Shoelaces for Josie

I called you today. In fact, I got off the phone with you an hour ago. It’s been a long time since we’ve talked, and I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I didn’t call you sooner, that I didn’t call you as soon as I found out. I regret that.

I wrestled with it. I just want you to know that. A part of me wanted to not call you. A part of me wanted to pretend like I didn’t know you and never had. I’m ashamed of that, but it’s true – the selfish part of me wanted to save myself from this pain. I thought I was through with this. I thought I’d put in my time, one and done, over and out…

On the flip side, though, the wrestling was merely for show. I knew what I would do in the end. I knew I would call you and face this with you. I don’t know any other way. I can’t be any other way. Besides, I know you need me. You may not know that yet, but I know…I knew…and so I called.

I wasn’t expecting your voice to sound the way it did though. If I hadn’t already been through this, I would have been shocked. Instead, I just hurt. I hurt for you. I hurt for me. And I hurt for Nick. I still hurt over him. Almost a year, and I still hurt.

I know it’s scary. I know it’s hard. Believe me, C.Ann, I know. I haven’t experienced this within my own body, but I’ve walked right next to someone who has. Maybe that’s why I called you, too. Because I know what’s coming, I can’t leave you out there to face it alone.

I’m sorry it took me so long. I’m sorry I wasn’t there months ago when I should have been. I’m so, so, sorry…but I’m here now. I’m here and I have two strong legs and a pair of shoulders and I’m ready. I know I should have been ready a long time ago and I’m ashamed I didn’t shoulder this responsibility sooner, but I’m here now and I’m ready to be the person you need me to be.

I drink and I think about him…Flash Boy. Or I think about Flash Boy and then I start drinking. It’s the chicken and egg dilemma on an entirely different scale. I think about how much he screwed me up. I think about how things could have been different. And I realize just how much it still hurts and that every day I tell myself I’m over it is just another lie.

I hate that I do this, you know. I really hate that I do this. I guess it’s some type of weird coping mechanism? A way to gain perspective? I mean, if I made it through that, I can make it through everything life throws at me besides death, right?

But I really hate that I do this. There’s got to be another way. A better way. A way that doesn’t hurt so much, because this way isn’t at all successful anyway. There’s got to be a better way…right?

I looked down at my running shoes. Gray and white, a few holes and a lot of scuffs. These shoes had seen me through a lot and far more times than not, they were taking me away. Puffs of dirt swirled around them, adding another layer of grime to the many miles they had already marched.

I am a runner, you know. By design, by nature, by spirit, by hard work. I started running as a kid – sometimes in play, most times in work, occassionally to get away. And then I ran for competition. I learned high knees and tucked elbows and big strides and proper breathing. I learned how to run fast, efficiently and out in front. I was coached, I was pushed, I was trained…and I won for them. I brought home medals for them. I earned a state berth for them. And for me too, in a way, but competitive running was a way for me to prove my independence, kick back and rebel, my saving grace.

One night in college, I was close to an edge I didn’t think I was going to be able to save myself from. So I laced up my running shoes and started walking. It was the middle of the night, and I struck out to the west, hugging the curve of the lake, pulled deep into my troubled thoughts. And then I started to run. I ran and I walked around that lake in the middle of the night, all 14 miles of it, and when I came jogging in from the eastern shore I was a few feet further away from that edge than I had been before.

The summer after college, I didn’t know where I was going, what I was doing or how to handle the difficult things I found myself facing. I threw myself into work. When 12- and 14-hour days didn’t seem to cut it, I would come home from work at 10 at night, lace up my running shoes and hit the streets. I ran to get away from my worries, away from my fears, away from the sadness.

I laced up again and ran across the country a couple years ago. Since then I’ve bounced around between apartments and jobs and beer bottles and road trips. My running shoes are always by the door, and tonight I put them on. I laced them up. And I started walking. Warming up. Getting ready to run.

And the strangest thing happened. I couldn’t. I didn’t have the desire. Every time I started to gear myself up to move into a jog, my feet settled back into a walk. Maybe I was tired today. Maybe I didn’t have any place to go. Maybe I was saving up my energy for a bigger run later on. But as I looked down at my running shoes that have seen too many miles and witnessed too many stories, I knew the truth was ground into the worn-down treads.

You get to a point in life where running becomes less attractive. You get a bum knee, your ticker starts to fail, you gain a few extra pounds to cart around. But all that aside, you get struck with the realization that at some point, you’re going to run out of room to run. And at some point, you’re going to run smackdab into the middle of something you can’t run away from. For a person who only knows how to run, it shakes your world down to the very roots.

