Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

Sunday musings…

1) Babies 2. Not gonna lie, still on a huge high from babies on the beach for the first time in 15 years. To top it off our last ‘baby” Ryan visited for a couple of days as he prepares for his senior year in high school.

All 6’5″ of him!

2) Highway. At the moment we are steaming along I-90 headed west to Casa Blanco, Beth at the helm. It never gets old, that feeling of awe that I can be connected to you all while I speed through the countryside of Western NY. I think this cellphone/internet thing is gonna make it, ya know?

This trip is often filled with hours of debriefing the events of extended White family’s week together crammed in our rented house on Cape Cod. Not this year, though. Nothing but a quiet, warm feeling as we work through the math necessary to accommodate what is likely to be a bigger crew next year as word gets out about how much fun we had.

3) Games.  This is the first year that CrossFit, Inc. has included sessions and events targeted specifically toward physicians who do CrossFit. It’s a good idea, albeit one that is rather late to the gate given Coach Glassman’s interest in the intersection of fitness and health. Still, better late than never. One of the best parts of the enterprise is the involvement of Dr. Julie Foucher. Waiting until now means that she is available to participate in the growth of the CrossFit MD movement as she, herself, grows as a physician.

Occasionally I stumble upon a post in the CF MD page on FB. Without meaning to offend, CF is so new to the majority of the MD’s participating that the space looks less like a collection of docs and more like some of the threads we all used to participate in back in the days of CrossFit.com v1.o and 2.0. This is not surprising, nor is it a knock on my medical colleagues. CF is exhilarating in the early stages; the newness of CF is the same for every new adherent. I feel like I am re-reading some of the best threads on the CrossFit Forum ca. 2010 or so.

Which makes me wonder: wouldn’t it be possible to accelerate the indoc (see what I did there?) if either the MDL1 course or the prep work included a review of some of those classic Forum threads? Think Eugene Allen on programming or Larry Lindenman on planned/cycled recovery. Robb Wolfe on Zone/Paleo nutrition. I remember one on scaling the load in a WOD based on your CrossFit Total (back for the first time since the very first Games in Aromas) rather than sex, height, or weight. Pretty sophisticated analyses from some of the OGs we no longer see anywhere around CF, but relevant and on point today as much as they were back in the day. You could accelerate the impact of having doctors engaged in functional fitness by leapfrogging them through the stages of self-discovery.

My take: make healthcare more like fitness rather than making fitness more like healthcare.

4) Reunion. Our return to Ohio is a day or two later than usual because we attended the 40th Reunion of one of my high schools (I moved after freshman year). Not a typo. 40 years. Doesn’t seem like yesterday; more like last week! One funny quirk: we all referred to each other as “kids”, as in “who’s that kid over there in the green shirt?” Every one of us did it. Attending was easy since it was my turn to bring my Mom home from the Cape and she still lives in the house I grew up in.

So? How was it? Was the Reunion a meaningful milepost? An event that will in some way alter the trajectory of any of us who attended? Probably not, but then again, is any Reunion really supposed to do that? No, what happened was a group of really nice people, many of whom still live in or around town, got together and spent a few hours being genuinely nice to one another. Oh sure, Tim (our Valedictorian) made fun of my senior picture outfit (definitely deserved), and some of the goofy stuff we wrote in each other’s yearbooks got a re-reading, but all in all everyone was quite gentle with one another. Heck, we could have spent all night ragging on me after Jane pulled out a pic I signed, but she was too kind to let it go down that way (for which I will be forever grateful!).

Heck, I’ll bet Dianne only got positive responses when she got folks to play the “who has changed the most” game (I wimped out and didn’t play).

No, Reunions are for remembering as many smiles as possible from days gone by, and for enjoying whatever threads there may be that tie us together, still. There were some crazy “it’s a small world” connections that were just a hoot to discover (like the Needham connection, right Lori?!) It was fun, and flattering as hell, to discover that some of my classmates have discovered my ramblings here and elsewhere and liked them. For the record they all seem to agree that Beth is AT LEAST my Better 95%! Tim and Tom came from California to RI and got trumped by Yukio who surprised us from Tokyo. That’s just cool. No revelations, no epiphanies, just a few hours to remember that we were privileged to have known each other in whatever small way, then and now.

