The Last Adventure

I've put this off for as long as possible, because in the long list of things I never wanted to have to sit down and write, this one's right down there at the lowest bottom. But the lady I'm here to talk about today would suffer no such talk of putting off, so here we go.
As many of you know, my aunt Anne (Nicholson) Blake passed away this week at the too-early age of 52. Her passing has left a hole in our close extended family that, even all these days later, we haven't even begun to comprehend, and I suspect that such will be the case for a long time to come still. All I can hope to do here today is to remember my aunt by sharing a few stories with you that represent the amazing person she was as I knew her; if my poor rendering provides even a fractional impression of the extraordinary person she was, you'll have a better understanding of just what a bright spark the world has lost.

Watching bits of the Democratic National Convention this week, I was reminded of a certain glass-ceiling-shattering candidate's (true) suggestion that "it takes a village to raise a child." In the village body of my own upbringing, Annie was in the governing cabinet. As far back as my memories reach -- surprisingly far -- Annie is present. I can remember being two years old and heading to the movie theaters for the first time to see Toy Story, for example, an experience which has obviously had lasting staying power... and Annie was there for it. I was so small at the time that I had to sit between her and my mother, and the two of them had to literally hold down my folding theater seat on either side for the duration of the movie, or risk it folding me up into the upholstery.
Annie and my mother always seemed to be a dual act like that. They were, in my mom's own words, each other's "original best friends." They grew up in an amazing household in the small town of Paxton, MA (right outside Worcester, since you've almost definitely never heard of it) with my two grandparents and an older brother, my Uncle Don. Annie, never one to suffer fools at any age, was infamous on the streets of Paxton for walking uninvited into my uncle's all-male neighborhood games, whereupon she would tell them in no uncertain terms that they were "doing it wrong," and promptly proceed to school them all. "You throw/hit/run/do sports like a girl" never flew as an insult in my family growing up, because I saw Annie do the same in her adult life -- I knew it was a high compliment.

She was one of the more avid sports fans I ever knew. Besides watching the Sox, Celtics, Pats, and especially the Bruins, she was a fitness fiend: she took 5am spin classes, kickboxed, played soccer, even fenced during her college days. She was a fiercely proud alumna of the College of the Holy Cross (Class of '86), and was instrumental in pointing me down the path to becoming a Crusader myself. Till the end of her days, Annie was the embodiment of everything I came to understand in my own time about Purple Pride and what being a Crusader meant in the context of the real world. My "Hoyas" and "Chu chu ra ras" will always have a bit more emphasis on them from now on.
During my own time in college, nothing could make my day or even my week like a surprise care package from Annie; she was always somehow able to glean the secret information of my mailing address from an unknown source, and many was the day I'd come home from a late night studying in the library to an unannounced batch of baked goods. This sounds great already, I understand, but the true value of these packages is something I really have to emphasize: without apology, Annie was the greatest baker I have ever known. "Man-hands Martha Stewart," as Annie herself referred to the cooking icon, had NOTHING on the baking ability of my aunt. Her s'mores brownies (every crumb as delicious as they sound) and cherry jam cookies will never and can never be duplicated, despite whatever poor attempts we might try and make in the future.
I have a lot of memories about travelling to local farms every summer and fall with Annie to pick strawberries or blueberries or apples or some other kind of fresh fruit, which would then be promptly baked into one of those amazing concoctions. Looking back on those times in retrospect, it's like something right out of the sun-drenched pages of a storybook or fairytale... they seem so ideal, so perfect, I almost have a hard time believing they ever happened. I can't express in words how thankful I am that they really did.

I make this fairytale association, perhaps, because Annie was in the company of only my father and grandfather in terms of instilling my love of reading. She had a seemingly endless array of storybooks and picture books, and for a child-toddler who insisted that every single reading and re-reading be done with the exact same pacing and intonation -- "No, Annie, no, read it this way!" -- she was second to none. Perhaps most significantly, it was Annie who introduced me at age seven to a small, little known chapter book, the first of a series, by name of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. The rest, as they say, is history. I don't think I actually owned a copy of that first J.K. Rowling book for a long time, because Annie lived so close and we saw her so often that I would just use hers. Every Friday growing up, on school vacations and through summers, Annie would take myself, her son John, and my sister Heather on weekly outings called "Adventure Fridays." Every week, we would pile into her well-used maroon Ford Taurus, where Annie had the entire set of Harry Potter books on audio CD as narrated by English actor Jim Dale, "the man of a hundred voices." We would drive around the entire state of Massachusetts and parts beyond, to the zoo, the aquarium, the movies, the mall, the beach, the mini golf course, even just trips to my grandmother's, Jim Dale providing "Harr-ee! Harr-ee!" narration for our trip the entire way. I remember finishing the third book in the series on an Adventure Friday and leaving Annie that day with the farewell, "mischief managed," a phrase used in the story to wipe clean an enchanted map.

