memories still to come…
To look backward for a while is to refresh the eye, to restore it, and to render it the more fit for its prime function of looking forward.
~Margaret Fairless Barber, The Roadmender
My father is a photographer, and as a kid, I always had a camera in my hands. Starting out with plasticy 110mm cheapos, evolving to a chunky East German made SLR, then finally now one of the highly evolved canon digital elphs, my father has given me every camera I own, and now, looking at a lifetime of photos. I feel completely wealthy with memory!! Thanks Dad!! On the right is my first time ever on a geared bike (look, I’m already reaching for a bigger gear!! I must be 8ish in that photo, hey dad, do you remember??)
Yet memory has a cost, fill your mind and soul with too much of it, and it can obscure or weigh down the future, balance is the key
Right now, to find balance, I need to edit down my lifetime of photos, currently about 8 boxes of them!!! I need to cut that down to 2 or 3 at max. So I am at present engaged in going though these boxes, photo by photo. Keeping a handful, 2-3 from each roll, and tossing out garbage bag fulls. So many pictures, people & places I had not thought about in forever (soundtack for this post: Paul Mcartney’s “in my life”)
What does this have to do with Zen and the Art of Speedskating? When I was first thinking of REALLY commiting to training, I wrote to the Connecticut speedskating coach Al Forsyth, who himself took this same path in the mid 80’s. I flatly asked him for his advice, here is what he wrote to me.
I threw it all away for two years and have absolutely no regrets. I
was lapping everyone in long track races here in the east and decided to take it to the next level. I STILL have great friendships from that period and have fantastic memories. I wouldn’t have know Eric Flaim and witnessed his rise to the top. When we were skating together he was doing a lot of the tagging along with us - although he may say otherwise…..Andrew - if the desire is really burning and still is there - you have
to find a way or you may regret it. Worth it on a one year trial basis
but you would have to change locales - out to Salt Lake, Milwaukee, or Calgary.
Al, you are right, the desire is there, and I will have so many intense memories from this next year. So here’s to the memories!!! that are still to come!! What does one really have, upon reflection? a back account? what truly is wealth? but family, freinds, and memories…
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Filed under: from home
From the outside it’s a gentle collection of curves and windows flowing together, on the inside, standing in the central open area, the glass ceiling rises 6 stories above you, staircases wind along one wall like strands of DNA, 3 glass elevators silently zip up and down with their massive counterweights exposed; on the other side of this open space tiers of shops give way to endless study nooks & reading couches. This feels more like it could be a sci-fi set from 
The mystical MRI magnets swept across my knee on Monday, today the experienced eyes of Dr. Anderson made sense of the pictures, and gave me the best possible news. There is no visible damage at all to my ligaments, ACL, or my meniscus!!!! There is some inflammation in the kneecap, indicating overuse & that there is trauma, but nothing really abnormal in the essential structures. 
Well, here is an opportunity to take that metaphor one step further, as here is an image from my MRI this morning! The bones of my thigh and shin are clearly visible, as well as my ACL in the center. This is a cross section, somewhere behind the kneecap. The Doctor suspects an injury to either the Pleica or the Meniscus, both are soft tissues that cushion and guide the bones, and the Meniscus is clearly visible here as the separation between the bones.
My friend Carla described the sound of an MRI machine as like “giant ladybugs walking across the earth”. The MRI I spent the better part of an hour underneath sounded to me like the yammering of WWI era machine guns, firing at each other across an echoing valley (weird associations, as these are both things neither Carla or I have ever experienced). The very nice MRI tech said that one patient described an an MRI as sounding like “an antique John Deere tractor”. That works too.
MRIs use extremely powerful magnets to work their visual magic, magnets that evidently can do things like pull pins out of repaired bones, metal slivers from skin, or destroy pacemakers. I had to remove all the metal from my body before I squiggled myself under this MRI (belts/zippers/keys). But I did forget to take off my titanium wedding ring, and although I did not feel it actually move, my ring finger tingled in the same way as the tissues of my knee. The kneecap looks so empty here, fragile like its filled with crepe paper, not like the meaty head of my calf muscle crawling upward from the right. Or the toughened X of my ACL linking the bones.
