“Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be.”
― President Abraham Lincoln
My buddy Joe rescued me in the way that only an old Army buddy can.
Joe and I had met back at Ft. Knox. The Armor Captain’s Career Course ended with a capstone exercise, a brigade defense fought via computer battle simulation. The event was primarily a staff exercise for which we were divided into four notional armor battalions with me and Joe serving as the leads on the same notional staff. I served as our battalion’s operations officer, developing tactics and drafting the bulk of our group’s tactical orders. Joe ran the staff itself as battalion XO.
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| Me & Joe before a dining-in at Camp Garryowen, ROK. |
We hit it off instantly. Joe was an avid runner and an occasional weightlifter, and we soon found that we were both headed to Korea. In fact, we were both headed to the 4th Squadron, 7th Cavalry. Joe got there about two weeks before I did and arranged to have the two of us room together in the “Captain’s Hooch,” the barracks building where the squadron’s staff captains lived. For the next year, we drank beer and lifted weights together almost daily, and when Joe decided to go to the Army’s Special Forces Assessment course (SFAS) about midway through our tour, I trained with him in every way save road marching. We’d hit the gym together before physical training (PT) in the mornings and then run together once PT began in earnest. Three to five mile runs were common, but I remember one morning late in the year when Joe got a new heart rate monitor, and we put in more than seven along the river that divided our little town from the Demilitarized Zone. Towards the end of that year, we even vacationed together in Beijing.
Joe was a part of almost all of my favorite memories of Korea. He was a veteran of many Ugly American Nights and sat with me in Camp Garryowen’s Saber Club when we rang in the New Year in 2000. We even went skiing once at a small lodge just outside of Seoul. He got hurt during SFAS, though, and wound up commanding a tank company in the First Infantry Division at Ft. Riley, Kansas. He invited me out for a visit the summer before I moved up to New York, during which we sat poolside for three days drinking yet more beer and chatting up coeds from nearby Kansas State University.
This proved to be more fortuitous than I might have expected.
Joe called at about the same time that I was trying to come to grips with my family’s substance abuse problems. He wanted me to meet him out in Colorado for a week of skiing in early 2002. I said yes, of course, and met him at Denver airport. We went straight from there to a big-tent ski sale where I bought boots, a snowboard, a heavy jacket, and a set of bindings—enough to keep me out on the slopes for as long as we cared to stay out there. We then drove up to Breckenridge, and that started the best week of skiing I’d ever experienced. The highlight came on a day when temperatures dropped to fifteen below zero in near-blizzard conditions, keeping all but the truly insane off the slopes. Neither Joe nor I cared overmuch for sanity, but we loved the sparse lift lines and all the fresh powder delivered by that unholy storm.
“Hey,” Joe asked me later that afternoon, “do you remember that girl Elizabeth? The one you met out by the pool back at my place last summer?”
“Dude, of course I do. Who could forget her?”
Elizabeth was a five foot, eleven inch former farm-girl turned would-be human resources manager and occasional aspiring model. She’d been a senior at Kansas State the previous summer, and we’d hit it off in a major way. She’d had brown hair and cut a stunning figure in her purple triangle bikini. From the pool, we’d gone straight to the bar by Joe’s place and spent the next few hours shooting the breeze and wondering idly if there was any conceivable way she could come up to New York for a visit.
“Well,” Joe said, “she remembers you, too. And she just moved to Savannah. She remembered that you used to live out there. She’d like to hear from you if you get the chance. I’ve got her phone number and everything.”
“Joe, man, I love you like a brother.”
Joe smiled. “I know, man.”
I called, and Elizabeth agreed to come up immediately, arriving in late March 2002. I took her to the same fancy restaurant to which I’d taken my mother back in November, but after that we barely left my apartment. Through three bitterly cold late-winter days, she did more to lift my spirits than anyone had since I’d returned from Korea. I felt alive and at peace for the first time in forever, not just because of our physical connection, though this was undeniable, but also because somebody wanted and needed me, and I badly needed to feel that I mattered.
That Elizabeth was lonely, too, went without saying. She was a young girl alone in a new town, and like me, she’d had trouble finding a social scene. We talked on the phone pretty much every day both before and after she came up, and I think we more-or-less saved each other over the first half of that year. I went down to see her later that spring, though, and I could sense that she was holding back. We got a room at a bed-and-breakfast on a beach near Jacksonville, Florida, took long walks along the water, and had a few romantic dinners together. Things weren’t the same, though. Our physical chemistry was off, and Elizabeth herself was prone to long periods of quiet introspection.
I was twenty-nine and ready to move forward. Elizabeth was twenty-three and unsure what she wanted. We talked, sometimes seriously, about her moving to New York, maybe even moving in with me. But I’d made a mistake like that once already; I was wary of a potential partner who didn’t share my outlook and enthusiasm.
Elizabeth worried openly that I was going to propose prematurely and told me point blank that she’d say no if I did. This was exactly the kind of fundamental misunderstanding that threw up warning signs. I wasn’t about to marry someone I’d seen a handful of times, no matter how beautiful she was or how much we talked on the phone. All other factors aside, she just didn’t know what she wanted. I was lonely without her, but I knew from experience that she had to willingly make her own choices. I couldn’t manage her life or lead her to become the person that she said she wanted to be. She had to really want the same things that I did—honestly and openly—or we would wind up hurting each other.
I couldn’t let that happen. Not again.
“You’ve got to live locally,” Elizabeth said over the phone one night that May. “Maybe see some other people and be sure what you want.”
“Seriously?” I asked. “You want me to see other people?”
“It would be okay if you did,” she replied. “The long distance thing is tough, and I don’t want you to feel pressured. I also don’t want you to pressure me.”
“Okay,” I said. “If that’s what you want, I’ll give you some space.”
We set another rendezvous for the coming summer, but I found myself wondering if what we had was maybe just a fling, if I’d been deluding myself because I needed to feel like our relationship mattered. I hoped that Elizabeth would come around, that maybe she just needed time to wrap her head around the idea of moving again, of changing her life so soon after changing it the first time. That might even have been the right read. It didn’t feel right, though, and I knew that the last thing either of us needed was another dramatically failed romantic partnership.
I saw a sign for the Hoboken Runner’s Club one night on my way home from work, and it occurred to me that maybe what I needed wasn’t Elizabeth, per se. Maybe what I needed was Joe. I didn’t need a girlfriend; I needed a running buddy. I needed friends who liked to do the same things that I liked to do. I’d moved to New York and done my best to make it my home, but I still lacked a sense of community. I still didn’t know where to find my people.
The running club met Tuesdays in the main park out by the gazebo. I made a note and decided to be there.
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