“I want it all.
“I want it all.
“I want it all.
“And I want it now!”
― Freddie Mercury from Queen’s, “I Want It All”
I trained through the fall and into the spring, improving my fitness while remaining conscious of the fact that I could no longer afford the kind of single-minded devotion that had made me a champion in the pool. I wanted to race and do well, but I needed to be a good father and a good husband, and I needed to find meaning in my professional work as well. I had to find balance. I ran Brian’s Beachside Boogie, an off-road run-bike-run duathlon, in the spring of 2009 and followed it up in June with the HealthNet Olympic Triathlon at Connecticut’s Indian Well State Park. This was my first Olympic distance race, and it proved to be much more of a struggle than I’d expected. I finished in just over three hours, realizing in the process that I would need to recommit to training longer before my next Olympic distance race.
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| With Sally and the girls at Lusk Reservoir just outside Michie Stadium, fall 2013. |
Still, I was more than ready by the time the Fairfield Sprint came back around at the end of that first full season. The day dawned windy and cold with almost two feet of chop marring the often glassy surface of Long Island Sound. Conditions looked miserable, but I thought they might favor a strong swimmer who carried a bit more muscle than the average triathlete.
We hit the water, and it was worse than I’d expected. I knew a moment of panic as I began fighting through all that heavy chop, but I knew that if the surf was bothering me, it would be far worse for less experienced swimmers. Somehow those folks kept it together. So could I. I forced myself to lengthen my stroke and refocus through a series of deep yoga breaths, and with that, I rediscovered my commitment to fighting and winning in the toughest conditions. And then there I was, no shit. Third out of the water and still twelfth overall coming off the bike. I finished just off the podium for my age group and in the top ten percent of finishers overall.
I’d become an athlete all over again.
Sally and I started running—and even racing—together as often as we could. We would go on running dates whenever we could get her mother to come over, and sometimes we even hired babysitters, so that we could go work out as a couple. We ran 10Ks and half-marathons and even did a series of mixed tag-team four-milers sponsored by the local YMCA. We won our collective age group twice in that particular race, based mostly on my wife’s blistering uphill climbing pace. I eventually started a triathlon club at the YMCA in Milford, and it was from this that I felt like I finally began to find my place within our local community. I trained extensively with my friend Ben, taught Sally and our friends Marisol and Leticia how to swim, and as a group we all ran the first ever Milford YMCA Y-Tri together.
Watching someone else finish their first ever triathlon because I had helped them overcome their fear of the water was as great an experience as beating Navy in the 200 Fly had been my plebe year. I felt like I’d passed on my love of fitness and made a real difference in the lives of my friends. That joy was indescribable. Even my own wife had been deathly afraid of putting her head underwater before I finally got her to relax and swim. In time, she went on to finish four triathlons, two with full half-mile open-water swims. She was really amazing once she conquered her fears.
I eventually qualified for nationals at the Olympic distance and in duathlon, too! This wasn’t nearly the kind of distinctive accomplishment that qualifying for Junior Nationals had been as a high school swimmer back in Tanpa, but it made me feel like I belonged in my sport, and that counted for a lot. Eventually, I realized that a lot of the guys and gals in Connecticut’s local races were actually former collegiate athletes out of the Patriot League. I’d been racing against these same people for nearly half my life!
Ultimately, I’m not sure that it could have happened any other way.
* * *
My mother finally died in 2011. Her internal organs just kind of collapsed one night without warning. The first I knew of it was when a doctor called from Nashville at midnight.
“Should we try to save her?” he asked.
What kind of question was that?
“Of course,” I said. “I don’t think she’d want to give up without a fight.”
I knew this to be true, but Mom’s last six weeks were a trial of agonies that no one should have to endure. She lay semi-conscious in a hospital bed in the Intensive Care Unit of Tullahoma Hospital, gradually overcome by a series of infections and then by total systemic collapse. They kept her alive via the dubious power of modern medicine, but it was a cruel kind of miracle. I flew down for a week, saw her through what I thought was the worst of the crisis, came home, and then waited helplessly as she began deteriorating. I spoke to her doctor after it became clear that she was never going to recover, and then I flew back to Nashville to convince her to end it.
I found her with a breathing tube and a series of IVs. She was fully lucid. She could write short notes to communicate, but I suspected that she couldn’t much remember what happened from one moment to the next. Her doctors kept her doped up most of the time.
“I want quiet,” she wrote. “I want peace.”
“I’ve tried to be a good son to you,” I said in reply. I very much felt like I’d failed in this, but it served no purpose to rehash old feuds. “I love you.”
“I’m sorry I missed your wedding,” she wrote.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m sorry, too.”
“I liked having fun,” she wrote at last. “Love was good.”
