MAR-A-8
AT LAST—ONLY
ON DONALD’S BIRTHDAY
NEARING THE
IDES OF MARCH—THE SNOW COVER
IN DERWOOD BEGINS TO MELT AND A HINT OF
SPRING FINALLY EMERGES AFTER A FEBRUARY THAT HAS EXTENDED TOO FAR INTO MARCH
FOR ME TO RUN
AT ALL UNTIL
THIS WEEKEND
March 9, 2003
It may actually happen. I still have to stop to put the Bronco in 4
WD to get up or down my drive, but it is now for reasons of a gravelly mud,
rather than deep snow. I had to push
Jim, the postman, out on Saturday, since he got stuck coming up to drop my mail
at my door.
I have had a rather social weekend for a
hermit in the woods. I had received a
call from Joe Aukward asking me if I could take him to a basketball game at
Smith Center in GW, since his high school alma mater Catholic school Gonzaga
was playing Dunbar, a big black high school in DC for the city championship in
GW/s Smith Center. I was trying to get
us both out for an early morning run on Saturday, so I tried to work out a deal
that might be efficient. I would go
home early on Friday, and after grocery shopping, try to make a brief run
through the neighborhood (Needwood Trail is still snow-clogged as I proved late
last week), then drive down to pick him up and carry him to GW and we would
stand in line for the tickets for which he had just called and found there were
still some available. Then I would
sleep overnight on his couch, and we would l take off early for a run.
The second half worked; the first half
did not. We got to GWU’s Smith Center
(the gym I used to use before the construction of the Wellness Center as my
base for running downtown) and we joined a very long queue for those who were
trying to buy tickets. DC Police came
out to manage the crowd by cutting off a group behind us—the high school chicks
trying to look cool in the uniform of the day, which must include showing up at
the big game in an outfit with cleavage and a bared and bejeweled midriff, and
then realizing that this was not the best of haute couture for standing in a
sub-freezing outdoor queue to wait for a slow moving line to the door. Wait we did, and made it all the way to the
door, when the DC Police came out to say the game had been sold out and that we
should disperse. So, we got back into
the Bronco, turned up the heater and went to Joe’s house where I got a pillow
and blanket for the couch. We went out
at about twenty degrees in early morning on a day that would later heat up to
the mid-60’s. The run was the first
eight-miler for Joe and me for some time, and if either of us had been missing,
the other would not have made it. It
was hard for me, in the cold and creaky dawn after a too long winter, and we
had to run the road down Rock Creek Parkway rather than the still-plugged trail
amid too-close cars speeding around us.
But, we did it—and not a moment too soon. Next week we should be in the St. Patrick’s Day 10K, often the
first race of the year for us, and in exactly two weeks, I am registered for
the second DC Marathon. If it were today, as I am having troubles getting eight
miles in, and if I were told to do another eighteen point two, I would not be
in the running. So, it is long past due
that I got out and tried to get the creaky cold winter doldrums behind me.
As I drove home after dropping Joe off
at his home, I got out to turn the hubs of the 4-WD to get the Bronco up the
drive. As I got back in, my left
gastroc went into a very bad cramp, and the spasm continued for a long time. It
was painful and caused a limp as late as 24-hours later. I tried to massage it, and then realized,
about the only way I could let it manage to get loosened is to try to run again
as soon as possible. So, once again,
today, I ran the streets of my Derwood neighborhood, to limp along and loosen
the calf spasm—another thing that could knock me out of the marathon if it had
happened then.
On Friday, Lee and MJ Dutton drove
down from Danville PA where he is a finishing Ob/Gyn resident at Geisinger
Clinic. He was my GW medical student
advisee and the one I hooded at his graduation, the last such I had attended. He has been talking about joining me in one
of my medical missions for the many years since he was a GW student, and I
suggested that the Ladakh medical mission might be the right timing for that,
although it is oversubscribed by freshmen medical students again this
year. I took them to lunch at the Magic
Pan Chinese restaurant on Friday and suggested they stay over on Saturday
night, and we could go to dinner. I made
reservations at Clydes’ at Tower Oaks Lodge-the elegant new restaurant in Rockville. Since they are very popular, I could only
get a reservation at 9:30 PM, so we wad a very fashionably late dinner in this
very nice setting.
Last weekend Christina Elwell
stayed—so I am getting to be a veritable host with the most here! Russ Elwell found out about Merkel double
rifles, and got one in .375 caliber for himself, and then went back to get the
matched pair .416 Rigby for Christian.
I have not contacted Christian Elwell since he was here since I did not
want to spill the news of his father’s gift to him.
I did,
however, contact the SCI and Chesapeake Chapter of SCI, the latter to join the
group we had visted loast week, and the former to volunteer my services in
Safari Care and their anti-PETA campaigning.
They were quite enthusiastic about my brief email to them, so I prepared
a packet (Mar-A-6) in answer to their request, and will work with them on it
later, besides sending in the package of my membership application to the
SCI-CC.
While I was at it, I had prepared a
thick Log Book of “The Hunts”—stories and pictures reporting the big game hunts
I have made, a big book-and-a-half length collection of Big Game adventure
stories that I should have written up and published anyway sooner.
Having put together the past due
outline of the “Year of Fulbrightness, and having sent “Surgical Endocrinology”
off for my friend Charles Proye to review, I began to think of other items to
be rescued, and wrote to David Schwandt, the Education and Human Development
Professor that had been recommended to me as a doctoral degree supervisor.
(Mar-A-7)
So, I have thought about future hunts,
and tried for present runs, with a whole string of races coming up soon, and a
bit of taxidermy and its display ready to make its way to Derwood. (Knight’s Taxidermy is overdue for delivery
of the brown bear full model bearskin rug, from Kamchatka by way of
Anchorage I have all the hunt stories
(I could find in typescript} with Photo Works off-line pictures that I have now
packed into Albums. So, my hunt journal
is up to date—even though much more usual circumstances and deadlines of other
matters are not. But, like Swiss
cheese, I am pushing holes in the mass of things yet to be done, and, at least
a few are now completed---DHL just delivered the round trip tickets to Lilongwe
for three of us from Washington. So, I
will keep on nibbling holes in the cheese, as the sun is doing to the snowpiles
of Derwood, even if the result is occasionally a little bit muddy!