Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

My Mom is gone, at least the version of my Mom that we knew and loved. While her body lives and a life she just can’t seem to get a firm grasp on now transpires in the back yard of my office of all places, the Mom of my memories seems to have died, at least in spirit, when she could no longer be safe in her apartment 2 years ago. There’s life here, for sure, but most days it seems more like survival. As if the final tomorrow is simply defeated one more time each day that a tomorrow arrives.

Like my Mom it turns out that I will also be dying tomorrow; you will too. Again, like my Mom, and my Dad before her, we will probably just not die all the way all at once. This has prompted quite a lot of thought about death and dying, but more thought frankly about living. What part of living constitutes being more than just alive? What, and how much of “what” is necessary in a day to qualify as living. And as with my meditations over my Dad’s long, slow departure, is there such a thing as immortality?

My memory is a bit hazy on when exactly Mom started to slip. She’s been here in Cleveland for about 4 months now. A recent viral infection seems to have brought about another pretty big step down, especially since she insists on taking her oxygen tube off (which drops her O2 levels frighteningly low). When in town, which is most of the time, one of us typically drops in for at least an hour each day. While not a huge amount of time, this is dramatically more company than Mom had in the assisted care facility in Rhode Island. Of late she has spent more time in the “company” of Dad and old friends. Outreach from her oldest friends, be it a card or the odd phone call she manages to answer, seems to bring her the same kind of comfort Dad got from his friends’ visits once upon a time.

While immersed in this line of thought, so similar to when I was thus engaged with Dad, I returned to a very famous poem by Thomas Gray, “Elegy in a Country Graveyard.” We are each but mortals. Billionaire or barkeep, the vessels of our voyage will all come to rest as deeply, as empty. Born low or high we shall all be bourn aloft or below, our sails forever furled. Shod in buckles and bows, or like my Mother, in the blemished “seconds” bought at the local discounter Ann & Hope to save money she no longer needed to save, each will enter and exit barefoot.

Not one of us will be spared.

And what of immortality? There exists a path, at least of a sort. However shod, however adorned our vessel, the course of our travels is forever marked by their intersection with that of our fellow wayfarers. The power and character of that immortality depends on the depth and character of those encounters. That my Dad was not only in mind but also of a calmer mind knowing that his memory lived bares this out. As my Mom’s memory fades will she, like Dad, be of a calmer mind knowing that she, too, will be remembered?

Are you familiar with the Mexican tradition of the Day of the Dead? A nice introduction is the Disney movie “Coco”. Lovely story. Typically cool animation. Anyway, no one is truly dead if there is still a memory that they lived. As long as someone remembers you, you live forever. Who will remember you? How will you be remembered? As your vessel slows, becalmed in an ever shallower breeze, will you be accompanied? Have your travels brought other vessels closer, tenders still knotted? How large was your fleet? At the end will your vessel or your voyage be the memory? Your shoes or your footprints? Again, Thomas Gray:

“Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere,
Heav’n did a recompense as largely send:
He gave to Mis’ry all he had, a tear,
He gained from Heav’n (’twas all he wish’d) a friend.”

Out of view yet not out of mind, the Dad who left us in 2015 lives on through his connections. The Mom who left Rhode Island has connections. Family and friends who will remember her. Who she is now is tempered by the memory of who she was to all of us and them. A family’s memory is powerful, but its reach is limited, doomed to dim in the shadows of yesteryear cast on the lights of today. There is something about a friendship, though. The reach of friendship seems so much larger. Longer. Brighter, even. The memories contained within a long friendship seem to be inoculated against whatever disease may suppress the present.

Whatever immortality we may have lies not so much in ourselves but in those memories and the friendships that carry them. A typical New Year’s resolution revolves around the things one might do to lengthen your voyage. I imagine that I will make at least a few very concrete efforts toward that, as it seems I do every year. However, this year I think I will also consider immortality, making a conscious effort to concentrate on the other vessels in the fleet that are accompanying mine on our journeys together.

My single New Year’s resolution is to follow the example set by my parents, my in-laws, and those who remember them, to deepen the ties of the friendships that they may carry memory of my voyage, long after my vessel has reached its final shore.

I’ll see you next year…

There are words in any language that have been co-opted in a great conspiracy. Actually, they’ve been co-opted into every conspiracy, whether great or small. I’m talking, of course, about all of the hedge words like “may” or “might” or “could”, words that can be inserted into basically any statement and simultaneously present a point of view while distancing the writer or speaker from any responsibility for either that POV or the consequences of writing/stating it. You know what I mean. Simply take a look at the Sunday papers and read a headline or two. “The election may increase blankety-blank in thus and such.” “So-and-so said blabbity blah which could result in a decrease in the weinerschitzel index.” “We think CrossFit might cause a significant change in the daily usage of pitbull greenhouse gas effluent.” It’s the same with all of the bloviation about COVID-19 and the coronavirus pandemic. Nothing but “may” and “could” and “might” in the headlines and on SoMe. Stuff like that simply litters our information pipeline.

A defining characteristic of statements like these is that the exact opposite may also occur. Indeed, it is entirely possible that the obverse is actually more likely to occur. Accuracy of this sort is precisely not what the speaker or writer is interested in, though. No, what people who write or speak like this are interested in is the projection and proliferation of a worldview that likely won’t stand up to either data or reality. Even more so, they are doing this without regard to the consequences for those who may share the sentence with the slippery and slimy hedge words. The reality is that they typically mean some sort of harm to that person, institution or idea.

They just lack the courage to not only place their flag in the sand, but to also stand next to it, defend it, and face the consequences.

Come on. Anything COULD happen. There is certainly enough uncertainty in the world that any statement with “might, could, or may” in it would turn out to be accurate. The reality is that we also live in a probabilistic world in which data can be used to give a bit more guidance. In so doing we can put the fire to the feet of those who are so careless with their regard for the effect of these words on others and too cowardly to willingly step on the fire.

