Author: rmlenzi

Writer by night, sports reporter by day.

An ode to a great pair

I’m so sorry, but this relationship has to come to an end.
We were together for nine months. Together through snow, rain, in sun, down in the dry heat of Arizona and through the city of Hartford, past the civic center – and you didn’t laugh at me when I started singing Brass Bonanza. Almost everyone else does.
Our first 5K? We made it!
Our first five miler? That was bliss. Frigid, drizzly bliss. We’d finally outdistanced ourselves and broke a barrier. This was the beginning of a long future.
But looking back, going that distance was the pinnacle of our relationship. Because it started to hurt. Literally hurt. My right heel was in constant pain for about two weeks and we had to be separated because of it. I looked at you longingly in that time, knowing we would be back together soon.
When that time came, I tried to put something more into this – a hard heel insert in my right shoe – to make these miles a little less painful.
Then, when we went to Phoenix together, something else happened. Two little holes on the outer edge of the fabric that’s kept it whole. Still, we went out two more times on the roads, and made it work for just a couple more weeks.
Finally, someone else consoled me, but was frank with me.
This, Dina at the running shop told me, bending you in half so that the top of the heel met the top of the toe, isn’t going to work any longer. You need something more stable, something that you can invest in.
I needed about an hour to make up my mind.
So I’m letting you go. I’m giving you up and finding a newer, brighter, firmer future in something like you.
I’m putting you in the shoe donation box at Dave’s Running, because I know that way you’ll find a good home in a new life.
It’s been fun. It’s been real. It’s time for me to move on to something new. Thanks so much for the memories, and for helping me realize that I can be a better person. And that I can run five miles.

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I just finished reading John Green’s “The Fault In Our Stars” at the recommendation of Jeremy, whom I refer to as my cousin because we share the same last name. And it’s not a common last name.

Jeremy is using this book as part of his high school English curriculum and it’s a sharp deviation from the books I was told to read during my four years of high school, such as:

“Night,” Elie Wiesel

“Native Son,” Richard Wright

“The Glass Menagerie,” Tennessee Williams

“A Farewell To Arms,” Ernest Hemingway

… to name a few.

Though I cried and cried when Catherine died in “A Farewell to Arms,” it wasn’t a novel I clamored to read again. Nor were the “classics” that were listed on our syllabus each semester.

I can think of one book from all of the assigned high school English classes that I absolutely loved.

Not J.D. Salinger’s “A Catcher in the Rye.” Not Harper Lee’s “To Kill A Mockingbird” – though both had the intrigue and life lessons.

It was “A Separate Peace,” by John Knowles.

Because there were elements I could relate to.

Friendship, loss, going through the same experience together, growing apart, growing up. Rivalries – at one point Phineas and Gene became frenemies, which changes the course of their friendships – and their lives.

John Knowles told the plight of the teenager, even though it was 1942.  It was more relatable than going down the Mississippi River on a raft or punishing a woman for committing adultery.

Anyhow, it got me to thinking: we need to incorporate more YA fiction into the educational curriculum … because this is what students relate to. There was a really good piece in last week’s editions Washington Post about the graphic novel as an educational tool and the author’s premise came down to this: don’t rule out a book just because it’s not of “the norm.”

Do the right thing?

If there’s anything I don’t mess around with, it’s drinking and driving. While I have not personally been affected by a drunk driver, I have seen too many people somehow get into more trouble than it’s worth because they drank and decided to drive away rather than call a cab or ask a sober friend to give them a ride home.

The latter two options are much, much cheaper than the cost of a DUI. Have you ever seen the totals for court costs, legal/lawyer fees, et al for getting arrested for drinking and driving? It could finance a starter home or pay for an economy-sized car. Or a luxury weekend in Las Vegas.

So I went out with a few coworkers tonight and there was a woman there who clearly had a lot to drink. She’d had a rough go of it as of late and I understand the need to blow off some steam and have a drink or two. We’ve all been there. But this woman had crossed a certain line and a few of us, in an effort not only to end the conversation but to send her on her way, agreed that we’d call her a cab so she would get home safely.

She insisted she wasn’t drunk. We insisted she take a cab home. We even called the cab and attempted to pool cash together.

She excused herself to go to the bathroom as we did this and a few minutes later, I saw her sprint out of the bathroom and out the door of the bar. Grown women DO NOT sprint out of a bar … unless they’ve had several drinks or are trying to get away from a creepy stalkerish man. The only man around was a married man. She’d had several drinks.

We were all stunned. I wasn’t going to have that on my conscience. So I ran out the side door, into the parking lot and started screaming at her as she got into the door of her silver SUV.

