Twenty, twenty-five years ago I was in an Honors English class at UNC. It was one of the three lowest grades I ever got in college.
It’s funny what we remember from moments in our past. A lot is lost in the sands of time. I’ve forgotten more than I can ever remember, and cannot fathom sitting still in a classroom for 50 minutes or an hour and fifteen. The very thought of a standardized multiple choice exam would lead me to break out in hesitating debate, a byproduct of age that makes one question any absolutes and certainties of bubble B trumping bubble C without exception. There are, depending on context and rationale, the possibilities of exceptions – some things I suppose are inherently “true” or “factual” but when delving into interpretations and analysis there seems to me to be far more room for discussion.
I always preferred the “blue book” essay exams, which perhaps required longer preparation but afforded greater opportunity to put forth one’s case and reasoning. I preferred it even in this English class of old that lived and died by blue book composition essays, a class wherein I never quite cracked how to write for the prof. I was a middlingly decent writer and could skate by on at times dodgy logic because I could “sell” the wording and construct of my essay. A little “razzle dazzle” showmanship to paper over the superficiality. A spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down. But while I was still at the beveled end of a bell curve in that class, I never quite figured out the right combination of glitter and jazz hands and spectacle to pull an “A.”
I bring this up because sometime in that classroom we read Homer’s Iliad (I don’t think we did the Odyssey that semester). In an atypical freewheeling class discussion, Professor Stumpf made mention of a “last lecture” series of talks on campus. Professors would present a talk, sometimes wholly unrelated to their field, as if it were the last thing they’d do on this earth. I actually was already familiar with the series as I had gone to one before I realized it was a thing; this one professor was going to talk about Snow Crash, a tech noir cyber punk thriller I had read in high school and I was a bit of a fan. It was a pretty good lecture partly because the guy was so into it and it was clear he reveled in talking about something he hadn’t lectured on for semester after semester.
We therefore talked about last lectures in the tiny fishbowl closet our professor had moved us into on our second day because it afforded a better octagonal grouping of desks. I think our professor was thinking about giving one and he waxed poetic about a colleague of his who a few years back had received a terminal cancer diagnosis. This collegiate English department colleague decided to keep working as long as he could, to keep teaching, and to go out, I might add, with a bang. For his course on Homeric epics, he decided to teach his own unpublished epic. It was entitled “The Ruthian” and was the story of Babe Ruth as done in classical Greek saga prose. It told of a flawed hero with epic strength undergoing a quest and a perilous journey for greatness, using extended similes, metaphors, and in true Homeric fashion, a repetitive list of players. Unorthodox perhaps but what was the university going to do? He was a dead man teaching.
As we were told this in the aforementioned fishbowl room, I recall us as the usual suspects in an Honors class – we all were, at least back in high school, something of Type ‘A’ high achievers. A lot of folks seemed somewhat mortified by such a syllabus curve ball. Me? It might have been the most engaged I’d been in that class. I kept asking questions about the narrative flow, if they performed it aloud as epics always seem to work better spoken than read, and asked where I could get a copy. Professor Stumpf and the majority of the class wanted to move on to discuss Homer and I slumped back into my chair. It’s not that I don’t love a good list of heroes on a battlefield… and it certainly wasn’t that I’m a huge baseball fan… but I was much more interested in this guy’s decision to make his legacy a reality. He had written this thing and I bet it actually was a fascinating take on the epic filtered through the cow leather of a pitcher’s mitt and the pine wood of a bat. I was intrigued as much in the making of one’s own story as I was intrigued by as the story being told itself.
In the quarter century or so since I first heard tell of “The Ruthian,” I’ve occasionally tried to track down a copy. The closest I’ve come is a throwaway line about David McGimpsey, a Halifax poet who is currently a faculty member at Concordia University. He apparently has a “Dante-esque” epic poem… but from what I recall my white whale “Ruthian” was more Homeric than Dante-ian… and was obviously written by someone who has since joined the Great Bambino in the big Yankee Stadium in the sky.
This is an incredibly long winded way of saying that in some ways Run Kevin Run Dot Com is my “Ruthian.” It’s a messy, chaotic story about how I’m trying to go on my own heroic journey to be a better person. Not just at running but in general. The running is just a Trojan Horse to force focus and commitment to something bigger… something beyond.
It’s been a tough few weeks as I try and get back into fighting shape. The training montage in this epic is nothing like what you’d see in a Sylvester Stallone boxing movie. There’s been a fair bit of setback and wrong turns. But this week I’m headed out to Guam to run with my fellow US citizens on an island that has far too often been in the crosshairs of fire and fury rhetoric. It is my own little protest against the madness of our age. And in this case it’s about how this race isn’t about time or distance. It’s about place. And it’s about running not our of fear but out of love for my fellow Americans. I’m also holding out hope that Puerto Rico recovers enough from their hurricane and political damage to once again hold their marathon. They have far bigger things to restore there (so many STILL without months and months later…). As soon as they do I want to be there to support them as well.
If this were my presentation in a last lecture series, I think it might be about how sometimes there’s an even better story behind the story being told.
Maybe, just maybe, there’s a bit of that buried in these posts. Thanks for reading and thanks for listening.
And now once more I head to a starting line…. and this time, though across the sea, it will still be on US soil.
