possible for me to stay on the team and work out with the guys and be here every day just like everyone else, but to do that with the understanding that I would only compete in the Turkey Day Run? Thanksgiving is on a Thursday, and I could run in that race! Would you consider letting me work out this year just to run in that race?” I again found myself looking at embarrassed toes, wondering of all things as I stood there wet from the shower if I might not be getting a dose of athletes’ foot while standing on the wet concrete floor with no flip-flops or slippers. That concern presented itself to me the way any detached, unrelated notion might emanate from cold wet tiles, emanating into a daze that held, beyond a vacuum of distantly ringing echoes of alienation, a stunned mind.

But it seemed to finally get into the coach’s head. He replied, “Son, this ain’t over yet. You can work out with the team, and you can run in that race that isn’t on Saturday, unless the committee has a problem with my springing a last-minute entry into it. They might not go for that, unless I let ’em know now that this is going on with you. I’ll look into that. Meanwhile, I hope you’re not going to get yourself all pissed when you find out I’ve called your parents, your preacher, the goddam national guard, and anybody else who can help me find a way for you to race every goddam race this season. Got it? It ain’t over yet. Keep your towels and your locker. If nothing else, I want you to run this team’s asses into the dirt every day during workouts. You can help them practice if you want to. Now get out of here. Report back here sixth period tomorrow.”

He walked out, and I dressed and walked home, suddenly, somehow, a different person in a new world. I would pray intensely that night, but not to ask for permission to make an exception in my God’s plan for my life. I prayed that the team would win all their races without me, that the coach would have his best season ever, and that I would be finally permitted to run in the Turkey Day race. And I prayed that my parents would not succumb to pressures from that coach and that they would always understand why I had made this decision, and that in my own way I had done it to honor them as much as to honor my conscience.

So began a weeks-long mood of detached somberness and aloofness. I couldn’t be included in the team’s spirited jests and playful jousts before and after workouts. I couldn’t even be present to watch them compete against rival schools each weekend. The girls looked somehow distant and unattainable. My reinforcement of my uniqueness within my common humanity was a solid and ever-present taste in my mouth. My days were no longer innocently enjoyed as they had been when I was in that private church school among people who already knew about keeping the Sabbath as God’s day.

Meanwhile, my new friend had been seriously re-appraising his friendship with me. That, I figured, could be slightly influenced by his fear that I could outrun him, but I think that he mostly felt that I was too strange and eccentric to command much of his time. I would figure out much later in life some subtle explanations, which at that time never occurred to me. He was popular in the student body and was on the staff of the school’s paper. He remained polite and put on the appearances of friendship when he deemed it necessary, but the distance was established, and I already missed the trust he once had in me. Yet there remained in the background a wish to remain friends, and we both felt that.

Still, I would not question my religion or my convictions. I had been conditioned to anticipate the subtlety of temptation as I went through my days in this world. I took this well and did not let it dampen my joys in loving my God. And every day, I worked out with the team and paced them all as the coach watched and approved, and each afternoon after school I would run the four miles home and drop off my books and run on down to the river bottoms and run my head off. The running in the river bottoms invigorated my will to be my own person, even if it seemed “weird” to the rest of my society. I knew of a greater race, and I knew I was entered in the running of that race, and I would settle for nothing short of full victory. This, at age sixteen, going on seventeen.

Schoolwork kept me busy, and my private music lessons twice a week after school interspersed my runs in the river bottoms and distracted me from dwelling on what I may have missed by not being with the team the previous Saturday as they put their training and their personal characters on the line against what I imagined to be merciless competitors from other schools. The team had gone several weeks in a row without winning a meet. Each meet pitted three teams against each other. The season’s won-lost records were being kept, and coaches would remind their runners of the importance of “beating their damn asses this time, men!”

During this period, I found the weeks to be long. I looked forward to each coming Sabbath, hopeful to see all my friends at church. I was “in” with them. They understood me and shared more or less my personal relationship with Jesus. Best of all, they knew why I wouldn’t run on Sabbaths. Between study classes and the morning’s sermon each week would be a twenty-minute break, in which we young people had much visiting and catching up to share outside under the elms and oaks that surrounded the church parking lot and grounds.

It was at such a moment that a close friend named Lynn found a good moment to draw me aside and show some real interest in my stand about running in competitions on Sabbaths. Somehow she wanted to lend an ear, anticipating that just talking about it would somehow be helpful. She had figured that there might be a conflict deep within me and wanted to look for herself. While speaking with her in a relaxed and comfortable way, which characterized previous years of knowing her as a friend and classmate in the church school I’d just left, I noticed that her bra size had grown again. She was trying to be genuine with me as a friend, which I did appreciate, but which ultimately released me to feel like the male part of the equation in our discourse. I began to notice her in a new light.

Her hair was brunette but light. A moody depth lent an intriguing mystery to her hazel eyes. As she noticed me noticing her, she must have seen something awaken in my roving eyes, for which she smiled the slightest hint of recognition. I leaned shoulder to shoulder with her and told her I was glad we were friends and that I felt that since we were such great friends, it wouldn’t really matter at all if she told me what her bra size was.

She smirked a laugh and pushed me away and walked back toward the church. I stood there and watched her go, intending to follow a distance back. I could see in her walk the certain knowledge that she knew I had seen her finally in a way she’d thought about before, and I could feel it tugging at something inside myself. Our friendship took a new turn that day, placing an invisible barb in a soft place within each of our hearts that would mark us both the rest of our lives.

We didn’t know that then, of course. But we did know that something with a life of its own had begun during our chat that morning and that nothing we’d said in words had anything to do with it.