How many times have we read or heard someone look at a CrossFit WOD like Deadlift 1-1-1-1-1-1-1 and say: “CrossFit may be dangerous; it might cause injury in individuals who are lifting heavy weight.” A fact-based examination of this WOD would certainly acknowledge that injury is a possibility, but the more likely outcome is that “athletes who perform a full-body functional movement like the deadlift with proper technique with relatively high intensity will gain strength.” Will. Flag firmly planted. Data available to date shows that vaccination with any of the 3 vaccines available in the U.S. will reduce the likelihood of severe illness and death by 2  orders of magnitude. Not “may” or “could” but WILL.

Flag planted.

There most definitely IS a lesson here: statements with “may”, “could”, “might” and similar hedge words are a warning that you are reading or listening to someone who is either unsure of what they are stating, or that they are very sure that they can neither prove their thesis nor defend themselves if it is shown to be false. An agenda too often lurks behind these words, and it behooves us to look for that agenda whenever we are triggered by these words.

Sadly, there is no safe space in our connected world for us to escape this kind of slime.

While fooling around on social media I came across a post from a prominent Harvard economist about the American Dream. Now to be honest that’s not a phrase he used in his post, but that is precisely what he was talking about. He lamented the findings in a recent study from Georgetown University that evaluated whether academic achievement or existing family wealth was a better predictor of eventual economic success. https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/schooled2lose/  The study looked at demographic and academic data from publicly available sources for the period between 2002 and 2016. It concluded that existing family wealth was more important than acadeemic achievement in predicting rather modest income and wealth outcomes. https://1gyhoq479ufd3yna29x7ubjn-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/FR-Born_to_win-schooled_to_lose.pdf (See part 3).

While the finding over the period studied does not really surprise me all that much (although I’d love to see the raw data to see if it was cherry-picked to produce the outcome), there was a paucity of deeper inquiry in the downstream responses to the Harvard academic’s post and lament. Indeed, each post clearly either assumed or stated outright that this is, and has always been, the great stain on the American Dream. But is that actually true? Has preexisting family wealth always been more important than academic achievement in determining next generation financial success? Seems like a logical question to ask; our culture, indeed our national personality is deeply invested in the opposite outcome. And so I asked the obvious (to me) question: if this has not always been the case (my premise), at what point in U.S. history did the factor “flip”?

You can imagine the scorn that my question received and the barely concealed contempt with which those who responded held for both the question and the person asking it. But seriously, even if you take for certain the conclusion of the Georgetown study, our history is just filled with both micro and macro evidence that shows that academic achievement was the singular driver of next generation wealth for decades beginning no later than 1920. You need look no further than the GI Bill post-WWII and the explosion of the America’s middle class that followed to see the evidence that family wealth was not the predominant driver. Heck, there just weren’t that many upper middle class families in the U.S. prior to the late 1970’s, let alone truly wealth families. The Doughboys using the GI Bill didn’t get their nickname because they were rolling in it.

Unfortunately companion studies looking at this question during earlier times are proving rather difficult to find. In a right and just world I could go look at decade vs. decade analyses to see if my sense that the traditional notion of the American Dream (do well in school, do better in life) was indeed a real thing. We all know that such a scenario is the best possible one in that we could head off charges of bias, etc. While I will continue to search for such research, allow me to present a couple of examples of why I believe that there was a time when our traditional notion of the American Dream did, in fact, exist, when I think it may have “flipped”, and a hypothesis to explain why.

Absent formal data all we have are stories. One hopes that the stories you choose to tell are indicative of more than just one life’s experience. In this case clearly I feel this is true. My thesis starts where it should, at home, in the history of my own family. In my father’s story. Mind you, this is not only anecdotal, this is coming to you in the classic tradition of oral history passed down through inter-generational story telling. Is it all true? Meh, define “true”. It’s true enough for both our family and for the purpose of placing the American Dream along a timeline. Like most family history it is true in spirit, true in context. The details may just be a tiny bit fuzzy, especially now that all of the principals are gone.

My Dad was a classic child of the Depression, a “cardboard in the shoes” urban (as opposed to “Grapes of Wrath” rural) version. The children of the working poor (and certainly those of the unemployed) rarely got a new pair of shoes unless they’d drastically outgrown the pair they were wearing. If one should encounter the misfortune of a hole in the sole of the shoe one did not replace or resole the shoe, one simply put a piece of cardboard inside the shoe under the footbed. Of course this required a steady supply of cardboard outside of the Dust Bowl, since even the most trivial rain storm was enough to necessitate another “patch”.

Dad was the fourth of 6 children, smack in the middle of the family. I never knew my grandmother, Dad’s Mom. She passed away (we think from Rheumatic Fever) when Dad was around 12.  Some time soon after my grandfather remarried; Kay had at least 4 children of her own to add to the mix. While Grampa White was always employed there is pretty solid evidence that he struggled with the bottle. Payday always seemed a bit more spare than his income should have made it according to family lore; lots of temptation on the walk home. Still, even though it was often nothing more than a ketchup sandwich, none of the kids in the White house ever talked about being hungry.

This being the 30’s and 40’s the children of the working class were placed in the “trades track” in school, my Dad included. The oldest in the family, my Godfather Uncle Larry, graduated from Waltham High and went directly into the Army. He would be on a ship ready to participate in the invasion of Japan when the bombs landed. Going to college was never a consideration for him; not a single teacher was said to have even broached the subject. Dad’s twin older sisters were expected to learn the skills of running a household to prepare to marry and raise the next generation. They, too, gave not a moment’s thought to college.

But Dad was apparently different, talented enough to catch the attention of several teachers early in either high school or junior high. One teacher in particular, Miss Nolan, is said to have literally plucked him out of the trades track and demanded that he be placed in college prep. From what we know from stories told by aunts and uncles Dad thrived in class, and like my Uncle Larry he was a star athlete as well. Armed with his diploma and wearing a pair of new shoes purchased by Miss Nolan for graduation, Dad headed off to the University of New Hampshire on a football half scholarship.

Things get a little fuzzy here to be honest. The mythical version of what happens next goes like this: Dad did great in football, was holding his own in class, but a half scholarship didn’t provide enough support for a kid from a working poor background to pay for school, room and board. Legend has it that Dad essentially starved out of UNH and joined the Army rather than head back to Waltham with his tail between his legs, not able to make it as a college boy. My Mom tells a different story. In her version Dad simply partied his way out of New Hampshire, spending all of his post-football time drinking beer with his buddies.

