“He left his mark.”

We say this when a man has bestowed upon us an indelible impression. The difficulty with attributing this quality to my grandfather, however, is that he didn’t leave a mark, he left thousands of them – bold, dazzling marks that, when viewed from a distance, collectively resemble art. Art of man. Art of soldier. Art of husband. Art of grandfather.

During family visits to his farm in Iowa as a child, I would anxiously wait for him and his sons to return from the corn fields for lunch. When they did, I would chomp on homemade brownies, swig RC Cola, and fixate my eyes on his green, weathered John Deere cap. I remember wanting to wear it more than I wanted to wear a Yankees hat or a space helmet.

I didn’t know enough about farming to know what he did, but his clothes and boots, which were persistently caked with dust and soil, told me how he did it – with a steadfast love of God’s soil and a movie-script-like devotion to supporting his family. Out of dirt rose life. As a youth, he dug foxholes to support General Patton, and as an adult, he plowed farmland to support my grandmother. A nation, and a family, carried on.

When you’re just a small boy, as I was when I got to know my grandfather, you spend stretches of time between naps playing with superheroes. Grandpa qualified for the same status. He was taller than two old ladies stacked on top of each other and whose long stride seemed to make the advent of the Ford automobile irrelevant. He towered over me as a six-year old, so much so that I was concerned he would hit his head on the sun, especially when it set.

His work ethic was superhuman. He could leap tall buildings in a single bound, but would stop and fix the roofing on several of them. Most impressive was his humility. My grandfather let his work speak for him. He grew generations of food and family – impressive feats that he would only acknowledge by uttering, “I’ve had a full life Keith.” 

I grew up. And up. I woke up one day and, at 6’ 5’, stood taller than him. Yet his hands – two tools that cultivated people and earth, loomed eternally large. A few years ago when he was 88 years old, I sat alongside him in his house and considered the magnitude of what these hands had held.

When he marched into Africa to fight Hitler as a teen, he gripped a rifle. Captured in Italy and imprisoned as a POW for two years, he clung to hope. He held my mother after she was born, then a tractor steering wheel, and then, for the very best parts of the rest of his life, my grandmother.

Finally, with typical grit, he held mightily onto life long enough for those who loved him to hold those hands of his one last time.

With that, his work here on earth was done.

In heaven though, it’s just beginning. Someone has to harvest those fields of gold.

Conventional wisdom says that you can’t teach an old dog a new trick, but the lady in condo #1210 in my building is trying to do exactly that.

She’s trying to teach her dog Jack to live a little longer.

Jack is a gregarious, six-year-old Golden Retriever with a rich, lustrous red coat that puts most my ex-girlfriends’ hair to shame. Jack is lean and lanky, so when he runs he strongly resembles a horse, a similarity which of course quickly dissolves once he starts sniffing peoples’ butts in the building’s elevator.

Jack, like most Golden Retrievers, possesses a friendly, eager-to-please demeanor. If he were a guy, he’s be the loyal, wide-eyed friend up for anything who shows up to a party with a 12-pack of beer because it’s the nice thing to do.  

Of course then he would drink too much, rip off everything but his underwear, throw up on the girl he’s hitting on and pee in the fish tank but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Two months ago, I struck up a conversation with Jack’s owner “Ann.” The quotation marks are necessary because, well, I don’t know her name. Like most people in my building, I know all the dogs’ names but just a few of the humans’. She is “Jack’s owner,” I am “Simba and Clementine’s owner” and so on. This can seem unsettling but when I consider that I could be “The Guy Who Never Dusts His Apartment” or “The Guy Who Routinely Comes Home with a Fifth of Vodka,” I elect not to protest.

Ann said she had just found out Jack had cancer, unfortunately a common disease in the breed.

“I’m so sorry. What kind?” I asked, as if that would help frame any of my responses. I just wanted to be inquisitory and polite.

“Mastocytoma. He has a mast cell tumor of the paw. Twenty-five percent of all dogs with skin tumors have this,” she responded.

With that, Jack ran by us, in full pursuit of a squirrel, and then a bird, and then a tennis ball. If he had cancer, I didn’t know it. He was in superb spirits all things considered. Hell, if I get a hangnail I curl up in bed, cry, eat Ben and Jerry’s Cake Batter and listen to Air Supply.

“What can you do?” I asked.

“Radiation. Prednisone. Prayer.” She said, as she smiled, perhaps to make the conversation less uncomfortable.

“Good luck,” I said.

