All or Nothing?

Not long ago, I heard someone I like, someone I respect very much, say, "All religions are stupid."

I didn't say anything because, well ... all religions are stupid.

They're also deeply profound.

They speak to people in some essential way. They must. Otherwise, it seems to me, they wouldn't have any followers.

Here it's probably worth noting that I know a fair amount about one religion and a little about several others, but that's it. There are plenty I know nothing about. Plenty I don't want to know about.

Still, it seems fair to say that all religions are a mixture of life-altering truths and sometimes silly misconceptions. The only serious mistake, to my way of thinking, is the belief that there is only one path.

There are, in fact, many ways to reach any destination you can think of.

What makes religions seem stupid is that too many people think of them in all-or-nothing terms. I say take what works for you and discard the rest.

And be willing to change your mind in light of new information.

Marathon Entry

The runners, more than a thousand of them, were gathering on Broadway for the start of the Trail’s End Marathon, the oldest race of its kind in Oregon. (Seaside, to be exact.) We walked along the street toward the beach and watched them jogging and stretching. It was already past eleven o’clock, and the race was less than half an hour away.

My friend Dan and I were supposed to be among the runners — this was in February of 1984 — but I had developed shin splints and, when they kept recurring, was forced to stop training. Dan hadn’t run since he hurt his back about a month before. Still, it was such a nice day — no rain and not much wind — that I was itching to put on my racing flats. We watched a dog do a trick with Frisbees and I said to Dan, “There’s still time to get changed.”

He shrugged it off as if I was only kidding, but I could tell he was fighting hard not to get caught up in the excitement.

“Come on ...”

“No.”

“You don’t have to finish. Just look at it as a workout with a bunch of other people.”

“No, if I start I have to finish.”

Then, as luck would have it, my wife said she needed to go to our room at the Ebb Tide to get a coat. We walked there with her.

“I’m going to do it,” I said, once in the room. “I’m changing.”

“You’re crazy,” Dan said, but he started changing, too.

Joanne (that’s my wife) could hardly believe it, but she helped me by pinning my number, 549, to my sweatshirt. We had only about fifteen minutes to get into our gear, relieve our nervous bladders, and get back to the starting area.

All three of us were laughing and shaking our heads as we left the hotel. “I don’t believe this,” Joanne said, more than once. She snapped a couple of pictures of us stretching on Broadway, then rushed off to tell the others in our party what we were doing.

We were standing near a hand-written sign that read, Over 4 Hours, but everyone pressed forward as the time drew near. Then I heard a pop that hardly sounded like a gun and we were off.

Slowly at first, we started to jog. The street was lined with people, but we didn’t see Dan’s wife, or her parents, or anyone in our group. Did they see us? No matter. We had a race to think about now.

There were hundreds of runners strung out in front of us, the leaders already out of sight before we had run two blocks. The temptation was to go with the flow — that’s how we had gotten into this thing in the first place — but I wasn’t completely out of my mind. I was able to fight the temptation, although Dad didn’t make it any easier.

“I want to go a little faster than this, don’t you?”

“No.”

Our first split was nine-something. Too fast, considering I hadn’t logged a single mile in the past month and had been able to run only fitfully in the weeks before that.

Dan seemed surprised our pace had been that fast. The news didn’t slow him down, though. I tried again to tell him to relax, enjoy the race.

“It’s hard for me to do something I did competitively for so many years,” he said, “just for fun.”

Our next split was eighteen-something, still a little faster than the pace I would have preferred, but I felt good. The sun was shining and I was enjoying this. As we approached the first station, I let it be known that I was going to walk through it rather than try to drink on the run. Dan agreed and told me to get the ERG, not the water. I had never had ERG before, but it wasn’t half bad.

By now I had no idea where we were, but there were plenty of runners to follow, and Dan knew the course, having run his first marathon here last year. He told me, as we ran, where it would be taking us, but it didn’t really mean much to me. I knew all I needed to know: the course was 26.2 miles. What I didn’t know was whether I could go the distance.