I like the family lore version way better.

No matter, though. At least as far as proving my point about the American Dream. Dad entered the Army and went on to serve in the Korean Conflict. Battle time promotions come quickly during wars. When he mustered out after his 3 or 4 year hitch (the details on that are a bit fuzzy, too) he had risen from E1 (buck private) to E6 (Staff Sergeant). Now funded by the GI Bill and another half football scholarship he headed off the the University of Vermont to finish the challenge he’d started with Miss Nolan’s help. Those times were still pretty tough. In order to get enough to eat after football season’s training tables were no longer available Dad worked as a short order cook: two squares and a small wage per shift. As a junior and a senior he was the house manager at his fraternity. Pay? Room and board. Not one iota of wealth in his back story.

You know where this is heading. Mom and Dad were married after graduation and they moved to a tiny town in central Mass to begin life together. Dad and a bunch of buddies trucked themselves off to Springfield and American International College. They put themselves through business school. Yup. That’s right. Not only was Dad the only one in his blended family to graduate from college, he also had an MBA. I should note that college was such an unthinkable path for kids from working families that my Dad’s younger brother turned down a scholarship to Harvard despite my Dad’s pleas from Korea. My uncle died a bitter man, resentful of every college kid who joined the company where he worked and become his boss despite my uncle’s superior intellect.

So what happened to my Dad? Well, this is America in the 60’s and the 70’s. My Dad made it. He ended up buying the company he was running, employing at its peak 800 people and setting himself and Mom up to be comfortable even when the strong U.S. dollar of the late 80’s destroyed the entire domestic industry in which he worked. Forced out of the company he owned by an ambitious banker with only ~10% of his loan remaining Dad essentially retired at 58 after raising 4 college grads and sharing parts of his fortune with his siblings and their families.

What’s the point? Simple. It was academic achievement that brought my Dad his financial successes. His siblings lived lives that were slightly better than my Grandfather. My Dad soared. More than that, he was not unique. Not even a little bit. Thousands of working class kids rose to prominence and acquired wealth accessed by attending and excelling in college. Somewhere there is a WSJ article that cataloged the colleges attended by Fortune 500 CEO’s in the 90′ and 00’s. The number one Alma Mater was not Harvard or Yale, not Stanford or MIT, but Wisconsin. Indeed, if memory serves only a single digit percentage of those CEO’s had attended the playground colleges of the wealthy.

No, my Dad was typical of those who grew up during the Depression and went on to acquire wealth. Some how, some way they found themselves in college. This, not preexisting family wealth, was the more important factor driving financial success. Into the 1980’s at least wealth seems not to be the most important factor. It was time when a “cardboard in the shoes kid” could rise through academic achievement.

Next: Post-Baby Boom Academic Achievement in the South.

Today, Father’s Day, my Dad would have been 89. I think of him often, as I do my Father-in-Law who passed away in 2017. Here is what I wrote after visiting my Dad on Father’s Day, the last time I visited him for his Birthday, re-printed as I’ve done each year since:

My siblings and I only need to remember one weekend each year when it comes to celebrating my Dad. His birthday almost always falls within a day or two of Father’s Day. So it was that I found myself in Rhode Island the past couple of days, in the company of my Mom and a guy masquerading as my Dad, a guy who was very curious about the new fella who’d dropped by for a visit.

Getting old is not for sissies, my friends.

Somewhere inside, deep inside, there’s still some of my Dad in the jumbled up connections of his mind, carried by the body that failed him in such spectacular fashion 2 ½ years ago. Dad is extremely intelligent, the only family member in his generation to have gone to college. Quite the athlete, he used football and the GI Bill to pay for school. Like so many in his generation he then worked, raised a family, and put himself through grad school. He won his club championship in golf twice at the ages of 50 and 60. No typo. Beat the reigning RI State Amateur champ on his home course for the first one.

As we sat on the porch of his house overlooking the par 5  14^th hole, I had an ever so brief visit from that guy. From my Dad. Like a citizen of Brigadoon he came slowly through the mist of his mind to join me for a bit. We’d always bonded over golf. My brother and I never turned down an invitation to join him on the course, either as partners or as caddies for him and his buddies. It was quite a privilege to do either; my Dad’s most elemental essence was expressed on the golf course.

A light breeze was blowing through the forest in the back yard just beyond the rough. We chuckled at the golfers who failed to take the wind into consideration, sheepishly trying to sneak into our yard to retrieve their out-of-bounds second shot. Dad talked about caddying as a kid in the Depression. We both noted the absence of caddies as the foursomes passed in and out of view. It was really very nice.

I quite like the Dad of my adulthood. Quick to smile, slow to anger, unfailingly loyal and kind. It’s hard to imagine now how distant he was when I was a boy, his friendship as an adult is so easy. I’m not sure how long we sat there to be honest, nor when I noticed that he was slipping away. As surely as the village of Brigadoon disappears, the mist had returned to claim him. I got up, walked over to his chair, held his hand and gave him a kiss. I wished him a Happy Birthday and a Happy Father’s Day, hoping that I’d made it on time. That he was still there. That he knew it was me, Darrell, his oldest child. I told him I loved him.

He smiled and gave my hand a little pat as he disappeared into the mist.

I really miss my Dad.

Only twice in my life have I ever noticed that I was different. That I was, or could be identified, as “other”. Now to be sure, at neither time did this realization make me uncomfortable. That’s probably because I was in a relatively familiar setting, just among a rather homogenous group of people where I was the guy who stood out. Being the only person in church or on the basketball court who is NOT of color was for me, a non-large very white male, more a case of “huh, that’s different” than a case of ” be on guard”.

More than anything else, that is likely part of the core of what is meant when we hear talk of “white privilege”: I am only at risk if I actually do something wrong.

Sitting here in suburbia, in middle-age, it’s instructive to look back at how I’ve arrived at such a place. A place where I always feel like I could belong no matter where my place takes me. The town of my earliest youth is probably most responsible for this. Southbridge was a dying mill town in Central Massachusetts, although none of us kids new it was dying at the time. Settled initially by French-Canadien ex-pats, a second wave of migration from Puerto Rico occurred before I went to grade school. 10 or 15 percent of my classmates were children of Puerto Rican immigrants, but I knew them only as kids in school or teammates on the various fields of our youth. We fought side-by-side 100 times more often than we ever fought facing each other. Sure, they were different. Their grandparents spoke Spanish while most of ours spoke French.