“JILL! DON’T YOU DARE GET INTO THAT CAR! YOU’VE HAD AN AWFUL MONTH, AND IT’S GONNA GET WORSE IF YOU START THAT CAR!”

She got into the car. She drove away. I canceled the cab. I have no idea if she made it home.

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Nelson Mandela’s impact didn’t truly resonate with me until I visited Italy two years ago and became friends with a woman who was born in South Africa but emigrated to Australia. I asked her, “Why Australia?” My friend: “Because of apartheid.” I was speechless. I wanted to continue the conversation with her but we were interrupted by something, and it never came up again.

Apartheid – racism by law – wasn’t something I had ever been introduced to first-hand, in spite of the fact that I’d gone to high school with a (white) South African family and worked with a (white) South African man in college. I’d only read about it in books and news magazines.

This was the other side. And I wanted to find out more, but never did. We didn’t speak of it further, but instead formed a fast friendship during the tour of Italy, based upon the fact that we were both outgoing people who shared similar interests and a certain wanderlust. Yet I had put a face to apartheid. It was not how I expected it to be, a wonderfully funny woman who spent her life helping others and finding the good in them.

***

Apartheid is institutionalized racism. And I thank God now that it has been legally abolished in South Africa for nearly 20 years. The minority white ruled the government. Whites and blacks could not marry in South Africa. Native men and women were forced to live in shantytowns, and lost their basic human rights. If you ever watch the movie “District 9,” it is a sharp, sharp metaphor to what happened in South Africa for nearly 50 years.

Mr. Mandela chose to stand up against the hatred and the laws that kept his countrymen – regardless of their color or social standing – from truly being free. He was jailed for 27 years, essentially for leading an uprising against his government in South Africa. He wanted what was right, not what was written down. He was punished. He found peace in prison and when he was released, he became an advocate for human rights.

My first introduction to apartheid – no joke – came through MTV. During the 1980s and 1990s, the iconic cable music channel aired videos in which musicians took a stand, whether it was Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach,” or U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday” or Midnight Oil’s “Beds are Burning.”

Musicians took on apartheid, as well. I’m watching this now and going, “yo, Hall and Oates! … Silvio Dante! … Rev Run! … P-Funk! … The Boss!”

But these musicians were sending a political message.

As an elementary school student, I didn’t know what was going on thousands of miles away, I didn’t know where Sun City was and I didn’t have a clue about apartheid, but I knew this: Little Stevie, George Clinton and the Fat Boys were telling me something was wrong, and they wanted me to do something about it, or at least to care.

***
I had a teacher in the seventh grade – Miss Raleigh – who traveled the world and who was one of the first instructors who encouraged students to think for themselves and to understand the world around them. The great thing about Miss Raleigh was that not only did she want her students to embrace their own gifts, but she wanted us to know what was happening in places other than in our classroom or in the Annapolis area and why we should care. She wanted us to be global and to realize that the same values we had here in the U.S. could be shared across countries and cultures. It’s like my dad says – “we’re all different, but we’re all the same.”

She wanted us to raise money and to donate to UNICEF. She wanted us to make posters about different parts of the world and what we didn’t know about them. She wanted us to know who people like Yasser Arafat, Indira Gandhi, Benito Mussolini, Mikhail Gorbachev and Nelson Mandela were – that they weren’t just people whose faces we saw on the cover of the magazines our parents subscribed to, or the faces we saw on the news.

She wanted us to be able to express our thoughts, feelings and opinions on what was happening in the world.

Miss Raleigh’s seventh grade social studies class? That’s when I truly learned what this whole apartheid thing was about. Much like our country – only on a sadder and bigger scale – one country was still implementing racism, which was wrong. Wrong. This was less than 30 years after the Civil Rights Act took effect in our country and Miss Raleigh was still angry and saddened by what was going on halfway around the world. Her classroom was one of the few places where I’d ever seen an instructor shed tears. After we watched a movie about apartheid, she asked us why we thought what was happening in South Africa was wrong – or why it was right. We knew it wasn’t right. She cried for the wrongs of the world, and I know she wanted us to understand those wrongs as well – she knew we had some kind of power not so much to change the world but to change our own perceptions.

***

Today, Nelson Mandela died.

Right now CNN is showing footage of people dancing, singing and chanting for Mr. Mandela outside of his home in Johannesburg. A white woman and a black man have their arms around each other’s shoulders. An Indian or Indonesian woman, maybe, has crossed across the camera. Another white woman is holding a black baby. An Asian person is videotaping this on his BlackBerry. A black woman is dancing. The ubiquitous South African flag is waving above everybody. It makes you appreciate humanity.