I had so much more fun than I expected to, from the first hugs (thanks Kit, Jackie, and Sue) to the last handshake (great party Steve), I’m so very happy to have been a part. Think “yes” the next time you get an invitation.

I’ll see you next week…

–bingo

A couple of weeks ago I wrote that the only constant is change; the only thing in life on which you can depend is that things will not always ever be the same. An important corollary to this is that all things, good or bad, will come to an end. So it appears to be in my little slice of the world. While it’s not quite clear exactly when, it is clear that a very important part of my adult life is near an end.

This is the weekend when Beth and I digest the latest iteration of the annual White Family Cape Cod vacation week. For 23 consecutive years all, or almost all, of my family has congregated in the same 2 cottages across the street from the ocean in the idyllic little town of West Dennis, MA. After that comes 12-14 hours of driving home, a rolling debriefing and decompression from a full-immersion experience into my family. For 8 years or so both vacation and the drive home have been fodder for my “Sunday musings”, some of my best. Although some aspects of the vacation were as immutable as Bill Murray waking up in that hotel room every day in Groundhog Day–a seeming violation of my “everything changes” dictum–each year has actually turned out to be a truly unique story told exactly once. For 23 years. It’s really been a remarkable streak when you think about it.

The genesis of this annual odyssey was my youngest sister’s wedding and the addition of a fourth set of in-laws to the family Holiday dynamic. Beth and I are both first borns. We were the first to marry and the first to bring members of the next generation into the family. We have always lived a mutually disagreeable distance from both families, in the backyard of neither, and no closer to either. Both families were equally unhappy with our zip code. Really a compliment, when you think about it.

As part of this it was clear right from the start that there would be no winning and losing when it came to family visits on the big 2 American Holidays Thanksgiving and Christmas. Nope, it was gonna be all War of the Roses, just degrees of losing. My proposed solution? We would declare a summer White Family Holiday and we would all convene in one place for a week together. Thus began 23 years of “The Cape Week.” When we began my caboose, Randy, was 6 weeks old, the 5th of what would become a gaggle of 10 grandchildren, the youngest of whom is now an 8th grader. Somewhere there’s a picture of him dwarfed by a 15 lb. lobster at dinner in year one.

For 23 years we distilled each year’s visits into a single week. We laughed and we cried, whispered and screamed. We loved and not-so-loved over each week as my generation fell into and out of our childhood family roles. It’s kinda like draft slots, right? You sit at the same place at the family dinner table and its even called “Beth’s seat”, or “Darrell’s seat”, or whomever. Whatever your place was in the family (agitator, comforter, achiever, slacker) at some point in the week you fell right into your allotted space. Triumphs and tribulations were tabulated as we offered each other all manner of advice and support. Some of it even solicited! In some years we single-handedly kept the vintners of California solvent with our dinner-time consumption.

So why now? Why is this summer the year that the end is nigh? Ah, it’s that old bugaboo, change. The younger couples and their children were paying attention and they have seen what it takes for the grandchildren to attend as they get older; this has (rightfully) given them pause. It’s hard, very hard, to make a week like this happen every year. As the kids get older, move through their school years and into real life, getting them to the Cape becomes ever more challenging, even when they truly want to be there. More than that, though, is the inexorable change wrought by time in my parents, Gram and Gramp. Soon, much too soon, the trip will either be too much for them to handle, or they’ll not be with us to handle it at all. All things come to an end, after all. Even something as unlikely and wonderful as a family of 20 meeting for a week on the same beach for 23 years.

The lessons are as obvious as they are at once joyous and sad. Good things are worth the effort it takes to keep them alive. My family, led by my brother, will likely try to do just that. Even good things, or the best of things, will eventually succumb to change and perhaps even come to an end. These realizations are bittersweet in our case for they bring along the dread for what this proxy for ultimate change portends. Late one night Mrs. bingo was awakened to the sounds of my muffled sobs as the end appeared before me. This year? Next? Change is the only constant. Everything comes to an end.

As I turned to leave, not knowing if I would ever return, I bent down to kiss my beloved beach goodbye.