Home since childhood has been driven more by economics than any other factor; the job has chosen the towns.  Most of my life since then has been lived in worlds that roughly track the Southbridge of my youth, roughly 80% White/20% Black or Brown. People of color were either there when I arrived (and so belonged as much as I), or arrived the same way I did (and so belonged as much as I). At this point I should confess that I’ve never given too very much thought to the color mix of my surroundings. This may also constitute “white privilege” I suppose, the privilege of not needing to be aware of color at all. What makes that kind of funny is that until the very last major move of my life, each time I’ve moved to a new place, many people assumed that I was Black prior to my arrival. Darrell White the presumably Black football player arriving at a new high school or at college? Nope. Short, skinny white guy. Darrell White the first ever Black med student or Black resident at my respective schools? No again. Still, short skinny white guy. Only my voice is 6’5″, and with no accent whatsoever my voice is colorless.

How about those two instances where I did feel different, in church and on the basketball court? In church it was mostly humorous since the other congregants made such a huge effort to make me feel welcome. Indeed, as the only White family among the churchgoers at the Black Baptist church one Christmas it was more than comical when the pastor, my friend the Rev. Mel Woodard, introduced us from the altar (over my gentle objection) to the congregation. “Please welcome The Whites!” With a twinkle in her eye “Lovely Daughter” leaned over to me in the pew: “Duh!” No, other than the obvious pointed out by Megan, in that setting the group made sure that only the most superficial differences existed for me in that room. I would only be “other” if I chose to be.

The basketball court just down the street from Wills Eye was a bit of a different matter, and because of that more instructive when examined through the magnification of the retrospectometer. The rules of pick-up ball are clear, and they are largely consistent in every park in America. There’s a line-up of who has “next”, and if you are not a regular you just call “next”, wait at the end of the line, and hope that you can assemble enough talent on your team to last more than one game. Here, like in church with Mel, mine was almost the only White face, but here I was “other” in every sense of the word. My turn as “next” kept getting lost on the list, the wait for that one game almost 2 hours before one of the park leaders acknowledged the tiny injustice and put my team on the court simply by joining us as our fifth guy. The other White guy was on the team, of course, and he was a stud baller. I was a bit to the right of average for that park; that game was the first time in my life when I was more conscious of what my game looked like than how I was playing. Who do I pass to? Do I take the open shot?

We lost the game, of course. Not so much because of anything I did or didn’t do during the game as that the other team had Joe “Jelly Bean” Bryant and no one could stop him (NBA vet, pretty decent player; his son Kobe had quite a run in the NBA). In the comfort of not needing to be the least bit introspective, of not needing to learn anything at all from that morning, all I got until these past weeks from my encounter with Philadelphia inner city hoops was pissed off that I only got a single run after waiting two hours for my “next”. It’s only now as I look back that I realize my sense of being scrutinized, of being conscious of how I looked while playing rather than just playing, needing to be much, much better than the other “average” ballers there that day because I was White. This lack of perspective in the moment at hand is also likely an example of White privilege.

The events–church, a pick-up basketball game–are trivial, but the fall-out, however long in coming, is not. The fact that it is now 35 years since my non-battle with Kobe’s dad and I am just now aware of how I felt may be part of what is called “White privilege”, but moments like this are to be encouraged however long they are in coming, don’t you think? My oldest friends of color, roommates and groomsmen, as well as friends of more recent vintage will likely welcome this sense with little more than a playful “what took you so long” wink, and begin the dialogue. They are, to a man, kind and generous people. The Rev. Woodard’s congregants didn’t even need the comfort and cover of friendship to offer a wink (and in their collective case, countless hugs), so aware were they of how it feels to be “other” until proven otherwise.

Sympathy, my friends, is not enough. Sympathy is situational and episodic, and is therefore also transient. After all, who among us but the most hardened bigots or the most unreachable psychopaths cannot find sympathy for the family of the man killed while instinctively reaching for his wallet, or the families of the officers gunned down while on duty? No, sympathy is not enough because it is only something that we feel, and not something that we are, or even choose to be. Empathy is the magic elixir because empathy cannot be set aside. Empathy is to feel with, not simply to feel for, because it is a part of who we are. But empathy is hard, and empathy takes time. No one would wish the loss of a loved one on another in order to feel “with”. Sometimes empathy is little more than a spark, and sometimes that spark is so small that it goes unnoticed or ignored.

There is a bridge, though, between sympathy and empathy, and it is understanding. Like a physical bridge one must look to the other side and seek to be there. Like any bridge one must have the faith that over the crest in the middle, beyond the road you can see, there lies ahead not a gap through which you will plummet to a certain doom, but a clear path to the other side. The trip may be a difficult one, but as with all trips, it will pass much more easily if in the company of others who either seek to understand as well, or better yet, others who already do. Like all those men and women who came up to me in church and hugged me after Mel’s introduction. Like the guy at the park who joined my team, made sure I got “next”, and told me to come back for a run the next Saturday.

Like my old friends Sheldon and Steve, Rasesh and Mel, as well as newer friends like my colleague Quentin. They will hold my hand and guide me as I traverse the bridge of understanding.

Sunday musings…

Oh my.

This morning my first outside interaction was a quick note from one of my sons: “CrossFit shit storm”. Though it has been several years since I have had any meaningful association with official CrossFit I did a quick perusal of social media and up popped the story. CrossFit founder and CEO Greg Glassman had replied to an Instagram post about the death of George Floyd and the public health implications of systemic racism with a rather flippant statement combining the two great mega-issues before us today: COVID-19 and the national unrest that has followed Mr. Floyd’s death at the hands of a police officer. Already under fire for not “adequately” publicly responding to the devastating economic effects of the corona virus lockdowns on CrossFit Affiliate gyms, Coach Glassman essentially ladled accelerant on the flames.

