I showed up to the Hoboken Running Club wearing shorts and a tank top. I was intensely happy to have something athletic to do in the company of other people. Though Ugly American Night had frequently been memorable, the happiest I’d been in the Army had been at PT. I’d enjoyed running in formation all the way back to Beast Barracks, and I’d trained for SFAS with Joe for no better reason than because I enjoyed it. I didn’t go to SFAS, and Joe didn’t need me pushing him. I just liked running with my friend, and I knew that the feeling had been mutual.
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| Before joining the Peace Corps, Sally worked at camera stores in both Manhattan and Milford, CT. |
Running has never been my best sport, but it’s the easiest to do in a limited timeframe. If you have shoes, a road, and twenty minutes, you can get in a quick run. Swimming, cycling, weightlifting, and most other forms of modern exercise take more time, require specific equipment, and often involve going somewhere. With running, once you step out the front door, you’ve already reached your training area. That counts for a lot.
By the time June rolled around, I’d realized that I didn’t just run because I enjoyed it. I actually needed it. With the stress and difficulty of my family life and the loneliness inherent in moving to a new city, the endorphin rush and physical release of exercise were the only things that kept me sane. This had been true in the past, but in the past I’d been able to pour myself fully into competitive swimming. I’d had a team around me. However, my working life didn’t leave the kind of time that swimming at that level required, and anyway, the memory of my last year in the pool made a return to my best sport emotionally undesirable. And yet, I needed the exercise. Weightlifting and running filled the gap, and if I wasn’t quite the same caliber athlete I’d once been, no one cared. Alas, there weren’t any former midshipmen running the streets of Hoboken in need of a race. I had a job, I had a home, and I had made a decision to move forward with my life.
I needed to find a place to belong.
I jogged into the park, found a few folks standing around the gazebo, and headed over. I saw a girl there, standing bent over and stretching her hamstrings. Blond hair, blue-green eyes, round glasses, pinks shorts, and a tank top. Very cute.
“Hi, I’m Dan. Is this the running club?”
She stood up and looked at me. “I guess so. It’s my first night.”
Was that a smile?
“Excellent. I guess we’ll figure it out once more people show up.”
A few more did show up. One in particular was a public defender working in Newark. He was a bit younger than me and had the classic runner’s lightweight frame. We started talking about work, and he said, “I like to throw a monkey wrench into the system. To make sure that the police do their jobs and that poor people aren’t getting railroaded just because they’re poor.”
I liked that. It sounded like service to me.
Small talk ended soon enough, though, and we started talking about our route. The club had a few established run routes; today’s was going to take us a little over three miles. That was great. I probably needed to put in a longer run over the weekend, but running more than a few miles with complete strangers, some of whom looked like they had legitimate talent, was not necessarily the best way to begin.
We started running, and the next thing I knew, that blond girl had taken off a like a rocket. I caught up quickly enough and looked her over, trying to figure how hard she was working. That one quick burst had already strung half the club back along the road in an extended line. But the girl wasn’t working overly hard. She was just talented. We exchanged a few more words as we approached an intersection and tried to figure out which way we were supposed to go, but then she took off again, leaving me trailing uselessly behind again.
The implied challenge made me smile. Not only was she cute, she was good. And she didn’t care whether the rest of the club kept up or not. She was just out there to do her thing, and if that left the rest of us panting, well, that was our problem.
She knew what she wanted, obviously, and she was not afraid to go after it.
Three miles went by in an instant. The girl let the rest of us catch up about midway through the course, and then the young lawyer from Newark took the lead, laying down a strong but steady tempo that put the club members through their paces. I had to work but not too hard, and I began to suspect that our leader had another gear if anybody tried to up the tempo again. We were talking as a group by the time we circled back, and I felt better than I had in ages.
This was what I’d needed after all.
We started stretching, and I made more small talk. “I need to do a long run this weekend. Does anybody want to meet me on Saturday and do maybe six?”
I said this to the group, but I meant it for the blond girl.
She looked me over quickly. “Sure, I’ll go.”
The rest of the club gracefully demurred.
“Awesome! See you Saturday!” Then, belatedly: “Um… what was your name again?”
“Sally.”
“Great. I’ll see you Saturday, Sally.”
Just like that, I had a running date.
* * *
Running club met on Tuesday. The rest of that week dragged by at earthworm pace. I woke up early Saturday morning, got super-excited for my running date, looked outside, and saw that it was raining. Not just raining, but pouring rain. Rain was coming down in buckets of torrential, near golf ball-sized drops. Hoboken was already drenched. It would have been a swamp were it not paved from end to end.
Wonderful, I thought sarcastically. I don’t even have this woman’s phone number. There is no way she’s gonna show. Hell, I don’t know if I am gonna show! Ugh! I’ll never see her again.