Lynn and I began to find seats together during meetings at the church. Before long I was charged enough to call her on the telephone late afternoons most days. We would talk using silliness and contraries and make a certain kind of nonsense that made perfect sense to us. We both felt the buzzing electricity growing between us. We began to look for events or occasions that would afford us a chance to be near each other. I began to think about getting on with obtaining a driver’s license, imagining about picking her up in a real car at her house for a real date.

She became a strength to me, and I for her. We talked of going steady, and we drew closer in each other’s confidence. As I recall, I’d be thinking very intimate thoughts of her each night as I drifted off to sleep in a distant closeness of our combined imaginations. She filled me with a sense of belonging in some very special and exotic way to another person who could be trusted with my every confidence. I imagined new plots to gain more opportunity to touch her. Rapidly, she filled me, and I liked the currents her presence unleashed inside me. Our innocence was an incubator for something neither of us understood, but we welcomed it and laughed and smiled and held hands and took walks and found moments of touching outside buildings and under trees or in parked cars. Each of us felt quite normal about it, and neither of us knew a thing about it.

Finally came Thanksgiving. My parents, who had remained uninvolved with my struggle to adjust to being a Seventh-day Adventist in a secular school setting, for the first time showed excitement over my impending competition. My dad even went so far as to tell me that while actually running that coming race, it would be okay if I forgot about my religion just while the race was going on, and that God would possibly understand that I needed to concentrate on my physical reality while I was running that race. I appreciated his thoughtfulness and the concern that underlay it, even though it revealed to me my own father’s lesser estimation of my relationship with Jesus. My mom was a bit more diplomatic and simply crossed fingers on both hands and said as I left the family car that fateful day and headed into the campus’ gym, “Good luck, son!”

To my surprise, my parents had brought Lynn. Neither she nor they had let me know that they had planned for her to be there too. I registered a flash of self-conscious adjustment and noted in amusement that I now had a damsel for whom to run, and I tried to get such mental antics out of mind right away. For the moment, I must focus on the coming “meet.” I was glad she was there. She twinkled a smile at me as I strode away from them and went for the gym.

Inside the changing halls were runners from every team in the city. There must have been more than a couple of hundred runners, and none of them knew me except my own teammates. I looked from boy to boy up and down the long benches. I watched as trainers rubbed liniments into the muscles of runners. I watched as the teams congregated in groups and began to visibly allude to various other teams or individuals. I saw, for the first time, and knew with a cold slug in my guts that it was “him” before my teammates pointed him out to me, the city’s fastest distance runner, a boy named Bill Runo. East High. My school’s arch rival.

He was skinny, all bones and flesh, with not an ounce of meat to be found on him anywhere unless it was in a sandwich in his lunch pail from home. Of all the runners there that day, Bill Runo was a man unto himself. I studied him very closely. I knew already that he was a great distance man. His name and picture had been in the papers often. He was the sportswriters’ pick for the individual win in this race, and his team was only really challenged by two other schools.

But he didn’t care about schools challenging his school. This man only knew one reality, and I saw it locked into the features of his face. He lived and breathed to be the first man to break the ribbon in every race he entered, no matter what. He would not consider coming in second to the winner. He would win and live, or he would lose and die. That was written all over this man’s countenance. Did I say “man”? Make that, sophomore in high school. Hardly someone we could call a man. Bill Runo was even a year younger than me!

I noted his height, and found that he was a good two inches taller than me. That would mean he had an extra inch or two if I matched his legs stride for stride, unless I managed to put a little bounce in my strides. I remember thinking to myself as I watched this guy compose his character for the pending race, “man, there is the enemy to your victory in today’s race. You have worked long and hard to be here, and it’s a crowning point in your year, this race for the Turkey Day trophy. But to him it’s just another in a long list of races scheduled this season. He lives the life of a runner, while you only play at it on rare occasions. Who are you fooling here? You have never even ran in a competition!”

Thoughts like that were followed by questions like this: ” Can he possibly know about what I’ve been doing, practicing for just one event this season? Whether he knows about me or not, if he does know it will only motivate him more to beat me soundly. This man is a winning machine with only one program.”

I could tell that by looking at him across the gym floor. I felt fear tempt its way inside me somehow. Could I beat this guy? What if he beats me? I began to succumb to such fruitless mental meanderings, and fortunately was snapped back to business by a slap on my shoulder by Coach Blevins.

“Well, young runner, this is your big day. You see that boy over there, the skinny little dude? That’s him awright. Mr. Beat-ya-at-all-costs Runo. Cross that line ahead of him, and you’re a winner for sure. Keep him in your sights from the first lap, and don’t try to pass him unless you damned well know what you’re doing. He’s got a kick that can get a calf out of a pregnant canary!”

Coach let it drop with that, and busied himself with getting the team “up” for this race. I looked at my running shoes, and felt a friendship with them as if they were actual beings of sentience. I loved those shoes more than I loved any physical thing in this world. Never mind nice cars, or television sets, or radios, or anything. These shoes were the finest things in all of creation, and I felt that I wanted to win this race for those shoes. I remember thinking that as if it were only yesterday. I wanted to see my red, soft-chamois thin-leather form-fitting fleetest-of-all-shoes-on earth win this race. And I wanted to be in them when they did.

I also remember Coach saying something about watching for unexpected team tactics, and not to fall for “pacers” which some teams would surely try to inject into the race. I even remember having wondered what someone might possibly do to disrupt a man’s running to the best of his capability. I would learn much that day.

Part 1– https://thementalmilitia.org/2024/08/29/way-of-the-runner/

Part 2 — https://thementalmilitia.org/2024/08/31/way-of-the-runner-part-2/

Part 3 — https://thementalmilitia.org/2024/08/31/way-of-the-runner-part-3/

Thank You For Reading.