Like so many things “CrossFit” over the years, this episode has multiple layers that touch on much more than what we see on the surface. My own CrossFit journey began in 2005, a time in which CF was little more than a tiny underground movement with a equally tiny group of nearly underground fitness “rebels” fighting what felt like a righteous enemy in the entrenched fitness (and nutrition) community, led by a brash iconoclast who reveled in conflict. Conflict that he routinely initiated, mind you. While I have never been employed by CrossFit, Inc. in any manner I was certainly an “insider”, comfortable in the “halls” of CF HQ as well as in the spaces CrossFitters call Boxes, CrossFit Gyms. My role such as it may have been, was to speak as a friendly fellow traveler to those in the CF community. Kind of a “Goodwill Ambassador” to both insiders and outsiders alike.  It was a role that I created, one that was by turns encouraged and barely tolerated by Mr. Glassman and others in HQ, until it wasn’t. A few years ago it was time to step away.

It’s been quite awhile since “CrossFit” has been mentioned in Sunday musings or Random Thoughts. Why now? As a longtime participant and observer who now has literally nothing invested in anything CrossFit (with the exception of several life-long friendships made in my earliest years there) I thought I might add a bit of perspective to what is happening at the moment for the benefit of those who are relatively new to the movement and the business known collectively as CrossFit. In particular I am hopeful that this perspective will be helpful to my fellow physicians, especially those who have recently come to the CrossFit world as part of their personal battle on the front lines of healthcare, fighting one person at a time to keep their patients alive and healthy. Again please note that I am speaking for myself; I do not speak on behalf of CrossFit, Inc.

In order to begin to understand how to interpret this week’s events in the CrossFit world one must first understand and acknowledge that “CrossFit” is not an omnibus term that means or encompasses one single thing. Rather, CrossFit is and has always been three interrelated entities. It is first, and foremost, a fitness methodology. “Constantly varied functional movements performed at relatively high intensity” designed to enhance and increase fitness. “Fitness” in the CrossFit sense is further defined as “work capacity across broad time and modal domains”: how far can you move how much, how fast. Countless trees have been sacrificed and electrons unleashed in debating whether there is anything unique, or even new, about the first part, the methodology. I’ve long counted myself in the camp that the “how” of CrossFit the system is indeed different and new; very smart, kind and considerate people both agree and disagree with me on that, which is more than OK.

Defining fitness was arguably a true “first”, and in so doing Mr. Glassman created a platform of a sort. More than that, by defining fitness CrossFit created a way that fitness might be measured. The CrossFit “Curve” of fitness attributes theoretically gives us the opportunity to measure an individual’s level of fitness by calculating the “area under the curve”. While this has proven to be more challenging than originally thought, this measurement gave birth to the second of the three distinct entities under the CrossFit umbrella: The Sport of Fitness. If you can measure something you can turn it into a competition. With what can only be described as a barbecue at which a bunch of folks engaged in friendly games from the gym was born what we’ve come to know as The CrossFit Games (note: I foolishly turned down a personal invitation to attend, thereby missing what is arguably the most pure expression of the “CrossFit Community” before or since).

While my view of the Games and the “Gamesification” of CrossFit was originally quite contrarian (conventional stance: the Games did more to bring awareness to CF than anything before or since), it was clear to me that the emphasis on competition drove CF away from  what was clearly its early drive to improve health. Indeed, the loud introduction of the CrossFit definition of health (Fitness over time) was drowned out by all things “Games”. As far back as 2010 I publicly (here on my blog) and privately encouraged a re-dedication to the kind of fitness and health discussions and emphasis seen on the CrossFit Forum in the earlier days of CrossFit. The introduction of CrossFit for Health along with a seminar program specifically aimed at practicing physicians was a welcome pivot by CrossFit, Inc. back to its roots.

Which brings us to the third leg of the three-legged stool that is “CrossFit”: CrossFit, the business. CrossFit, Inc. is a combination of an educational business and an affiliate business in which independent gym owners pay a fee to use the “CrossFit” banner as a part of their brand. In return for a relatively modest fee (in comparison with franchise fees) a CrossFit affiliate is enabled to operate with rather minimal rules (in comparison with the franchise model) regarding the actual practice of “CrossFit” the fitness modality. CrossFit the business is a one-man shop when it comes to corporate direction. The face of CrossFit was, is, and will be Greg Glassman until such time as he decides otherwise.

Nothing that transpired this week is new or unique. Mr. Glassman marches to his own drum. More than that, once he has chosen his particular beat he pounds that drum loudly, regardless of how his audience responds. On occasion even his good intentions are drowned out by his drumming; it is often tone deaf and off-key, (if asked my bet is that he truly felt he was being supportive of protesters against racism). Many in the CrossFit universe feel that Mr. Glassman’s views on the national protests about racism and police brutality are flat-out wrong. Disappointment and anger are the public sentiments. A wish to separate from CrossFit expressed. This has happened before, albeit on issues much less global and at times when CrossFit was much tinier in all ways. Mr. Glassman is nothing if not consistent. When his views run counter to prevailing views he has typically doubled down rather than withdraw. I have never seen him back down, no matter how tiny the corner that he has backed into may become. Expecting anything different this week is as fruitful as expecting the sunrise to hold off because you got to bed a bit later than usual and need a few more hours of sleep.

And so, whither CrossFit? It is not my place to suggest to CrossFit, Inc. how it should proceed. It never was. Nor is it my place to suggest to any of you who might read my drivel how you should respond to what comes from Mr. Glassman or CrossFit, Inc. CrossFit, and Mr. Glassman, will address the issue of systemic racism and associated mistreatment of Black Americans by a faction of the police force, or they won’t. Both are incomprehensible to me, a middle-aged white man who has acknowledged (and written) about a lifetime free of the concerns of racism and the likelihood of harm at the hands of a police officer. Like white bread I am of no particular distinction in the eyes of those who would judge one by how one looks. I am bland; I don’t register. I can not empathize, I can only be as sympathetic as possible. And so, like most of White America I struggle with how to actionably express my dismay at such things. To in some way give not lip service but be of real, actionable service in the hard work necessary to effect change here.