“Thank you,” she responded, as she flung a tennis ball off into the grass, which sent Jack bounding after it like it was the last biscuit on earth. He caught up to it, pawed it to a stop and chewed on for several seconds, before dropping it out of his mouth and panting with a tongue slightly smaller than a pancake at I-Hop.

Weeks later, I saw Jack and Ann again in the same grassy play space behind our condo. I looked down and saw Jack smiling despite a hairless, raw paw with a bright pink hue – the consequence of the radiation. It looked bad.

Knowing what I intended to ask, she offered, “He’s had three treatments. It’s helping a little but he can’t walk after each one. He’s fine today but the last treatment was a week ago. I talked to Tom (her husband) and we are not going to take him again. We just can’t … We can’t take him …We can’t do that … ” as her voice trailed off.

 “What are you going to do?” I asked.

“Love him,” she said.

It was a beautiful response, and one that has not escaped me since. When I head out on a run, I often see her strolling with him amongst the grass, or on the trail that snakes past our building. Ann is pretty beyond her 45+ years and her large sunhat and graceful walk lend her a sophistication you can’t pick out of a store window. When it is windy, her dresses ripple in the breeze like when you shake a bed sheet, and this adds to her eloquence. She belongs on a book jacket.

Of course, Jack is anything but, and it is precisely this juxtaposition of energies and imagery that give me pause. Sometimes I will slow up, just enough to watch them play, just enough to watch her love him. But I do so with caution, not wanting Ann (or Jack) to notice I am being deliberate. I don’t want to ruin it.

I think about stopping to say, “Jack is a beautiful dog and he loves you,” but she knows this.

I think about stopping to say, “Ann is the best owner you could ever want,” but he knows this.

Her walks with Jack are longer these days. Either that or the walks are in greater frequency. I think I know what this means, but I don’t ask. All updates from now on must come from her – whenever she feels like sharing.

I see them walking side by side.  I can tell Jack is begging for the tennis ball. I can tell Ann is begging for more time. Time to rub his ears. Time to wake up in bed alongside him. Time to watch him nap.

Time to teach him one last trick.

I just signed up for the Austin Marathon. Assuming I cross the finish line (crawling counts), Austin will be marathon #9 and the seventh state in my quest to run a marathon in all 50. I object to having to run one in Delaware since it is the size of the electronics department at Target, but well, at the very least, I can pick up a Blu-Ray while I’m in town for the race.

I wrote about why I run, but really, that is a more general explanation for why I gravitate towards the activity itself. Watching my dad as a child knock out the miles certainly convinced me to run, and it certainly convinced me I had to run a marathon before I died, but still, all this talk begs another question:

Why do I continue to run marathons?

Yes, I want to run one in each state, but that is lipstick. Let me explain.

If I can do it, great, it’s an accomplishment that adds to me and helps make me shine in the eyes of those who love me. Like lipstick. It will make me pretty, especially in memory.

“You know, your great grandfather ran a race in every state.”

“Even in Delaware?”

“Even in Delaware.”

But that doesn’t fuel me. And it won’t matter until the last state is crossed off.

What matters is why I wake up at 6 a.m. for three months in a row to take on a part-time job (training) for a race that will see me bargain with God, temporarily destroy my body, possibly make me vomit, definitely make me cry, and leave me with nothing more than a shitty t-shirt I can’t wear in public, a banana and a bagel, and the sensation that my body is on fire four to five days after the race.

Did I mention I have to pay for all this? $110 for Austin. That’s pricey for a bagel. I might as well pay a hooker to spoon me while I’m at it.

Why do I do it?

Because it makes me uncomfortable.

Comfortable scares the absolute shit out of me. I think that’s a term that should be reserved for recliners. I also think white picket fences are scarier than clowns, especially that one on the tricycle in “Saw,” and “how it’s usually done” is quite possibly the most frightening four words you can string together.

I don’t want to be comfortable. It’s why I have lived in six cities and four different states, why I took a job that I was probably 75% qualified to do, and why I run marathons.

When I line up to run a marathon in that 50th state, I will still think to myself, “I don’t know if I can do this.” At mile 10, I will convince myself I can. At mile 20, I will convince myself I can’t. Then I will spend the next 6.2 miles wondering how it’s possible to feel more alive than ever before despite the fact that I feel like I am dying.

The point is that not knowing keeps me wide-eyed in life, and really, not knowing is the definition of being uncomfortable. Not knowing keeps me aware; keeps me searching; keeps me wondering.

It keeps me running long distances in shorts that are too bright and too small to wear anytime or anywhere else in life.