I got home tonight, and I slipped out of my running shoes. They’re in my living room, leaning up against the baseboard heater. They look tired, and they look a little bit sad because they know…they know the running days are put on hold…maybe for good. And yet they also look a little relieved, because running all those miles was a series of years of wear and tear and hard days and longer nights.

I was five years old when I started helping dad chore. At least that’s when my memory of it starts. I’m sure I was out there off and on before that, getting in the way and being a whole lot of good for nothing. But by the time I was five, I was big enough to do a lot of walking. Rounding up yearlings, fill feed buckets, open gates.

I think I was still in my single digit years when dad decided to go big or go home and bought 120 first-calf heifers. We wintered them on 80 acres, set up a feed wagon and had feed bunks stretched out in either direction. During the coldest months of that year, I recall feeding around 90 5-gallon buckets of feed a morning. That’s 90 buckets filled and 90 buckets carried out along the bunks. Seven days a week. We didn’t do anything easy in Iowa. If there was a hard way to do it, dad hunted around until he found an even harder way.

I was maybe 10 or 12 when I began working outside all the time. The operation had continued to grow with more cattle and more acres. Every afternoon, I’d get off the school bus at 4 and work until it was done. Or until a good quitting point arrived. It was never done, and it was a lot of long days. Yearlings to feed, corn to grind (we usually fed ear corn to the yearlings which meant scooping it by hand into the grinder…those are years of my life I can’t ever get back, but I did have nice pipes.), yearlings and cows and heifers and bulls to hay (they were usually fed during the day while I was off gettin’ me some book-learning) and all the other multitude of things that needed to get done like fixing fence or doctoring calves or checking cows. Weekends were always spent choring or working on bigger projects.

And then when “Kevin” (calving) came, everything was always a race. Long days. A lot of late nights, a lot of rodeos to pull calves and get calves to suck and rope burns and faces full of cow crap and C-sections and sick yearlings and frozen fingers. Iowa weather is brutal. I never needed to go to the salon to get a facial, because working in the sub-zero temperatures with 30 mph winds did the job for me for free. Sleet was always an added bonus.

In the spring, we doctored pairs and hauled them out to grass. Long days. Always a big job and always a relief when it was done. I still haven’t figured out why it was such a relief, because on the heels of that job was hundreds of acres to cut thistles on. Dad hated them. So he equipped his small army of children with shovels and buckets and sent us to the front lines of the thistle war. It gave me the unenviable ability to shuck a musk thistle of its heads slicker than a whistle. It’s also how I got poison ivy.

And then summer haying started. Long days. We put up all of our own hay and so every summer, I spent most of my days on a tractor. Raking hay, baling hay, hauling hay. Bucking bales, dropping my tractor wheel into abandoned wells, running the wheel off my rake (twice)…the usual, you know. The cows still required attention – checking them, hauling water and the like – but our focus was always the hay. Oh and cleaning out the barn. Why dad thought summer was the best time to shovel out a barn full of cow manure is beyond me. Probably because he wasn’t the one doing it most of the time – again with the army of children.

Then fall, and we’re back where we started. Weaning calves, starting to think about bringing the cows in a little closer to the homestead to weather the winter. Harvesting corn and soybeans. And, of course, long days.

That’s how I lived my life until I graduated high school. Actually, that’s just a portion of how I lived my life. Because I didn’t get a Y chromosome, I also had to do all the “woman’s work” after coming in at night, but that’s another tirade for another time.

By now, if you’re still reading this, you’re probably wondering why I went to great lengths to share all of that. I’m not sure I can tell you. Maybe because, after being away from the cattle industry for a few years and now having had an opportunity to get back into it, I’ve realized how integral it is to me, who I am and what I am about. All those years I spent walking up and down bunks and haying and pulling calves and all the hard work – it was something I had to do, yes, but it was also something I loved to do.

I loved that I knew all of our cows and I knew our yearlings and I knew which calf came from which bull and which calf would have an attitude problem based on its momma. And even though I was tiny, I loved that I could buck bales with my brother and keep pace with him shoveling corn into the grinder. Even when he resorted to mean, nasty tricks like shoving dead rats in my face.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that this cattle business and my love for it isn’t a new thing. In fact, it’s an old thing – nearly 20 years old – and having that many years of blood and sweat and hard times sunk into one area isn’t something I can take lightly. Nor is it something I’ve been able to forget or walk away from or leave alone.

But let’s see. I was…a junior in college so it’s been four years now since I learned I had an eye condition known as nystagmus. Yeah, I know…nystagma-what? Basically, my eyes flicker back and forth and won’t stay focused. They move rapidly between two points of focus because they can’t decide which one is right is how the first doctor who diagnosed me described it.