As for CrossFit, my views on the gamesification of CrossFit (not a great thing) and the recent pivot back to emphasizing health (a good thing) have been consistent over many years now. CrossFit, the methodology is still, when followed according to its original spirit and intent (and perhaps even better,  how it has evolved in the hands of several OG’s no longer affiliated with CF), the best overall fitness program I have encountered in a lifetime of fitness and athletics. This is the part that I do want to suggest. Constantly varied functional movements performed at relatively high intensity following the progression of form, then consistency, and then intensity, is still transformative, especially if it is accompanied by a diet low in processed foods and sugar, also encouraged by the CrossFit modality. This is separate, and separable, from the business of CrossFit and the public (and private) missives of the founder and CEO of CrossFit, Inc.

Understanding what “CrossFit” is will hopefully assist you in evaluating what it means to you and how you will choose to interact with all three of the very distinct entities that in combination constitute “CrossFit”. One can simultaneously, honorably, both do and disavow “CrossFit”.

I’ll see you next week…

St. bingo of the Sweaty Angel (ret.)

“I” before “E” except after “C” and when sounding like “A” as in neighbor or weigh, and on weekends and holidays and throughout May, and you’ll always be wrong no matter what you say!!” –Brian Regan

Not surprisingly this came to mind as Beth and I were talking about the best, or right, or acceptable way to start to resume life outside of our houses. How to return to the office, go to the grocery store, visit a family member or a friend. Fantastically superistically smart people who spend their entire lives thinking about this kind of stuff haven’t been able to find even the tiniest kernel of agreement, and yet we poor intellectual peasants are out here picking at their intellectual crumbs as we try to do the right thing. Go out/stay in? Hug the grandchild or wave? Mask/no mask? You get the idea.

The issue of testing is a great example of the conundrum faced by both the intelligentsia and the hoi polloi. It’s not even as easy as test or don’t test. Nah, that’d be altogether too easy. You gotta decide which test. Do you have the virus now? 4, 5, maybe 6 tests to choose from, all of which are substandard when it comes to accuracy in a normal world. Which one do you choose? How many times must you be tested? How long between? Have you ever had the virus? Meh, same issues. All but the most recently pseudo-approved tests in both categories take days to return a result. Does it really matter, that result, after it’s been a couple or a few days? Is it better to choose a slightly less accurate test in order to get the result within minutes, or wait for a slightly more accurate result arriving soon come? Now decide if you should venture out based on your decision.

See? No matter what you do you’re wrong.

We have all lost sight, at least a super majority of our government officials and many of our non-governmental experts have lost sight, of what “flatten the curve” was meant to do. It all made so much more sense, and the resulting overshoot on stuff like saving PPE for the tip of the spear workers was more tolerable, when we had a clear mandate that could be graphed accurately: prevent the surge of infected individuals from flowing over the level at which our acute care facilities would run out of space and materials necessary to provide the highest levels of care. Easy. Easy to be right. There were no extrapolations necessary to see if you were succeeding; you used real data. The line below which you succeeded was a known number: ICU beds + respirators. Nowhere in the U.S. have we seen the tragedies of Lombardy where doctors had to decide who made it into the ICU and who did not. We saw the curve, we understood the curve, and we successfully flattened the curve.

So what’s been lost? It’s a little more difficult to understand the concept of the AREA under the curve. How many people either get sick with the virus or die from the virus. Very few of our experts showed the far right side of their graphs. Fewer still gave any explanation regarding the dirty little secret of “flattening the curve”: all you are doing is pushing out the infections and resultant deaths from the virus. Pushing them out further in time. Flattening the curve simply means that you are not having EXCESS deaths caused by insufficient acute care availability in an overwhelmed  system. Without either a vaccine to prevent infection or a medication that treats the virus such that people don’t die, the same absolute number of people will eventually become infected, same number of people will become sick, and the same number of people will die.

Let me say that again so that it is clear: flattening the curve saves only those excess lives lost to insufficient hospital resources during a surge. Over time it does not save lives unless a vaccine and/or treatment arises.

Once again, no matter what you do, just like “I” before “E”, if you persist in flattening the curve edicts you are wrong unless you have a hard arrival date for a vaccine or a treatment/cure. You see, lockdown policies such as those in place in much of the world now are not entirely benign when it comes to health. Or death. Lockdown policies that mandate isolation, especially those that make it difficult to take care of what would otherwise be well-controlled chronic medical problems, actually cause EXCESS deaths. How many? The cold reality is that not a single model is capable to telling us that. Or at least telling us with enough degree of certainty and accuracy that we could titrate the “flattening” policies in such a way that the EXCESS deaths caused by the lockdown are more tolerable to a society than the excess deaths caused by system overload. No flattening of the curve? Excess deaths from system overload. Extend the curve? Excess deaths caused by solitude, reduced access to typical medical care, and the well-known health effects of an economic recession or depression.

Are the experts saving lives by insisting on these draconian lockdown policies across the country? Sure. Today. They are saving the lives of those who would not survive a viral infection should they become infected today. Are these lives that will ultimately be saved from being ended by the virus entirely? As of today the answer is a resounding “No” despite the earnest pleas and declarations from the various governmental pulpits. Absent a vaccine or a treatment/cure the math is as inescapable as math can be: the area under the curve, flattened or not, remains the same if you look far enough to the right. Deaths from the virus will be equal over time.

The REAL curve, the one we’ve yet to see and the one we are unlikely to see from those same pulpits, is one that adds the deaths from the virus to the excess deaths caused by the lockdown policies. Preventable deaths from untreated or inadequately treated cardiac disease or cancer for example.  That curve will show that no matter what you do, at home or behind the desk where you sign the lockdown edict, you will be wrong. That’s what makes this all so discouraging for me. What makes it all so dark. You can’t be right. Like “I” before “, be it May or just any old today, no matter what you do you’ll be wrong. Literally the only thing that changes that is a vaccine or a cure, two highly elusive solutions, the  achievement of which historically takes years, not months. Only then does the curve flatten to zero. Only then can we say that lives in the absolute have been saved.