This struck me as a fitting epitaph for a bonafide Vol Beauty from the University of Tennessee.
I spoke briefly to Mom’s doctor and then to her nurse. They upped her morphine drip and removed her breathing support and antibiotic feed, and she was dead within hours. We buried her out at Flat Creek Cemetery following a short memorial service sponsored by the Daughters of the American Revolution. Half her high school class showed up, though no one had much spoken to my mother in recent years. Still, there was no denying that she’d once been the queen of their high school.
* * *
Pa Pa Dan was my last living family member. He died of lung cancer just a few short months after my mother passed. I found myself alone in truth in much the same way that Sally and I had felt alone as a couple ever since we’d been married in an Italian restaurant in front of a bare dozen people back in 2002. I’d become the patriarch of my family at the grand old age of thirty-five.
“That’s okay,” Sally said. “This is a new beginning. The mistakes of the past are gone. It’s just you and me now. This is our family, and we can do things our own way. We’ve still got each other. We can build something new together.”
Amen.
* * *
“It’s time,” Sally said in early fall, 2013. “It’s time for you to go back. It’s time for you to show me where you came from.”
I will admit that I was nervous. I hadn’t been back to West Point since graduation—June 3, 1995. Sally insisted that we go, however, and after just a bit of discussion, we settled on the Homecoming game. Army was hosting Eastern Michigan. We bought tickets late and wound up in the nosebleed seats in the upper deck. By the purest coincidence, my friend and classmate Kurt from the Army Swim Team wound up just a single row behind us.
I felt like I’d somehow found my way home.
Kurt and I talked through most of the game, a game that Army won handily against a badly overmatched squad from EMU, and I realized at last that I’d been a fool. Like swimming and athletics in general, the Academy was a part of who I was—a part that I’d ignored for far too long. With our twentieth class reunion coming up, I decided to reconnect. I’d missed my classmates, but I’d also missed my own sense of who I wanted to be. I needed to find the one thing that I’d never really had—a true hometown. I needed to discover a sense of where I’d come from.
For better or worse, West Point had become that place. The familiar grounds of Trophy Point, the eternal seasons of the Academic Year, the cadets marching through their daily routines, on their way towards their ever brighter futures. The Academy embodied the ideals to which I’d always aspired.
Going back was the reclamation of that last lost part of my soul, the last piece that had gone missing in the tumult of the previous ten years or more. Through the power of technology and social media, I got back in touch with my old roommates Chris and Brian, with Amber and Matt, and even with Dave. In time, I realized that I was not truly alone, that perhaps I never had been. I had community in the form of my brothers and sisters from West Point. I had acceptance and even family. These things would be there for me for as long as I nurtured those relationships. It was my own stupid fault for letting them go in the first place.
* * *
I talk to Chris weekly and sometimes more, and I text back and forth with the former members of the Army Swim Team at least that often. I talk to Brian a little less, but we stay in regular contact, and we skied together last year. When my daughter Hannah started asking what it would take to become an Army Veterinarian, it was Brian who walked down to the appropriate Branch Chief’s office at Fort Knox to do the legwork for her. My friends have become colonels now, and as I write this, Brian commands the garrison at Fort Carson. Amazing!
As for me, I ran for class office after our reunion and won! I’m now the official Information Systems Officer for the West Point Class of 1995. That’s maybe not super-glamorous, but I feel like I matter to my classmates, and that’s important. Mostly, I manage our class’s Facebook and Twitter pages. Occasionally, I set up conference calls for my fellow class officers. Most importantly, I feel like I have a place in our community. I have a few responsibilities, and I belong. After everything, it’s that and the love of my wife and children that matter. Those are the only things I’ve ever truly wanted.
* * *
I taught swimming starting in 2016, and when that became too much with an otherwise full work schedule, I transitioned to a regime of charity racing. My Army Swimming classmates and I raised more than twelve-thousand dollars for the Swim Across the Sound here in Connecticut in 2017, and we have plans to race again in 2018 for a cancer charity in Houston and a veterans’ charity in New England. Swimming--and charity racing--helps keep me focused, of course, but more than that, it make me feel connected to my community.
What I’ve learned is that people don’t just need to live, they need to serve.
This is endemic to human nature. It’s a basic part of who we are. We can walk into a room like we own the place, intimidate our peers, defeat our rivals, and take home the spoils of victory, but until we know what connects us to our communities, we’ll still never be at peace. We’ll never be a part of anything, not where it counts. We’ll never belong.
Home isn’t just where we lay our heads at night. It’s not the place where, when you go there, they have to take you back. Home is where we care about the future. It’s where we invest ourselves for the betterment of the group. It’s where we belong by our actions, not just by our perceptions of ourselves.
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