I was playing Hangman with my future six-year-old niece this weekend at a Mexican restaurant as we were waiting for food, and wasn’t just loosing badly; I was getting my ass kicked.

Ten minutes in, I had guessed eight letters, only one of which had made the cut – the letter ‘a.’  I sat there munching on chips and salsa, stupefied.

_ a _

I guessed another three letters to no avail before spitting out the letter ‘y’ in disgust, almost as a protest guess. The six-year old scrawled the letter to the right of the ‘a’ and I stared at the complex verbal arithmetic she had created:

_ a y

“Can I get more salsa?” I asked the waitress, who scurried by. I was stalling. “Maybe some guacamole too? Can you make it by hand? Oh, and I’ll take a triple scoop hot fudge sundae and an old fashioned.”

Thirty seconds passed. I blinked. Pressure was building.

“M-A-Y. It’s MAY!” I barked.

“You won!” the six-year-old shrieked. “You won!”

I looked down at the mess of letters I had incorrectly guessed that she had scribbled next to the hangman. There were 10-12 or so by my estimation, but the large font she used to write them down made it look like I had worked my way through the English and Arabic languages and was now onto Mandarin.

I had very clearly done everything but win. I had guessed so many letters wrongly that the niece may well have layered the hangman in J Crew’s winter line before he suffered his fate. Moreover, the presence of a tiara suggested she was being forced to accessorize to keep the hangman alive. We were one more missed letter away from a pair of UGZ.

My hangman was beyond hung. He suffered a very violent death. Each letter more horrific than the next. Vowels, Consonants. It didn’t matter. They came at him with a flurry and overwhelmed him. Bright red salsa stained the placemat on which his motionless body lay.

But she didn’t see the mess of letters. Well, she did, but they had no bearing on her thought process. I had messed up, but I kept at it, and eventually I succeeded, and to her that was winning.

Yeah, yeah, it’s childhood innocence, I know. But still, I smiled a smile as wide at the salsa bar, joyful that for five, maybe 10 seconds, I was reminded that it is not all about wins, or black, or losses, or white.

We live in the gray for a long time growing up – even throughout our teens. Imaginary friends dance. We use colors that aren’t supposed to go together. We take chances. Bigger ones than we take NOW.

Exhibit A: The note I passed to a girl I liked in sixth grade. That sounds trivial until I count on my fingers the number of years it’s been since I hit on a girl and I run out of hands.

I lament that life becomes black and white as we grow older – metaphorically and literally. We merely win or fail. Promoted or demoted. We furiously type away on our black laptops and clamor away on our black, well Blackberrys. Then we go home and try and inspire ourselves by hanging a new piece of art from Z Galleria, because that is what our playground has been reduced to – a bunch of white walls.

We go from coloring on walls to hanging crappy imitation art on them that we overpaid for. We go from dreaming bigger to working harder. We turn our attention from keg to political parties. It’s inevitable. We grow up. We have babies. They color on walls for us.

I find that sad. You may disagree, saying “That’s the way it has to be Keith.” I don’t know that I would disagree with you. But I certainly wouldn’t agree with you. 

So what have I learned by eating a quesadilla alongside a six-year old?

It has encouraged me to think less about the sum, or the result, or the “right” way. It has encouraged me to believe in what we disbelieve in. It has encouraged me to spend more time with people who are creative, or odd, or ever better yet, weird. Abnormal or what is thought of as wrong is so much more interesting than what we all agree on.

Life lies at the edges.

But mostly, it has taught me that if I want my Hangman to wear a Kangol hat before he dies, then fuck it, he gets to wear a Kangol hat.

I remember driving 4 hours from Sioux Falls, SD to Fargo, ND late 2007 to see Bon Iver perform in a tiny, dark bar that was half full. I had decided to go after reading a short write-up that detailed what a grease fire his life had become, and how that led to the creation of the album For Emma, Forever Ago.

A third of the crowd was watching sports on two TVs behind the bar; another third was shooting pool or interacting with friends. So it was me and 30 other people, standing there, taking it all in. I never will forget that performance. It was like catching Pacino doing community theater before he landed roles in Scarface or The Godfather. You knew things would never be the same. They couldn’t be.

A year and a half later, Bon Iver is an indie icon. The band has toured relentlessly and with good reason, decided to make October 11^th’s performance at the Riverside Theater in Milwaukee its last. For awhile.

Radio Milwaukee broadcast the performance and is now streaming Bon Iver Live at the Riverside here.

P.S.  For those of you Bon Iver super fans (like me) who think you’ve heard all his songs, you haven’t. He covers The Outfield (I’m serious) during this set.