This was my first marathon, and I knew I was not ready for it. I thought: Maybe, though, if I forget about my time, I may just be able to get through this.

“What was cross-country like for you?” Dan asked.

“What was it like?”

“Yeah. What did you think about it? What was it to you?”

We had run together in high school, more than ten years earlier. Dan had been my best friend. A gutsy runner in the Steve Prefontaine mold. I was a middle-of-the-pack team member.

I told Dan I had enjoyed the camaraderie and had felt I was contributing to the success of the team. I also told him I regretted not having pushed myself harder. “But then I have a tendency to burn out if I train too hard — so maybe I knew what I was doing after all.”

We ran past the place where Dan had first met his support crew the year before and kept going for several miles before our impromptu crew honked and waved on its way by in the baby blue New Yorker.

A little while later we spotted Joanne on a corner, focusing her camera on us. Connie, Dan’s wife, was there, too. We asked for Vaseline.

Connie: “We don’t have any.”

Dan: “Go to the store and buy some.”

He was in pain. His shorts had been rubbing him the wrong way for miles.

I gave Joanne the sweatpants that had been bound around my waist almost from the start and she, running beside me, asked, “Are you going to finish?”

“We’ll see.”

She shook her head, smiling. “You guys ...”

But I was experiencing some chaffing, too, and I could tell I was going to have blisters on both feet.

The next time we saw our wives, sure enough, they had the petroleum jelly, and we stopped just long enough to smear some on.

On the run, I told Dan about my blisters and he said that when we saw the girls again I should put Vaseline on my feet.

“I hate to stop. They’re not too bad right now. But it might keep them from getting worse.”

“No problem,” he said. “I’ll help you.”

The girls caught up with us again just before the half. We had been running for two hours by then — matching my longest training run. I still felt okay, but the miles were starting to take their toll. Already I had walked up one hill, trying to conserve energy, and had started to concern myself with running the shortest distance between points on the course.

The girls ran beside us along Highway 101 until we could find a suitable place to sit down. I ripped off one shoe: Dan ripped off the other. We got my socks off, and Joanne dolloped jelly on the ball of each foot. I caught a glimpse of one blister, and it looked worse than it felt, which so far wasn’t bad.

Back on the road, I tried to keep the pace down without being too obvious.

“How ya doing?” Dan asked.

“I feel fine. No problem breathing or anything. My legs are just getting a little heavy.”

“I’ll feel better when we hit mile sixteen. Then there’s only ten miles to go.”

“I should be able to handle that.”

The stretch along Surf Pines Road took a lot out of me, though. It was shaded and scenic, but the rolling hills sapped my energy.

We made it to mile sixteen all right.

“How ya doing?” Dan asked again.

“I’m not getting any faster,” I told him.

“You’re not?” He smiled.

Okay, I guess that was obvious. “I’m just going to try to hold on to this,” I said, meaning my pace, of course. “You can go ahead, though. I only asked you to stay back with me for the half.”

“No,” he said, “we’re going to do this together.”

I’m sure he meant what he said, but I had to walk up the hills and that was death to him. “It’s too hard for me to start running again once I do that,” he said.

I tried to keep running, but once we got on Del Rey Road, that little out-and-back leg, I said, “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to walk.”

Dan kept going and that was fine with me. I didn’t want to hold him back. The last time I saw him he was on his way back down Del Rey. I gave him the thumbs up.

“I’ll wait for you,” he offered.

“No, go ahead.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, go on.”

So I was on my own. I jogged when I felt I could and walked when I had to. I remember Dan saying how demoralizing this leg had been for him the year before, and I could see why. It seemed to go on forever.

Getting down on the flat didn’t help. I jogged a few yards, but that was all. Walking was the best I could get out of my legs. (By contrast, Dan would rip off a few seven-minute miles starting here, I would learn later.) It was cold, with traffic stirring up a chilling breeze, and my legs felt like they might cramp on me at any moment. Hugging my wet shirt to my chest, I tried to keep warm and kept an eye out for the support car.