Without Mr. Mandela, without his self-sacrifice, his selflessness, his desire to unite people and to eliminate the wrong that affected his nation … we wouldn’t have any of this.

As you probably know, I’m very anti-bullying and very pro-empathy. Sometimes I’m a little too empathetic.

Given what we know about the Richie Incognito-Jonathan Martin situation with the Miami Dolphins, it proves that bullying never stops, and people don’t grow out of bullying. It’s not just a meanness thing, it’s an insecurity thing.

It’s a power thing, too  – a person is so certain of his or her own self-importance, yet has no self worth, or are threatened, and gain a false sense of entitlement by belittling someone else.

A colleague of mine groaned and made a comment about the “wussification” of America, and I thought, well, how would you feel if someone belittled you every day?

Heck, at my last workplace, I had a bully, and I was hesitant to stand up to the bully for fear of “upsetting the apple cart.” Finally, a male coworker recently told me, “I’d never have let it get to that point.” And at that point, I felt as if I’d been granted permission to stand up to workplace bullies. Not that I haven’t stood up to people before, but I finally had a coworker put himself in my shoes.

Among the things I’ve taken from the Incognito-Martin feud: Male bullying is overt, while female bullying is covert.

Girls wouldn’t tell another girl that they’d shit in their mouth. They’d tell them their lipstick made them look too pale. Or they wouldn’t invite them out, when they’d invited everyone else out. Or that the story they worked on wasn’t worthy of being run on A1, despite all the hard work that was put into it. That’s something the bully at my last workplace did.

I’ve forgiven her for being such a horrible coworker and for behaving horribly towards me, and I know I didn’t do anything to provoke her. Sometimes I wish I would have just cornered her and asked her what her problem was with me. But there’s one thing I think of when someone brings her up to me. (I won’t name the woman who bullied me in the workplace. She knows who she is. That’s on her conscience.)

Charlie Batch, a former NFL quarterback, recently posted this on his Facebook page. There’s truth in this statement from Maya Angelou:

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

And that’s the problem with bullies. They likely never consider how someone else feels. Their only concern is for their own feelings.

 

Annapolis

I’m not sure where I call home anymore, as I’ve lived in six states over the past 15 years.

But for the first 17 years and 10 months of my life I lived in Annapolis, Maryland. Being stuck that long in one place, seeing the same people day after day and driving the same roads year after year only contributed to my desire to leave, to get out and see the world.

I didn’t understand the intrigue of living in Annapolis until I went to college in Pittsburgh and told my classmates – many of whom had never been outside of the West Virginia-Ohio-Pennsylvania region – where I was from. They oohed and aahed and said they’d seen the exits for Annapolis on their trips to … Ocean City. Had I ever been there?

“Real Marylanders go to Nags Head,” I explained. Geez, all I needed to do was lace up my topsiders and fling my lacrosse stick over my shoulders, and I was set.

The truth was, I hadn’t gotten out much more than they had. But because I was different, and from a different place, I knew I had a different perpective.

The truth is, I fondly look back at the time I spent in Annapolis, time I didn’t appreciate until I had left the East Coast and had actually gone out and seen the world. My first trip back home, I spent a day driving around the town, taking pictures to show my friends in Texas. There’s such charm in the town, especially when you think of the role that Maryland played in the early years of the United States – heck, there are taverns in Annapolis where some of our founding fathers drank beer and caroused. And the tavern owners will brag to you about that.

I miss Mike Riordan’s bar across from Market Square. I miss Dahlgren Hall, the ice rink on the Naval Academy campus. I miss driving over the Eastport Bridge. I miss cruising up Main Street with my friends, many of whom have also left.

I’m somewhat torn about going back to Annapolis next summer, because I have little left there besides a few friends. My parents have moved away and reunion won’t be in Annapolis proper; instead it will be in one off the neighboring communities, in a barn. And really, there’s no one left to impress from my high school. We have Facebook to take care of that, don’t we? (ha ha)

But it is definitely a part of me.

***

Speaking of my history, I was thinking of my high school boyfriend from the Annapolis days, and thought of a story a mutual friend of ours told me.

“You know his mom got into a lot of trouble about a year before he met you?”

“Excuse me?”

Something about stealing money from the social security administration, and paying restitution and that the reason he worked all the time was to help pay his mom’s bills. I looked it up in the courts records, and there was the case against her.

For years I thought his reticence to get serious came from the fact that he had been ceremoniously dumped a year earlier by a classmate whom he thought was “the one.” (She wasn’t. They were in the ninth grade. What did they know?) And I remember his mom being very chilly, very distant. And they went to Washington every weekend – later on I found out she was working in the city to make money under the table. It was all very un-Annapolis.