There is only one thing left now, and that is a vaccine or a cure. Whatever light remains in the shadow of the virus, it exists here. Will it be months as we’ve been told? Will this virus fall to a vaccine in months where prior scourges took years to defeat (HIV), while we still await victory over others (Ebola)?  We must all pray that in this one single instance the people who are leading us are not wrong. For if they are wrong, if the area under the curve is the same no matter what shape the curve takes, it will upon the souls of our Government, our elected and appointed leaders, that each excess lockdown death will weigh.

“I” before “E” as directed by “G” means that the weight of being right falls on them, not on you or me.

Sunday musings…

1) Lockdown 1. One of my annual meetings, some 15,000 typically in attendance. Cancelled weeks ago. Somehow they managed to transition the whole shebang to a virtual setup. How’d it go? No idea. After 8+ weeks of nothing but online Zoom-type “meetings” I just couldn’t make myself log on to yet another one no matter how many friends were watching.

Sasha took me for a walk instead.

2) Lockdown 2. “[F]acts and data are independent of your credentials.” Aaron Ginn

Some of the most educational (and educated) pieces on the corona virus have been published by a few of my ophthalmology colleagues. You read that right; the so-called “eye dentists” have done excellent work both fishing out interesting ideas for treatment and testing and assimilating available information to form some sort of coherent whole.

You may remember that the first doctor to sound the alarm in China was an ophthalmologist.

The point? There are all kinds of degreed and pedigreed experts who have been belittling and lambasting very smart people outside of their little professional circles for having the audacity to opine on facts that are available to anyone to parse. The possession of a degree or an appointment does not confer upon you an exclusive right to set policy, or advise those who set policy, in your area of study. It certainly doesn’t inoculate you from having your conclusions questioned by other smart folks who may see something different in the data.

Data are what they are. Ideas sprout from data. It is those ideas that should be addressed, not who it may be who proposes them. Lofty credentials do not entitle one to an exclusive on the ideas.

3) Leadership. Have you been watching the  epic 10-part series on the 6th NBA championship won by the Michael Jordan/Scottie Pippin Bulls? It’s fascinating for dozens of reasons, none the least of which is the insight we have gained into the leadership style of Jordan. MJ comes across in episodes 7 and 8 as, there’s really no way around this, kind of a jerk. He bullies, berates and belittles his teammates, pushing and pulling them to heights most of them were wholly unaware that they might reach. No one, it seems, was immune from his attacks, though they took on terrifically different forms when applied to different teammates.

We’ve seen this type of leadership before in otherwise lauded and revered leaders. Steve Jobs comes instantly to mind. Jobs was infamous for how badly he treated subordinates at all levels. His impatience with underlings who failed to deliver was matched only by the vigor and venom with which he made his displeasure known. Now you could surely say that Jordan spent his career in a perpetual zero sum setting; winning was the only acceptable outcome and there would only ever be one winner. Jobs, it should be noted treated every market his company entered as if it, too, was a zero sum game. It wasn’t enough to simply succeed, to be profitable. Nope. The goal was to win so completely that the competition left the game.

Was Jobs an asshole? During his career was Jordan? I have to admit that I simply don’t know enough about the rest of Job’s life, how he treated people who were not in his chain of command, to opine of his overall asshole quotient (though it is rather common knowledge that he was quite unkind to his daughter from his first marriage). Jordan, too, was private enough that one can’t really say what his non-winner life was like. Did he treat Bulls staffers (other than the GM) better than his teammates? The guy who parked his cars, did the laundry in the locker room, mopped the gym floor? If he did does that lower his asshole quotient? There are some who say that it was the naming of Bill Cartwright as co-captain that catalysed the dynasty. Does a toxic leader need a consoler to be effective?

One thing you can say about MJ and his leadership style is that there was no subterfuge involved.

4) Unlocked. We finally cracked. Just a tiny bit, but crack we did. Not being able to force myself to log on to a national meeting with my peers was the first little leak in the dyke. A couple of videos of the grandchildren we usually see several times a week and hadn’t for 6 or 7 days, the announcement that our closest friends here in town were moving. Yet another series of announcements that our “new normal” was going to be around for 18-24 months. It all just became too much. One tiny bit of good news–it turns out that asthma is not the high risk problem after extensive research–and we took stock of what it would mean to live for another year or two without a vaccine. In the end one must accept that up to 50% of our nation will contract the virus (though medical technology will inevitably reduce the % of people who die because of that).

Without putting others at risk the question one must now ask is what part of your life, which of your loved ones can you accept the risk of seeing because not seeing them is more a case of not dying rather than living?

All around us similar cracks are opening up for similar reasons. Mind you, this is not “we love to go out to dinner” so we’re putting ourselves out there to visit our favorite restaurants. No, as much as I pine for Veal Picatta served with a side of smiling snark on “Tina Tuesday” at one of our locals, this is much more personal. As close to need as can be. This is about seeing our children and their spouses, even if it’s 6 feet away, instead of viewing them on FaceTime. It’s a running, jumping hug from my Man Cub and a kiss on the cheek from his sister the Pipsqueak. A very special bottle of wine, 22 years in the waiting, shared across a ludicrously huge table for only four people, but around a real table pouring from the same bottle with cherished friends. No hugs or handshake there, but THERE.

There is an energy that exists in love extended and received in person, even if in person means 6 feet apart, maybe even a mask or face shield. That energy is real, and at some point being walled off from that energy is to be walled off from what it means to be alive. In no way am I telling anyone what it means for them to feel alive. It would be unforgivably presumptuous to tell anyone that they cannot live behind an impenetrable curtain of seclusion, or which of their people they can accept as so essential to living that being with them may be the source of acquiring the virus.

We may escape an interminable pandemic. A vaccine may be on the way along with all of the other blessings we each receive. Until then we must accept that we each have a responsibility to protect our fellow travelers from whatever risk we might personally represent. For ourselves we will all eventually need to come to terms with what it means for us to be living, and who it is we need to have along with us as we do.

Anyone who knows me well knows that one of my very favorite drinks is called “The Last Word”. It’s also a huge source of frustration because so few bars, however hifalutin and pretentious, can make a decent one. But this is not an essay on drinking. Far from it. “The Last Word” is the running series on the last page of each issue of Men’s Journal in which an older male celebrity is asked to answer a series of questions about life. There’s nothing particularly unique or imaginative about either the endeavor or the questions asked. Still, it makes me think, and I thought it might be a fun thing for us to think about together.

