Beloved family and friends,
As I sat down to begin penning this 2011 Burden Family Christmas missive, I was struck by a single, clear, profound thought: “Dear heavens, there is not enough single malt Scotch in the whole state of New Hampshire to get me through this task.” Regardless, let us soldier on and see how far we get, keeping in mind that if we do drain the state dry, from Manchester, the Massachusetts border is only 30 minutes away.
A traditional holiday letter might at this point regale you with a year’s worth of charming anecdotes about the precociousness of the family’s children: little so-and-so just published his first virelai nouveau, in French, based on Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme, blah, blah blah. At which point the reader is left wondering if Fabrice’s many affairs in Naples are in fact good subject matter for even the most precocious seven-year-old, and what the hell is a virelai nouveau?
But as you know, we have refused to allow David (9), Sofia (7), or Isobel (4), to write any of their poetry in French – at least until they have mastered all the lyric forms in Spanish and German. And while they have complained bitterly about this throughout the year, we have held firm on the point and are glad to have done so. This means, however, that we have fewer examples of their precociousness to boast of in this letter, particularly ones that will appeal to our francophile correspondents.
I must admit that we have been less strict with Gabriel (6 mos.) and he is allowed to compose in any language he pleases. A recent work is entitled, “Goo.”
Speaking of Gabriel, he’s new to this whole Christmas mise en scene, this being his first holiday season ex-utero. He is delighted by the lights, the sounds, the smells of the season, as evidenced by how wide his eyes open as his adoring siblings drag him around the house with their hands under his armpits as though he were a cat, his little pajama-swaddled body dangling like a December dumpling. It is interesting to note just how much delighted joy can resemble abject terror.
***
All right, back at the old iPad virtual keyboard, glass refilled. While I was at it, I took ten minutes to peruse my and my wife’s Facebook feeds, having realized that I have traveled so much for work this year I have no idea what’s happened. Not because I wasn’t here a good amount of the time, or giving a sufficient amount of attention to Kris and the kids, but simply because the constant altitudinous high speed trips have caused more than a little “time dilation.” As physicist John Carroll’s A Time Travel Web Site points out, “a fundamental postulate of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity is that the laws of physics hold true for all inertial frames of references.” In other words, having spent so much time in airplanes, I’ve not missed things that have gone on this year, they just that they haven’t happened for me yet. The good news is that I have only aged half as much everybody else in the family. (I’ve managed to counteract this effect by running as many miles as I’ve flown, in all sorts of harsh weather, thereby aging my face until it’s as craggy as an ent. Edward James Olmos sends me skin care tips.) I’m greatly looking forward to June 2011, when I turn 41 and we experiment with taking a month-old baby camping in the White Mountains. According to my own Tweets, we have (had) a lovely time.
Roaming farther down the social media timeline, I see that we laughed quite a bit, gave the kids plenty of hugs, watched David and Sofia go back to school – fourth and second grade! – drew like mad, that favorite family pastime, sang songs, wrote countless volumes of stories, built empires in Lego and then constructed the trebuchets with which to destroy them.
Sofia, the Cat Whisperer, reports that despite the smell, both felines are still alive and as charmingly surly as ever. The turtle slumbers in the basement, an ectothermic leviathan whose baleful eye closed for the season’s hibernation before he could finish the last, desperate fish swimming through the little castle, which he has named Pyke of the Iron Islands. Geek.
Finally, here at the last, even the most mordant, Swiftian author of the pre-Epiphinial epistle might be tempted to turn maudlin and mawkish, or worse, sincere — to renege on the promise of whiskey-soaked sarcasm with which he essayed forth, and type something serious about the depth of love and gratitude he has for his family, his friends, and all the great blessings God has commended to his stewardship. He might swerve then to the deeper meaning of the season, past the frenzy of commercialism, the Black Friday Walmart waffle-maker brawls and insipid contemporary “holiday” songs, and comment in full Chestertonian throat on the awesome mystery of an all powerful God choosing divide the very nature of history and reality by personally entering the world, not in the guise of a king with a flaming sword, but a baby, born in the humblest circumstances imaginable, to reconcile all of humanity back to the unity with Him for which it was created. It’s not hard to see why a writer would struggle not to let his carefully constructed voice lapse in order to offer genuine comment on these important matters.