But then I realized that there was no way to not show, that if Sally did come out—in the rain—and I wasn’t there, she would definitely never speak to me again. Besides, I was a West Point graduate. How do you graduate from the world’s premier leadership institution, serve five years in the Army including a year on the border with North Korea, and then blow off a running date with a beautiful woman just because it’s raining?
You don’t do that, obviously.
I figured that I had something like a ninety percent chance of getting soaked for nothing and decided that whatever else happened, I would at least put in three miles for my trouble. I might get drenched, but I would make sure to get something for my time. First, though, I had to run out to the park to make sure that honor was satisfied, that I hadn’t accidentally stood Sally up. Only then could I start my now abbreviated run and get back home. Maybe I’d see Sally at the next running club meeting, and we could try again.
I jogged out to the park, grumbling, and was shocked—shocked!—to find Sally standing under the gazebo, waiting for me.
Holy shit. This girl must really like me.
How the Hell had that happened?
“Hey,” I said. “I’m amazed that you came. Heck, I’m a little surprised that I came.”
“I almost didn’t,” she replied. I could see that her glasses had fogged and that her hair was already soaked. “Thank God you didn’t stand me up.”
“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t do that. But I think maybe we ought to cut this a little short, yeah? I mean, it’s almost raining sideways out here.”
“Good idea,” she agreed. “You ready?”
We started running, thankfully not at the same breakneck pace we’d held on Tuesday night. It was actually chilly in the rain, even in June, but it was comfortable once we got going, and we talked easily. The rain soon tapered to the point that it bothered neither of us, and I found that I was enjoying myself.
It turned out that Sally had been in the Peace Corps, that she’d lived in a tiny wooden hut in Paraguay for three-and-a-half years with neither electricity nor running water while teaching entry-level Spanish and other basic life-skills to preschool-aged children from a local indigenous tribe. Against that, a little rain was hardly going to scare her. She’d come back, enrolled at Columbia’s Teacher’s College, and had then gone back to work teaching elementary education in the South Bronx—again mostly in Spanish. Wow! But she’d gotten burned-out teaching in such tough, unrelenting conditions, and she’d eventually left, finding her way to Hoboken’s charter middle school. This, however, hadn’t worked out much better than had the inner city schools in the South Bronx, and now she was trying to figure out what to do next.
I sympathized. People want it to be easy when you come back from service overseas, but it isn’t. There’s no coach telling you where to go and what to do, and few potential employers understand the value of the qualifications you’ve gained from your service, from putting team above self. My service in Korea hadn’t exactly been a hardship, but it had been decidedly focused and isolating. I’d come home with no clue how to proceed, and if I’d eventually landed on my feet, this had hardly been a sure thing. Not everyone sticks the dismount.
Sally’s case had been similar. She’d come home and been embraced by Columbia, but after that, she’d found herself in schools where the administrators kept giving her all their problem kids. With her education, her youth, and her particular experience, she herself became the school system’s single solution to education’s most intractable problems. She cared, and she kept trying to engage, but it was exhausting, often unfulfilling work done on behalf of parents and administrators who collectively had little invested in those kids’ actual outcomes. Many of Sally’s students had serious impediments to their educational growth, things that Sally herself could barely begin to engage. She spoke to parents as best she could, painted her rooms in soothing tones, and even tried to use music to calm kids who barely ever had a chance to just sit and think, who didn’t see themselves as students in any way that mattered and didn’t understand the point of sitting in a classroom at all.
Unfortunately, she found little support beyond the training she’d received at Teacher’s College, and eventually she realized that things were not ever going to get better. Administrators in New York and New Jersey both seemed happy just to throw her at their problems. However, there was no way that Sally could be a sustained solution all on her own. Her students’ realities were entirely too entrenched. She was slowly losing herself in the fight to make a difference.
I was unsure how to take all of this beyond the obvious, that I was thankful to have found a woman who cared about more than just how she looked and what her social circle had planned for the coming weekend. Sally was engaged with the world and actively trying to make it better. It was no secret to me that this was not as easy as it looked on television.
A corner pub sat at the end of my street, and it offered a legitimate weekend brunch menu. They’d done the place up in hunter green and hardwood, and I knew from experience that they offered an excellent selection of three-egg omelets. Omelets and coffee were exactly what we needed after three miles of running through fifty-degree drizzle. Sally agreed, and we met again shortly for breakfast, having each had a shower and a change of clothes. We lingered over coffee, neither of us really wanting to leave, but when I asked if Sally wanted to go to the movies that afternoon, she told me that she already had plans. It turned out that she’d just gotten a bequest from her father’s estate—finally—and that she was off to buy her first car. We made plans to meet at Hoboken’s Pier A park the next afternoon instead, to lounge in the sun beneath the Lower Manhattan skyline.
I knew already that my life had changed for the better.
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