It was along here, as I walked from mile nineteen to mile twenty, that I began to think about my motivation. Why was I running this race anyway? What did I think I was doing out here on this desolate road?

I had thought about it before, when I was in training, but my answers did not seem as convincing now. I was out here to test my own determination, to see if I could reach a distant goal. But was it really that important, this goal? The marathon had always been a symbol for me, from the time I first decided to try it. It was a test. If I could go the distance, maybe I could achieve some of my other long-range goals as well. But I wasn’t prepared for this test. It didn’t count.

What I was after, I think, was that certain sense of self I had found through cross-country running in high school. It was in high school that I discovered I could do more than I thought I could. It was then that I had surprised myself with my endurance and gained a quiet sense of confidence in my abilities. That sense had been shaken of late by certain personal setbacks, and I was looking to get it back.

But now, being passed by frail old ladies and chunky girls, I couldn’t remember half of what I had told myself during training. I was ready to quit any time — and why not? I hadn’t been able to prepare for this race. I never expected to finish, not really. This was already farther than I had ever run. Dropping out now would be no disgrace. It certainly didn’t mean I would be giving up on my other goals.

I did some figuring and realized that even if I ran ten-minute miles, I’d still be out here more than an hour. And there was no way I could muster that kind of speed, not even close. Better to give up now.

I was convinced. I was done. Only one thing kept me going: the New Yorker was nowhere in sight. I had no choice but to keep moving.

There was an aid station at about mile twenty and, after drinking more ERG, I started to jog again. The course turned to the right and away from the heavily trafficked street I had been on. Just getting away from the cars made me feel better, and I jogged for maybe two miles, nonstop. I even ran backwards at times, just for the change.

I knew once I came around the golf course and saw 22 painted on the road, I would finish. I stopped thinking about how long it would take. Four miles was all I had left. I could crawl that far if I had to.

Dan was probably finishing about now, though I didn’t think about that. He would be struggling when he crossed the line, but not as much as the year before when he went out too fast and was practically delirious by the time he collapsed in the chute.

Shortly after the final aid station, someone on the side of the road said I had 3.1 miles to go. “Seven-eighths of the race is behind you,” she said. I liked the way she phrased that.

For several miles now I had been having an odd craving for a Hershey bar, and when I saw Joanne along the side of the road I made her promise to get me one when this was over.

She had gotten worried and walked the course backward until she found me. I was moving slowly, but had not collapsed in a heap somewhere along the side of the road as she had feared. She was prepared to jog with me, and I tried it briefly, but mostly I just walked. I thought I would save whatever I had for the promenade. I didn’t want to be walking then, with everyone watching.

As we reached the promenade, there was Dan. His arm around Connie, he leaned on her and limped when he walked. He had a smile for me, and a word of encouragement.

Then we started running, Joanne and I. There weren’t many people around, but that didn’t matter at all. In fact, it was better that way, for me.

I glanced at my watch for the first time in about an hour. “Let’s pick it up a little,” I said. “I want to see if I can break five hours.”

We did pick it up, and I had more left than I thought I would, but the finish was farther away than it looked at first. I could see before I got there that too much time had elapsed.

Joanne peeled off, and I stopped looking at the official clock. I concentrated instead on the finish line. I even forgot to stop my watch when I crossed it. But I remembered something: a feeling I had all but forgotten.

What's in a Name?

I changed my name when I was fifteen. I wasn’t in any kind of trouble, I just didn’t like the person I had become.

That's not quite right. I simply didn't like the image I had of myself. I saw myself as timid and too easily given to tears. I was wishy-washy and didn't know my own mind. (Few fifteen-year-old really do, but I didn't know that.)

In one sense, my name didn’t really matter. I was living in a new state, and the friends I made knew nothing of my imperfect past. I was free to reinvent myself.