I however, will do no such thing. The glass is empty, the fire is burned down to embers, and somebody’s got to bring the trash to the curb and turn the Christmas lights out before bedtime. I guess I’d better go wake up Kristen.
Tags: Christmas
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Today is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of Mary today (and a Holy Day of Obligation). This is one that many folks misunderstand and think relates to Jesus’ conception, but in fact commemorates the Catholic belief that Mary herself was immune to original sin, even from the moment of her conception.
Here’s a nice piece on it from the Catholic Encyclopedia and today’s Mass readings from the USCCB.
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Moonrise 7 miler from the Inner Harbor and out through Fell’s Point in Baltimore.
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Sunrise run around Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. Crisp fall morning, absolutely gorgeous!
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Point of Graves cemetery in Portsmouth est. in the 1600s.
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20 seconds. In the end, it came down to that little. Less than two seconds a man for the 12 men, all over 40 years old, who ran on Captain John’s New Hampshire Athletic Alliance super master’s division team Sept. 16 and 17 at Reach the Beach. We ran from Cannon Mountain to Hampton Beach, 191.92 miles in 20 hours, 48 minutes and 31 seconds, and came in second in our division by 20 seconds. We finished 9th overall, out of 338 teams. We averaged 6 minute 30 second miles for the whole distance, exactly the pace the Captain had asked us for, and in the end, statistically exactly the same pace as our chief competitors. 20 seconds.
And sure, 20 years from now, I’ll mention that 20 seconds when I tell this story. (You spouses and friends know how insufferable distance runners are about telling their stories … over and over and over again.) But it’s not the 20 seconds that really counted at the end of it all. It’s not why I ran or why I think any of these guys ran. Sure, we wanted to win, but when you get down to the guts of it … we wanted to chase, to hunt, to be hunted, to hurt, to sacrifice, to strive — not just against the intellectual and emotional mountains that 21st century man climbs every day as he makes his living in front of a screen, at a desk, in an office somewhere as he struggles to be a good steward of the gifts he’s been given, his family, his business, his community — but with muscle and sinew and bone against the very substance of the earth itself. It is an ancient, primordial striving that is, well, the guts of it – and at the same time entirely, wonderfully distinct from the intellectual duties and obligations that mean the difference between success and disaster in “real life.”
Running is transcendent.
And for me (though I don’t presume to say for all of us) it is a form of prayer. And when on a team, running may become a material expression of the implied brotherhood, unity of source, at the beginning of the “Our Father.” We will do this thing together; we are of the same stuff, for the same purpose.
It is amazing that the Cap’n was able to pull together a team of 12 men, all of whom, despite or perhaps because of their years and experience, could commit to arriving at the starting line ready to run … fast. The fact that there was only one other super masters division team close to us underscores that point. Yes, everybody came with his own baggage, injuries, worries, mitigating circumstances – I sure did – but everybody came to run.
The kind of training it takes to get to the line at this level is the kind of training it takes to get to the starting line at a marathon. Not everyone makes it – injury can slip like a slim, cruel dagger into the strongest, best runners. As it did with two of our original teammates, much missed on race day.
But were we truly a team as we gathered in the parking lot at Derryfield Country Club in Manchester at 10 a.m. on the morning of the race? I doubt it. Not all of us knew each other well, and some were just meeting for the first time. But by the end? I have no doubt that we were a team. Only a deeply intense experience could fuse 12 people into a team in such a short period of time; which may explain why these relays have grown so popular; they are to men’s friendship as geological time and pressure are to coal.