Months ago, I told you about Fun, or, the new incarnation of The Format.

First, a little background: Fun is fronted by Nate Reuss, former lead singer of the now defunct band The Format. If you lived in Phoenix in the mid 2000’s and were dialed into local music, you had them on repeat and often muttered “These guys are ridiculously amazing. Seriously.” They were the one of the hottest things to come out of AZ, besides, you know, the fucking sun.

Well, the band is knee-deep in its kickoff tour. I caught them in Houston when they opened for Manchester Orchestra (Audrye Sessions was also on the bill).

In between stops, Fun sat down for a studio performance at Paste. “The Gambler” is a pretty ( “I swear when I grow up,  I won’t just buy you a rose / I will buy the flower shop”), haunting (“We moved to Arizona to save our only son”) song that is amongst my list of top singles for 2009.

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Dear Michael,

I’ve stopped and started this letter to you eight different times. The first time I stopped because I found myself being too forgiving. The second time I stopped I found myself being too unforgiving, and so on. With my last attempt, I had formulated what I thought was a rational, thinking man’s response to all that has transpired, and then my dog Clementine jumped up onto the bed, licked my face, and rested her head on my keyboard.

And well, it’s not difficult to surmise the tone of the letter when she’s the editor.

I have an active imagination, and when I read the court documents detailing how the dogs under your care, if you can call it that, were tortured, I started to paint their reality. The terror they experienced overwhelms me to the point where I have to wipe my eyes, close them, shake my head like an Etch-a-Sketch and erase those thoughts from my mind.

What bothers me the most is that when I talk, my dogs Clementine and Simba search my eyes for answers. Their eyes dart back and forth as they yearn for meaning in what I say, or what I do. It kills me that the dogs you tortured searched your own eyes for the meaning behind your brutality and only found confusion and fright. 

The legal system uses the phrase “paid one’s debt to society” when a person is released from prison, so one could apply this to you. In fact, people have applied this you when arguing that you are free. Free to eat whatever you want. Free to watch whatever you want. Free to play for the Eagles. There is the opinion that you served your sentence and should be able to again chart your own course in life and play football. Legally speaking, this is accurate. You are absolved of judgment by the state and the federal government.

But some crimes are so heinous that judgment doesn’t end with the gavel. There are cases where society in addition to the government demands retribution. Yours is one of those crimes Sure, you may free be free legally, but we will incapacitate you publicly as long as we desire. My freedom allows me to do that, and anyone who tells me otherwise confuses legal sentencing with moral sentencing. The public does the latter. You have served your time with the prison system, but not with me. Not yet.

There is also the opinion that your crimes are so inherently evil that they should prevent you from certain activities, such as playing in the NFL. This argument is not a stretch. We take things away from people all the time, especially if they are felons. Society takes away jobs, the government takes away voting rights, and so on. As a company, the NFL certainly would not be setting precedent by disallowing you to continue employment.

I have two dogs and am tempted to share the sentiment of people who don’t want you to touch a football field, but I hate playing God. My beard’s not nearly long enough to start telling people how they can and cannot best provide for their families. You are a felon, but you are a felon with children. You are a human being, and I don’t feel entirely comfortable setting the limits to what that “being” consists of.

I think there is a middle ground here; some common space between “let him play” and “let him die.” We, as a society, just need to define that common ground. For me, it is this:

You tortured many dogs that lived. They have all been placed in homes now, and while I lament what they have been through, I celebrate what they will go through in homes filled with dog beds and table scraps.

It’s the ones that you tortured that died that give me pause. Those are the ones that make me bite my lip and fall into sadness. These are the ones that truly represent the sadistic nature of your dig fighting ring. I won’t go into greater detail describing that sadism because it’s sunny outside today and I’m in a good mood.

But the ones you killed are also ones that can redeem you, so pay attention. This is where the moral sentencing comes in. This is how you can make me feel better about allowing you to go about your life.

You know how many dogs in which you had a hand in killing. Tell me. Give me a number. Be honest with me.

Now, I want you to go out and save the lives of twice that many dogs. Millions are euthanized each year due to old age, demeanor or injury, or regretfully, lack of space. So, go to the county shelter in Philadelphia and find out what dogs will die that day due to lack of space. Save one of those dog’s lives. Then do it again. And again. And again. Start a website if you need to. Hell, I’ll help. Post the photos of the dogs whose lives you are saving. Tell me the story about a black lab you rescued who is now in a loving home in Philadelphia. Tell me the story about a 12-year-old shepherd mix you rescued because you wanted it to enjoy one more year of ear scratches.