The new name was for my benefit.

Anyway, it was easy to make the change. Up until then, everyone had called me Fred. From then on, I would be Al. Since the name on my birth certificate is Alfred, no paperwork was required.

Did it make a difference? I don't really know. I chose Al because it sounded more sophisticated to me at age 15. But I don't feel any more sophisticated at 52, and it doesn't really matter to me anymore.

Well, not much.

I'm certainly not the small-town boy I once was, and I can't imagine living in a small town again. On the other hand, I still have a sister who calls me Fred and I like how it sounds. Friendly and unpretentious. Qualities I'd like to accentuate.

Alive

I was behind the wheel of our two-door Honda Civic, barreling up I-5 toward Portland, when a smile stretched my lips. I was thinking: Dan is alive! He’s alive and when we get there I can talk to him and we can laugh together the way I feel like laughing now.

This was in 1982. Connie, his wife at the time, had just called us.

“Dan was electrocuted today,” she said.

There was no other word for it. He had taken a lethal 400 volts. No one could explain why he wasn’t dead.

When Joanne and I arrived in Portland, I went to shake my friend's hand.

“Not that one” he said and gave me his left. “The other one’s still a little sore.”

He was lying on their couch, that big brown thing they got such a deal on, and he looked tired, like his limbs were too heavy to lift. He spoke in his normal voice, though, and tried to joke as if nothing serious had happened.

Finally we got the whole story:

They were setting up a conveyor outside on the tank farm at Steinfeld’s, trying out a new idea for streamlined processing of . . . cauliflower, I think. Anyway, some guy forced the plug into a high-voltage outlet where it didn’t belong, and when Dan went to reposition the conveyor, 400 volts grabbed him. He screamed once and tried to get free, but it was useless. The electricity lifted him off the ground and put him back down.

That’s all he remembers.

Witnesses — and there were lots of them, bosses and workers  — said Dan was bounced twice and then hurled, head high, for a distance of about fifteen feet. His body went into rapid convulsions.

At the hospital, doctors looked for entry and exit burns but found none. They gave him a tetanus shot for all the scrapes he suffered hitting the pavement, examined him, and sent him home with a complete recovery expected.

Dan’s sister, Kathy, a nurse there at Emanuel, couldn’t believe they didn’t want to keep him overnight for observation, but here he was at home already. He let Joanne compare one arm to the other, and she said the right arm was still warmer to the touch. Some of the voltage was still coursing around in there.

“I guess the Lord wanted to keep me around a little longer,” Dan said.

His mother, Joy, a compact woman with dark curly hair, was in the kitchen cleaning up after their Kentucky Fried dinner. She had already lost her first husband, Bill, in an on-the-job accident. Kathy was there, too. She had been in nursing school when Joy drove to Portland to deliver the news, and so the job of telling Dan — it had to be in person, not by phone — fell to me, his best friend.

He was telling me now that he would have to go back to the plant the next day, see the scene, and actually touch the conveyor.

“That’ll be hard,” he said.

“Have to get back on the horse that threw you, huh?”

He didn’t answer me, just nodded blankly, and I wondered if he was thinking about the trip we made to the plywood mill to see the machine that struck down his father. He had insisted on seeing it; I’m not sure why. To make it real, I suppose. He was having trouble accepting it could happen — and did happen.

I was thinking about a lot of things. About a silent ride to Eugene in the truck of a family friend some eight years earlier, the highway straight and flat and dark ahead of us. About waking Dan with a late-night phone call once we got into town so he could give us directions to the trailer house he was sharing with some other students. About how he could see it in my face when he opened the door — how I wanted him to see it — before I said a word. Because all I could come up with was: “Your dad is dead.”

Later he would tell me he was glad it was me who broke the news; he couldn’t have taken it from anyone else, he said.

I had lost my own father to cancer so I knew what it was like and I guess that made all the difference, but I remember thinking, What if Dan had died today as, by all rights, he should have? Who was going to tell me, without warning, that he was gone? Who was I going to be able to take that from?