I won’t try and recap the whole race here – that would take a book, and a broader perspective from more sets of eyes than I have in my own poor head. But I will share, to close, a moment from the race I recall that may begin to describe how that striving begins to fuse men into a true team:
In dark hours of early morning, you come up out of the night along the shoulder of the road toward a small constellation of blinking red lights, bobbing white blotches of headlamps, disembodied skeletal outlines of runners, all shadow except for the reflectors on their vests. You don’t feel like you’re running that fast anymore, but you are, at least compared to the star people you’re passing, slipping by them in the dark, rhythm of your breath and footfalls fast, labored but as tight and sharp and controlled as the wickering fletching of an arrow flung from a bow toward an impossibly distant target. You must, to those people you are passing, seem to be flying. You may remember, in past years, feeling runners come by you at that pace and wonder at how they could be moving so fast, so late at night, after so many miles, and yet they are. And now it’s you: and you are on the hunt. Or you are being hunted. Either way, this leg matters. Because everyone else’s leg will matter to him, and what you do on this leg will determine the significance of every other leg, and you will not be the one who lets somebody else’s gasping, white-hazed, lung-searing, eye-bulging, nightmare run be in vain. You will run that hard, and you are running that hard, and you, an arrow loosed miles ago from eternity’s own bow, go on up the dark road, with the smell of apples and lake and night and fall in New Hampshire in your nose, and a scorching in your lungs, and a tearing in your eyes, and a true, pure desire in your heart.
Tags: marathon, reach the beach, relay, rtb, Running
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Tough race for our team at Applefest. Curt blazed at sub 6s for the first 4 miles, then tore his plantar fascia and limped in the last 2.5. Sheer guts. We still ended up running the third fastest men’s master’s relay time, fifth fastest overall.
I avg’d 6:39s over my climbing 6.7 miles. (The race is essentially first half downhill, second half uphill with some real bruisers. Here’s a link to the elevation map. Hills from miles 2-4 were non-stop, culminating in some real beasts! I caught the guy I was running against for second place just a 100 feet after the transition area. We ran together for a while, I led for a couple of miles, but he caught me after four miles, near the end of the hill section, just as the drizzling rain turned into a torrential downpour. When we went around a corner and found – big surprise – another hill, he kicked and passed me, looking strong. I didn’t have the legs to go with him. I managed to keep him in sight for the rest of the race, and even drive my pace back toward its pre-hill speed, but never came near reeling him back in. Another steep hill at the end of the race put the nail in the coffin.
And that’s how we ended up third today. I was happy enough with my run – but felt awfully for Curt; hoping he heals well enough and soon enough for the marathon on his calendar this fall. This race was really just a tune up race as we near the end of the marathon training cycle. Consolation? Third place still gets each runner a Mile High Apple Pie to take home. That and the finisher’s medal is a bottle opener – perfecto for a couple of post race bottles of Guinness.
Tags: 10k, Applefest, marathon training, relay, Running
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It’s easy to feel the weight of the world some days – stock markets plunging, euro zone struggling, mid-East warring, politics mired in seemingly intransigent partisan demagoguery – but how’s this for good news: we may be living in the most peaceable era in human existence. This according to Harvard psych prof Steven Pinker, who writing in today’s Wall Street Journal argues that our era, “in light of the historical and statistical facts, is blessed by unprecedented levels of peaceful co-existence.”
He points to six benchmarks in human history that stood as significant drop-off points for violence trend lines: the move from tribal, pre-state cultures to state cultures, the civilizing of those states, the Humanitarian Revolution about the time of the Enlightenment when we saw the “widespread abolition of judicial torture,” the end of major interstate war since World War II, the new peace that followed, and finally the “rights revolutions” of the postwar era.
As hard as it may be to take Pinker’s thesis at face value, one of the stats he provides give a good starting point for conversion to belief. “On average, about 15% of people in prestate eras died violently, compared to about 3% of the citizens of the earliest states.” Fifteen percent. That would be about 2 out of every 13 people you know.
So what’s the reason for this decline in violence? Pinker points to three things: the existence of the state, commerce (we are not about to declare war on China – “morality aside, they make too much of our stuff and we owe them too much money”), and cosmopolitanism (“the expansion parochial little worlds through literacy, mobility, education, science, history, journalism and mass media.”).
Has human nature changed a lot since the war was fought with clubs and stones? Maybe not so much, but the structures of culture have, and if Pinker’s conclusions about the state’s role in the decline of violence are correct, then at the very least people have realized that “zero-sum plunder” is much less profitable long-term than “positive-sum” trade.
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On our hike yesterday with four 8/9-year-old boys, a couple of things occurred to us. One was that 9 seems to be the absolute perfect age to be a boy. Coming into your physical and imaginative powers, yet with none of the baggage that attends the teen years. It also occurred to us that not one of these kids had been born when Sept. 11 happened. Maybe ages of innocence pass for some of us, but then get rebooted in our kids.
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