Tell me those stories, and it will redefine your own.

There’s something to be said for lead singers of bands who look like they could also be serial killers in their down time. They are always really fucking good. John McCauley from Deer Tick certainly qualifies. I’m half wondering if he celebrated the release of Born on Flag Day by watching Silence of the Lambs and then kidnapping a few blondes in a creeper van while listening to Tom Petty.

I also wonder if he and Matthew Sweet get together and share creeper secrets:

John: “So I’m thinking of growing out my hair. Should I wear it in a pony tail?”

Matthew: “Absolutely not. That’s dorky, not creepy. You’ll look like an IT guy, or a tennis player.”

John: “Good call. No ponytail. What are your thoughts on the receding hairline and the mustache?”

Matthew: “Killer dude, pun intended.”

I have no idea how to classify Deer Tick’s sound. Grunge country seems fitting. I think if Kurt Cobain smoked a carton of Marlboro Reds while watching a CMT marathon on Merle Haggard and then recorded, it would probably sound something like McCauley

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I saw Audrye Sessions open for Fun and Manchester Orchestra a few weeks back in Houston. Halfway through the band’s set, I turned to a fellow fan:

Me: “They sound a bit like Radiohead.”

Fan: “Maybe, dude, but that’s saying a lot. I mean, they’re good, but fuck.”

Me: “No, I know. But there’s a little resemblance there. Maybe they’re not like Radiohead, but the poor man’s Radiohead.”

Fan: “Maybe, dude, but that’s still saying a lot. I mean, they’re good, but fuck.”

Me: “True. Maybe they’re like the homeless man’s Radiohead.”

Fan: “Sort of.”

Me: ‘What do you mean ‘sort of?’”

Fan: “Well, yeah, generally speaking, they sort of do. But on ‘Turn Me Off’, they do especially, but in a coked-up kind of way. Like Tom Yorke is in a hurry to finish a song.”

Me: “So Audrye Sessions is a coked-up, homeless man’s Radiohead?”

Fan: “Well, yeah.”

Me: “Is that good?”

Fan: “Good? That’s great.”

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Read Part 1 here

It didn’t.

He bought a treadmill, started running, and for a few weeks, his body held – like a beach home against a wretched wind and mounting floodwater.

He was running three miles every few days; then four, then five. I hung up the phone one day and thought to myself, “I should sign up for the half and run it with him. Or more appropriately, for him.”

A few days later, he called and broke the news:

“I’m done. For good.”

“With what?” I asked, knowing full well he was talking about running.

“With running. I’ve been in so much pain lately that I went to the doctor recently. He ordered me to stop running.”

“What?” I exclaimed. “Why?”

In true understated Minnesotan fashion, he replied, “Because I need a knee replacement.” If we would have been dining together, he may have added, “Pass the salt.”

I knew his knee would make or break his attempt to run the half. Twenty or so years earlier, he had major surgery on it and the cartilage was completely removed. Now, at 65, the bones in that knee were knocking into one another like bumper cars driven by teenagers who drank too much peppermint schnapps on prom night.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry dad.”

“Me too,” he responded.

He didn’t sound sad. Or disappointed. But I knew he was and is both. He keeps a lot to himself. He would never, ever cry over not being able to run again one last time. But he would and will reflect on it.

He will reflect on the fact that we never got the chance to run a marathon together. Not that we never ran a race. As a child, he would enter me into fun runs here and there. I remember crossing the finish line of a one-miler in my bright orange Sunkist t-shirt and white tube socks, gasping for breath, and falling into his arms.

Still, I think at different points in our lives, my father and I pictured us crossing the finish line of a marathon hand in hand, and that never happened. This is something I regret, and I am comfortable saying that. I don’t trust people who don’t like dogs; I don’t trust people who don’t admit failure, and I don’t trust people who say that they have no regrets.

But regret is also largely useless and wasteful. It’s one of those things that may be important to experience, but dangerous to hold onto. Call it a beautiful cactus under the setting sun.

I choose instead to hold onto my father, a brilliant man who no longer runs but will always be a runner – a father who I misunderstood for too long, liked for years, and started to love at 28.

I picture him untying his running shoes for the last time, placing them in box, and casually storing them next to a box full of Christmas ornaments and a bin of VHS tapes. To do anything more would be far too celebratory for a man who deserves a statue but who, under the dark of the night, would melt it down and use the metal for bath fixtures within the addition he is putting in at so-and-so’s house.

When my own wheels fall off 30 years from now, I will do the same. And when the time is right, I will open up both boxes, and jog down memory lane.