He never mentioned it to me, which tells me that the relationship wasn’t as serious as I thought it would be, and I wonder if that came out of shame, embarrassment or the mere wisdom that he, at 18, had as a way to not get me involved in any of the mess. I’m leaning towards the previous two thoughts.

I told my mom about it, and even she knew, all those years ago!

“Mom, why didn’t you tell me!?!”

“Because you were 16 and you were in love. And besides, you would have told everybody about it.”

He broke up with me, and when I was 16, I probably would have told all of Annapolis had I known.

I never brought up the issue with him, all these years later. But I get where he came from.

Why the hell do I run?

Honestly, I don’t even know how I got into running – and why I’ve stayed into it, because it’s painful and arduous and agonizing. For years, I refused to jog, after I graduated from college. When I had to jog in college as a way to stay in shape for soccer and softball, it was an obligation.

But once I went into the working world, I tried. And I couldn’t jog more than a mile. And it sucked. And I gave it up and traded it in for a bike, which was much easier but still gave me a sense of satisfaction.

I can trace my innate fear of running. In elementary school – yes, in ELEMENTARY SCHOOL – we were required to run a mile as part of the Presidential Fitness Test. Yes, President Reagan mandated that we run a mile. I’m that old. Anyhow. We were never trained to prepare for the mile run, the dreaded mile run. We were never told to run a lap around the soccer field as a warm-up before class, or that this test would be coming. We’d just show up at gym class and Mr. Lord (who was more like Mr. Devil) would announce, “Guess what, kids! You’re going to run a mile on Wednesday!”

Four laps around the massive field behind the elementary school. Being the non-athletic kid in the class (believe it or not, I was once unathletic), I’d find a way not to run that mile. I’d wear the wrong shoes that day. Or I’d go to school in a turtleneck and skirt. Or I’d feign an illness.

Finally, the day came when I had to run that mile. Or fail gym class and disappoint my parents.

Mr. Lord barked at us, telling us non-athletic fourth graders how awfully out of shape we were, and that we weren’t competent athletically and generally laughing at the kids who couldn’t run that mile. It was mortifying, and he did that to every kid in his class who couldn’t turn a cartwheel or kick a soccer ball … or run a mile.

Mr. Lord had no business being a teacher, did he?

Years later, as I started to jog again, I realized a few things:

We are likely never properly trained to jog. It’s not an easy endeavor, and so much of it is about mechanics. Efficiency is as important as speed, and sometimes even more important.

If you can jog a mile, you’re doing OK. Keep going.

There’s one more thing I realized, long before I started jogging again. I made the softball team in the ninth grade and I remember getting off the bus after an away game. Mr. Lord was the girls soccer coach at my high school, and was talking to some of his players. He and I made eye contact, and I nodded to him. And I thought one thing:

“All that yelling you did at me when I couldn’t run a mile, you probably never thought I’d become an athlete, did you?”

*Bleep* that!

I will admit I have a foul mouth. I will own up to the fact that I cuss. My best friend from college and I try to out-swear each other whenever we get together. We like to joke that it’s because we’re both Italian, and we’re “emotional people!”

One of the funniest stories I’ve told is about the first time I cussed at the dinner table. My father asked me, “do you talk like that at the dinner table at college?”

My response? “Yeah, I do!”

That was 18 years ago. My father made me leave the table. To this day, I still haven’t cussed at the dinner table in front of my parents. And I’ve learned that in my role in the work force, saying one of the “seven words” doesn’t make you sound cool to other people.

There’s a time to hold back from dropping the f-bomb. Or using the s-word. Or calling someone the d-word. And when you use that kind of language as a professional or as a representative of an organization, it reflects badly on you and on the people who sign your paycheck.

So when a Division I football player said of me and my cohorts that “you just write shit down” – on the record, on the podium, during a live press conference after a game – I wasn’t taken aback by the fact that he tried to belittle or question my profession. Heck, we question what he and his team do at least four times a day.

I was more shocked that he had to resort to using a profanity to make his point.

Maybe I’m old-fashioned. Maybe I’m one of the few people who still believe in the importance of manners. Maybe I put too much value on people having a certain level of professional decorum.

When you use that kind of language to reinforce your point as a professional, it’s all over. You’ve lost. You’ve relegated yourself to the lowest common denominator.

You’re no better than my trashy neighbors. And probably no wiser than that college kid who cussed that one time at the dinner table.