Awesome. Not only must I wear “corrective lenses”, my eyes also jump around like little dancing leprachauns. I’ve researched it a little. Especially after the doc told me it could be related to brain tumors. I usually sleep through my eye exams because after your eyes hit a certain stage of blindness, you just don’t care anymore. You can bet those two little words made me sit up a little straighter.

I’m not sure how I got this nystagma-what business. I must not have been born with it, because I wouldn’t have made it to 20 without hearing about it. But the little research I’ve done suggests that acquired nystagma-what is generally because of head injuries, neurological problems related to medications or by a disease…and if I’ve never had a head injury (at least not until after I was diagnosed) and I don’t do meds or drugs…

You know, it’s going to be whatever it is going to be. I could be proactive about it, but to tell you the truth, I usually don’t notice it too much until I start thinking about it or when I get tired or until I go into the eye doctor and they shine that bright light in my eyes. Then they go ballistic. Which leads me to another revelation – my nystagma-what is probably why I have a more difficult time driving at night than I should. After meeting a car, my eyes go crazy and can’t refocus after being blinded by bright lights.

It was the end of December and the air was surprisingly balmy. The scent of rain wafted in on that Iowa night breeze, and a star or three winked through the clouds above. The lights of White Flash picked out waist-high ditch weeds, bouncing over a rough two-lane trail, before finally settling on two large trucks next to a large, lonesome shed. I cut the engine.

Two beers, several animated conversations between myself, Marine Man and Army Dude and a still-broken Blazer later, a mutual decision was made to head to the bar. Yes, the bar and not a bar: the Dally Post Saloon was where it all happened in my hometown.

So we’re sitting at the bar, shooting the bull and drinking some beer, and midnight rolls around. Marine Man twists around to look at me and then glances over at Army Dude, “Hey, ya wanna go shoot somethin’?”

We all drain our glasses, shout our good-byes to the Dally Post and pile in Marine Man’s truck. After stopping at a buddy’s house to get some…equipment…we head out into the back country we all know so well for a little coon huntin’.

I think they call it country-style fun. Or gettin’ down in a hicktown. Or maybe it’s just stupid people who drink a lot and then go shoot stuff, but that’s what we did. Traipsing across the country side, scouting the cricks for beaver dams (setting up future late-night+explosives+beer adventures), shooting at coons and anything else that looked like it needed to be dead.

But out of that entire night, the thing that sticks out the most in my memory is driving down one of those backroads and Marine Man spots a deer out the window. He snaps around and grabs his high-powered rifle from behind the seat, reaches for my hand and slaps it on the wheel – “DRIVE!” – and then leans out the window, sights up and blasts a hole plumb through that white-tail at 40 miles an hour. Did I mention that Marine Man got his name because he really was in the Marines? That trigger-happy, beer-drinking loon.

Over the last several days – the last couple weeks actually – I have been contemplating a regurgitation of the past. Weighing the pros and cons of contacting someone I used to know, and the verdict has been handed down: the cons have it, no contact shall be rendered.

Details, you’re probably asking. Okay, details.

Six years ago, there was a boy, Flash Boy. We met. We were friends. Then we were more than friends. Then we weren’t friends. Three years have passed since the demise of that relationship, and these past two weeks, I’ve been considering getting back in touch with Flash Boy.

Why? Because at one point in our lives, we meant something to each other. At one point, we meant an awful lot to each other. And to have a lifetime expanding before us with no contact, no friendship? It makes our together years seem such a waste, a relationship caught in a vacuum that has been sucked dry of all meaning. And so I considered it, contacting Flash Boy, seeing what he was up to, how he was doing, where he was at.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I didn’t care. I don’t care what he is doing, how he is doing, what he is doing, who he is doing. I am completely apathetic towards him and, quite frankly, I don’t have the energy or emotion to pretend like I give a flip about his existence.

That sounds cold and harsh. It is cold and harsh, but when it comes to Flash Boy – I am an open drain. While I don’t think I hate him anymore, I don’t particularly care to dredge up a bunch of dark memories by trying to cultivate what will only prove to be a fake and draining friendship.

How do I know it would be fake? Because I know me. A friendship with Flash Boy would be in name only. It could never be anything more, because I won’t ever let him within 10 feet of my walls ever again. I don’t care if he has changed – quite frankly – he’d never be able to make me believe it anyway.

The bottom line is this: there are few people who don’t deserve a friendship, but Flash Boy is one of them. He doesn’t deserve to be my friend. He doesn’t deserve to get to know this amazing person I rebuilt myself into. He doesn’t deserve to know how I think or what I love or who I’ve become.