Here he was, though — blinking, breathing, speaking.

Questions of life and death and why were swept aside because here in front of me was something I could accept without question: My friend was alive.

Seven Sayings

Of all the things I've been taught in 52 years, these seven have shaped my thinking the most.

> "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."

> "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's."

> "Be as shrewd as serpents and as innocent as doves."

> "The Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath."

> "Love your enemies."

> "Whatever you want others to do for you, do so for them."

> "Seek and you will find."

Playing with Guns

I remember a first-grade classmate saying, "You mean your dad and my dad could have been shooting at each other?"

It was possible.

I hadn't really thought about it before then, and it felt funny to admit it, but it was possible.

It was no secret that my dad and mom were born in the old country. For one thing you could hear it. Even when they spoke English, which was most of the time, my parents didn't sound quite like other people.

If you looked close you could see that my dad had been in the war. It was evident in the half-thumb of a war-torn hand. (The left, I think, though I'm no longer certain.) You could see it even more when he was working in the sun and took off his shirt. There on his back was a long, deep crater about the size of a razor clam. The first time I saw it I asked him what it was and he said, very simply, that a bomb exploded near him during the war and a piece of it landed in his back.

I could see that it had been bad, but as a young boy I never even thought about how much worse it could have been.

The day my classmate told me, toy gun a-blazing, about his dad fighting the Germans, I asked my dad about fighting in Hitler's army. I don't recall exactly what I asked, or all that he said, but I do remember the look on his face and the way he shook his head.

He made it clear that he hated Hitler and the Nazis, but then he surprised me with this:

"Hitler did a lot for the German people," he said.

"He did?"

"Ja, sure, in the beginning we were much better off than before ..."

Then, I think, it was impossible for him to tell a young boy everything that was going through his mind.

Forty-some years later, I would sooner forget that my father said what he did about Hitler doing a lot for the German people. But there it is. I remember interrupting — "He did?" — because it shocked me, even then, that the name Hitler could be connected with anything but evil. I was too young to realize (as I'm sure my father did) that the connection was there in what he had just told me -- the division, deprivation, and depravity already implied.

Nine-One-One

It was a Sunday night in December of 1996, our first year in the house, and we were about to find out how long it would take paramedics to reach our doorstep.

Joanne had gotten out of bed at some point. I knew she wasn't feeling well, and I heard her moan as if ready to throw up. Then there was the clatter of our plastic waste basket tipping over. Then a heavy thump.

I called to her.

No answer.

I found her stretched out on the bathroom floor, her head twisted in a tiny corner where the wall extends just beyond the edge of the tub. Her eyes were open and she was white.

She still wouldn't answer.

I cradled her neck and eased her down flat. Then came the horrifying second when I looked down into her vacant eyes and thought: she's dead.

I didn't want to believe that. I said her name again and again. I couldn't find a pulse. She was so white. I tried to remember CPR and mouth-to-mouth. Make sure her breathing passages are clear, I thought. When I pinched her mouth, I heard her suck air. Good. But her eyes. They didn't move. Didn't even blink.

Back in the bedroom, I dialed 9-1-1, then dragged the phone as far into the hallway as the cord would allow. The part you hold to your ear stretched almost to the bathroom. As I was babbling incoherently, Joanne said, "What are you doing? I'm fine."

I told the operator, but she said the paramedics would be here soon.

A fire truck arrived a few minutes later, followed by an ambulance. Though Joanne seemed to check out okay, they took her to the hospital just to be safe. (Here's the thing: In the morning she was going to quit a job she once loved but now hated, and she had been stressing about it so much she passed out. Breaking an 11-year bond is not something Joanne takes lightly.)

The next day she was resting on the sofa and asked me to fix her some toast.

Grudgingly, I got up and walked to the kitchen.

"You know," I said, "I’m only doing this because you’re alive."