Herewith, the most frequently asked questions. I’ll offer up my own answers in a follow-up post. Perhaps you might answer either here in the comments, on Facebook, or somewhere else I might find you.

Who were your heroes growing up?

What is the best advice you ever received and from whom?

Who had the biggest influence on you when you were younger?

Was there a life-changing book you read? Movie you saw? Adventure you had?

What is the trait you most admire in other people? Least admire?

How should one handle getting older (if you are, indeed, older)?

How should one handle criticism?

If you could select the guests for your dream dinner party, attendees living or dead, who would you invite?

Do you have any advice you’d like to have given to your younger self?

How do you want to be remembered?

There’s a whole lotta ground you could cover there. Pick a few or pick ’em all. No rules here, just an opportunity to take a little stock, draw a few lines in the sand, look both forward and back. Write it down somewhere I might see it. Or not. Incorrigible naval-gazing bloviators like yours truly might turn each question into a an essay of its own, filling pages in the process. The poets among us will tell epic tales using fewer word than a Haiku.

That’s all part of the fun, eh?

In a gentler time Beth and I were out to dinner with another couple. Mutual friends came up in conversation. They’d moved away a couple of years prior. Moved a couple of times, actually. “Have you heard from so-and-so?” “No. You?” “Uh uh.” “Huh. That’s funny. We thought maybe it was just us.” “Yah, I call every now and again. Text every so often. Crickets.” In an odd way it felt a bit better, for all four of us, that we weren’t the only ones who’d been left behind, as it were. Better, but still a bit sad and still a bit hurt. While we’ve all been home these many weeks we’ve thought about friends from the past. The longer our isolation goes the further back in the past we seem to go. Wondering, where did our friendship go.

Friendship is a bit of a journey. That’s not really news, though the journey evolves not only as one gets older but also in relation to societal evolution. T’was a time when the maintenance of a friendship forged on the battlefields of youth was almost expected to fade away, with only the faintest embers of memories still burning. It was natural. Common to the point of being expected, especially if friends moved far afield.

In order to keep the fires of friendship burning you need to stoke them. We marvel at the long-distance friendships of our forebears, brought to light in the letters they sent to one another. Can you imagine? Friendship maintained at the whim of the postal service? And yet, maintain they did, at least those friendships that were meaningful enough to make the effort. The dawn of the telephone age made it somewhat easier to do this, but expense was a barrier often too high to surmount, trumping the immediacy and intimacy of hearing a friend’s voice.

Friendships at the mercy of distance and time were friendships most often destined to become little more than memories.

Ah, but the world is so very different now. We have, each of us, a device that allows us to talk to anyone we have ever known, right now, for pennies. A text can be sent with an effort so trivial that we have laws to regulate when we should know better than to fire one off. As if that’s not quite enough, Facebook and Twitter are there for the asking, and the original “reach out and touch someone” revolution that is email will alert you when someone has messaged you on either of them. And now, in the age of Corona, we have all learned how to use Zoom. It is now so easy, the effort necessary to remain in contact is now so minimal, that what it means to stoke the flames of friendship has been turned on its head. Along the way it seems that our expectations of what will become of our friendships has changed as well.

We will have to re-order that, I think.

Beth and I have a number of friends with whom we shared many, many things, who have moved away from the little burg we call home. In truth, most were little more than friendly acquaintances, people with whom we were thrown together because of stage of life stuff like schools or sports or jobs. “Moving away” for these friendships is simply another way of saying the calendar has flipped, and these fade just like friendships in the days of the Pony Express. That’s OK, too; they are meant to fade because they weren’t really friends, people in whom you confided, people who confided in you, counted on you. They were “friendlies”.

Our new world of easy access to one another changes how we feel about people we really did consider friends if and when they move away. It takes only time, well, time and desire, to stay in touch. To stay friends. Ah…there’s the rub, eh? It’s so easy now–no hoping that they will pick up the phone, return the voicemail, reply to the email/text/PM/jump on Zoom or Facetime–that our expectations have changed. That resignation inherent in the historical timeline of all but the deepest, most meaningful friendships has been replaced with some kind of new expectation that we don’t have to let go, let the friendship go, simply because someone has gone somewhere else.

And it hurts, doesn’t it, when friends who were friends in person make it clear that moving away is actually just the same today as it was in the days of the letter and the rotary dial telephone. All but the truest of friends move on, and what we have now is not a gentle resignation and wistful sadness about our mutual loss, but rather a more acute and personal type, especially if we’d decided that the friendship had been worth the effort necessary to keep the fire burning. Moving means we are no longer friends. It is only natural to wonder, then, if we ever really were.

There’s a story here, of course, from days long before the Pandemic, but I won’t trouble you with it. You’ve got one too I’ll bet; only the details are different. There’s also a lesson I think, one that is grounded in the wisdom of yesteryear. Our world has changed in ways that were unimaginable to our parents and grandparents. Heck, even my Mom is now on Facebook (yikes!) and has participated in group FaceTime visits with her children and their spouses. Friendship, however, has not. It doesn’t matter even a little bit that it takes so little effort to connect in today’s world. What matters now is the same as what mattered when connecting meant eagle feathers and inkwells: having a friendship that was meaningful enough to make the effort. Friends reach out, and they reach back when you reach out, whatever reaching means on any given day in any given era. Friendship requires effort, and the effort required is most often more than can be mustered to carry a friendship over a lifetime. The arc of a friendship still ends most often as nothing more than warm memories, like the tiny embers of even the most magnificent bonfire in a dawn to come. Slowly, but ever so surely, only the memory of warmth remains.

We are all happier when we accept that most of our friendships will still be like this. Lucky are we if we have even a single friend who feels just the same about our friendship, whether we stoke our fire face-to-face,  side by side, or cross-country. Friendship was, is, and will always be about the desire to remain friends, not how easy it might be to express that desire. Remember this, and we steel ourselves a bit more against the sadness of a friendship which has been lost to time and distance.

Remember this, and we can still allow ourselves to be warmed by the memories that remain of the friendship that once was.