Pedestrian Attempt

 [Dear 1971 Driftwood editor: Please consider the following for publication. Even though it is 50 years late, I think your readers might still enjoy it. It is an essay. "Essay" comes from the French word "try." I'm still trying, as hopefully most of your readers are. Also please note it includes a single but very judicious use of the "f" word, but hey: I made a button with the word on it that my diary tells me I wore to school on Nov. 4, 1970, which was very injudicious. Somehow I didn't get kicked out. So maybe judiciousness improves with age.]

It hurts to walk. It's my feet. Earlier in the summer an apparent combination of new footwear and high trail mileage caused burning knots on the balls of my feet. I've since found ways to deal with it, and it seems to be fading (I've had plantar fasciitis before; it went away). The condition has a name: metatarsalgia. The metatarsals are the bones in the feet behind the toes. "Algia" is the familiar medical suffix for "pain": neuralgia, fibromyalgia.

And nostalgia. Hm. What is painful about nostalgia? Until now, my understanding of nostalgia ran along the lines of contemporary definitions that cast it as a lightweight, whimsical yearning for some halcyon time in the past when things -- seen through the optics of the present -- appear to be happier, simpler, better. Trappings of the time past form the basis for fetishistic revivals (listening to In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, say, while wearing paisley bellbottoms, etc.) that amuse the reminiscing elders and puzzled youth alike. However, older definitions of nostalgia, like the one in the Oxford English Dictionary, consider it to be a severe form of homesickness that could cause total breakdowns and even suicide. It turned out that "you can't go home again" could have a steep downside. There was definitely real pain involved; nostalgia was not to be taken lightly.

Opening that door onto the word invites a reconsideration. Edward Francisco's poem "Christmas Eve 2017" invokes, by its title, the supreme example of contemporary, sugar-plum nostalgia. But you won't find that here, as Francisco recounts unblinkingly the private moment he shared with his dying grandson as the clock ticked toward the Christmas-bringing midnight. It is understood that it would be the last such moment for the young man. Francisco's grandson says "To him/being dead/is knowing this/is his last Christmas/with familiar strangers/who can't love him enough/to save him." If that doesn't cause your heart the deepest pain, you are heartless. It amazes me that Francisco summons the courage (which word comes from the French "coeur," meaning "heart") to confront this moment with words. I don't think I could.

Out of it, though, comes a kind of Christmas present from the grandson -- and I mean a Christmas present to me, an absolute, total stranger reading the words of his grandfather years later and miles away. It is this sentiment: "What he says he'll miss most," Francisco writes, "is the chance to make/mistakes he won't live/to regret." Here is another amazement: this self-mocking humor, wise not so much beyond his years as full of them, truncated as they must be, presented to you, unbidden, transformed into a box of dark nostalgia. "Here, have some mistakes you lived to regret!"

Regret: like nostalgia, a word whose meaning we've watered down. Originally Scots, it signified a much more acute emotion, something to be expressed through lamentation, meaning keening and wailing. Not much of that going on these days! Even lite, though, it's a pretty chewy thing, regret. It has an aftertaste that doesn't permit forgetfulness. Even forgiveness doesn't wash it away. It works a number on nostalgia, too, meaning it forces you to re-visit whole series of events you'd really like to avoid. Our response? We try to dodge it with a coping mechanism: applying the knowledge you now have to situations you can never have again.

Regrets? I have them in spades. So I'm going to dodge away. The knowledge I now have is "Fuck you, Yoda. There is too such a thing as try." There is such a thing as try, try again. There is such a thing as keeping on trying. There is such a thing as getting back up after you've been knocked down, in order to go on trying. Jack in the Jack Tales (as I'm reminded when I read to grand-daughters) does it all the time. If you want still more authority than Jack, Yoda, there's Deuteronomy 4:29, where there is "seeking with all they heart and with all thy soul," which sounds a lot like trying to me.

(BTW that box of dark nostalgia has other flavors as well. One of them is wrapped in gold foil and the diagram on the back of the box identifies it as "WTF." It's a right time/wrong place kind of memory: you did the best you could, and actually did something well, but boy was it a disaster. And it has since become the juiciest scab you would ever want to pick, and pick at it you do, because it has all the allure and charisma of disaster. In this case I was at Northside Jr. High; for an Easter week school assembly, my 8th-grade-still-boy-soprano-self sang a solo from Mendelssohn's Elijah that used for its text Deuteronomy 4:29; as soon as I opened my mouth and bestowed my dulcet tones upon the audience, said audience exploded in derisive laughter. My diary simply says the solo went "fairly well;" hindsight says The Sopranos could've gained a cut-rate hit man -- er, boy -- then and there.)  

So then, "trying" being a thing, among the things I wish I'd given more "try" to -- back then -- are piano, French, and running. I did eventually give plenty of "try" to harmonica, dulcimer, and bagpipes, and the results have been good enough to smear in Yoda's ears. But it also turns out that even lackluster trying and eventual failure can have a silver lining. And when I say "failure," I mean "failure."

It was my sophomore year in high school. Never having participated in organized sports, but wanting to try because I enjoyed playing most of them for fun, I took my fun-having self to the practice field a quarter mile down at the bottom of steep "Cardiac Hill" and "tried" out. The first time I tried to run the course -- the first leg of which meant running up Cardia Hill -- I walked more than half of it. Finally, at the end, I remember rounding the bend after Pine Breeze and seeing at the bottom of the hill the whole team stretched across the road at the finish line, waiting for me. I didn't know they would do that. I trotted in, awash in embarrassment. I kept this up for at least a couple more weeks. "Came in last again," moans my diary at one point. It does not record when I quit, but quit I did.

At some point, though (cue the hopeful music, just, please, nothing with a boy soprano) I asked my friend Benton Hood about breathing while running. I haven't seen Benton since high school. As 1971 Driftwood readers know, Benton was a particularly gifted and successful wrestler, but he also ran track and cross country. When I asked him how to breathe while running, Benton said the most important thing was to exhale sharply, to push out the air. After that the lungs just fill back up. You don't so much inhale as the lungs just re-inflate all on their own. When this exhale/re-inflation cycle hits a rhythm, you relax, and that's your "second wind." You just keep it up. You're no longer panting uncontrollably. His advice didn't do me any good in high school -- I gave up trying -- but later on I took up running for (wrestling) coach Morgan's conditioning class at UTC and since then, on as many days as possible, I've tried to get to a second wind and keep it going for a while.

At first I ran, but eventually chronic Achilles tendinitis convinced to shift to walking, well-rewarded by the profile of the ridge I live on. Now metatarsalgia makes my feet hurt, but hey, there's swimming or cycling. I'll work back into walking eventually. I'll keep trying.

Whatever it is, when I get winded, don't you know that my Yoda is Benton Hood, reminding me how to breathe. And I do it. Then, by some miracle, there is no try. I still can't go home again, exactly, but Cardiac Hill's close enough.