15 years ago …

… I didn’t know any better. I wanted to get a start on my life. I’d graduated from college three months prior.  I was living closer to Mexico than to my hometown. Literally. The offices of the first newspaper I worked at were 11 blocks from the border of Mexico. I was 2,000 miles away from home. 

As I watched the FX series “The Bridge” earlier this week, I saw images of the border town I once knew – dusty, bilingual, foreign yet familiar. 

It was strangely comforting. And then I realized something: Has it really been 15 years since I took my first job out of school? 

Yes, it has been. The first job didn’t come without its struggles. 

Sure, I thought about quitting, about a month into my job, when my editor pulled me aside and told me in so many words, “you’ve got to prepare better for this, because clearly, you’re not.”

I drove back to my apartment and cried. I wondered if I could hack it. I thought about going to the news side. Duh, I told myself, this is what you love, you’ve come this far, why go back? Then, I went home and got a good night’s sleep, and took my editor’s advice to heart.  

I was 21 years old, and at the time I didn’t realize it, but it was constructive criticism. Andy ended up giving me a lot of that, which in the long run became valuable to me. Years later, Andy tracked me down after I moved to New England and told me how he saw talent in me, but that at the time it was green. 

I don’t know what happened to Andy – arguably one of the best editors I ever worked with. I sent him an email after I moved to the midwest but never heard back. 

I have a lot of good memories from my first job out of school. I met two of my closest friends, David and Rose, and met a reporter, Emma, whom I still consider one of the best reporters I’ve ever worked with – and who is still doing the damn thing all these years later. 

Two of the funniest Emma moments ever:

*When all the computers went offline in the spring of 1999, and Emma was outside smoking a cigarette. Someone complained and Emma said, “and it’s happy hour!” Marcial, a city reporter answered, “Well there’s a bar down the street,” and Emma didn’t hesitate.

“LET’S GO!” 

Four of us grabbed our bags and hustled to La Oficina, and drank wine coolers and listened to Tejano music. The computer system was still offline when we returned.

*Emma was on the phone, trying to get a response out of an official. Emma did that a lot. She was very reasonable with people, but I could tell the call was starting to get out of hand. Emma, a classy lady who knew when to pick her battles, kept her cool and ended the call in professional fashion. As soon as she hung up the phone …

“WHAT A PENDEJO!”

I died laughing. 

“WELL HE WAS!” 

Emma didn’t make excuses for who she was or what she did. 

Of everyone I worked with in the newsroom, only a handful of us are still in newspapers. Several have gone onto bigger papers, and some have stayed in the area, on the border of Mexico. They didn’t just have jobs there, but they had lives and families and genuinely loved the area. 

I didn’t get that at the time, when I was 21, because I really saw it as a springboard for the rest of my career, and for the rest of my life. And I feel differently now, that I’m in an area I like, and the fact that I have to think about two people now instead of just one. 

The first high school football game I covered in South Texas was Lyford against Brownsville St. Joseph. Tomorrow I’ll cover an FBS program. I realized this as I was driving to run an errand the other day. 

“Shit,” I said to my husband. “It’s been 15 years since I first started covering football for a newspaper.” 

I’m so conditioned to being in this city, I almost wanted to put a dateline on this post.  But each time I come here – and I’m here a lot for work – I always think about one of my friends from college, who went to school here and who lives in the area with her family, and who likely works here.

Steph went through a rough go of it in college, and dropped out after three semesters because of health and emotional issues. I don’t know if it was the culture shock of moving to the United States from Canada, of being surrounded by seemingly liberal women after growing up in a religiously conservative household and having to straddle two worlds, of having to leave everything she knew behind including her boyfriend, her best friends, her college scholarship and her life behind to uproot with her family … I remember going to visit her when she was hospitalized and I gave her a copy of one of my favorite books. I wonder if she still has that tattered copy.

And I remember seeing her again in Colorado about 10 years ago, right before Christmas. It was the best three hours of that winter, sitting at the Cheesecake Factory and telling old stories and looking through photos of our lives. At one point, she made me stop as I flipped through an album.

“Is that graduation?” she asked. It was. I wondered how Steph felt when she saw that.

I remember that when we hugged in the middle of downtown Denver and parted, a Christmas carol covered by Christina Aguilera was playing on a nearby sound system. I can’t listen to that CD without thinking of Steph.

In the 18 months I’ve lived here, Steph hasn’t returned any of my emails or phone calls – so I’ve gotten the point. Set ’em free, right?

When I’m in Ann Arbor for work, sometimes I’ll be sitting at Starbucks or at lunch and I’ll look out the window, wondering if I’ll see Steph pass by.  And I wonder if I would get up from my seat and chase her down. I wonder if it would be worth it.