As I grew older, and new Harry Potter books sadly became a thing of the past (Annie and I went to the last few midnight premieres of the series together... not the movie premieres, mind you, I'm saying we waited together in a Barnes & Noble until midnight when the new books came out), I took a college class in "detective fiction," and Annie and I then began trading off books from the Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie (and not once, in all our readings, were either of us ever successfully able to predict the killer, damn it). As the other member in our book club of two, it was Annie who I then naturally turned to when I first began writing stories of my own. She was my most nit-picking editor and frankest critic, as well as my warmest reviewer and most eager audience reader. I wrote a one-off children's story for an undergraduate assignment once which I sent to her for perusal, not thinking much of it; because of the feedback and comments she gave, and continued to give for months and years and drafts upon drafts upon drafts afterwards, I will now be working with a literary agent in the fall to turn that same story into a publishable manuscript. Annie's voice will now forever be constantly in my ear as I take up a pen or turn to a keyboard, and I can't be more thankful for that.

I don't even have time on top of all this to touch adequately upon Annie's stellar career as a lawyer after meeting her devoted husband John at Vermont Law School, her epic victories as a youth league coach in the Chelmsford, MA, area, or the hundreds of immigrant students whose lives she impacted as a teacher of English as a second language in the Billerica school system; she was a world traveler, gardener, bird-watcher, fashionista (three days before my freshman year of high school she threw out my entire closet and forcibly dragged me to the nearest mall to buy a whole new wardrobe, and never gave me the chance/choice to look back after), movie buff, world-class tea barista, Downton Abbey fanatic, blogger, and party planner extraordinaire. She was the living definition of teacher, coach, friend, cousin, daughter, aunt, sister, wife, mother.
She was also, besides all these things, a fighter. A survivor. A warrior.
Annie's first bout with the insidious disease that is cancer came with a leukemia diagnosis in 2002. She underwent chemotherapy and came out smiling on the other side, the disease in remission. In 2004 she literally became the poster girl for Lowell General Hospital's annual Cancer Walk, and the entire extended family all became card-carrying infantryman on the walking team Annie's Army.

She and my mom also made the annual 13.1 mile Dana Farber walk from Wellesley College along the Boston Marathon course; I would regularly hop in with three miles left to go and then eat more than anyone combined at the finish line festivities.
In 2013, we received the gut punch revelation that Annie's leukemia had returned. The world class doctors in Boston who had kept tabs on her during remission were stunned... this was the type of cancer which, once treated, was never supposed to come back again. While the rest of the family reeled from the news, Annie, true to form, hunkered down and prepared for the battle ahead. She was at Brigham and Women's Hospital undergoing a round of chemotherapy when I ran my first Boston Marathon that same year, and our plan was then to visit her once I had finished. Because of this, my mom and sister stood on the other side of the street from their usual location, the spot where they had watched my dad cross seven times previously, since it would allow for an easier exit to the hospital... and because of this, they were spared being blown up in a terrorist attack. Even in the worst of circumstances imaginable, even unconsciously, Annie was still busy saving our lives.
Annie underwent experimental stem cell transplantation therapy a few months later, which then allowed her to kick cancer's ass a SECOND time, showing how she truly was not one to be trifled with. While it successfully treated the cancer, however, the transplant created subsequent health problems for Annie which plagued her last few years. The soft tissue cells of her original biology began rejecting the new transplantation cells, effectively rendering her blind and unable to breathe, amongst a host of other problems. These caused frequent hospitalizations and, after a minute by minute struggle for the last three years, are what eventually caused her passing. Even as her body failed, however, her spirit and mind remained unbroken, or, if anything, shone out the clearer for all the world to see. Those care packages of baked goods, those meticulous story edits and Agatha Christie novels, were somehow done even as she battled all these obstacles -- while I would of course like to remember her most in health, I think some part of me will remember Annie and be awed by her especially during these years of sickness when she was still nevertheless able to accomplish so much.

The societal custom in such a case, vexingly to me, seems to be saying that "so and so lost their battle in the end." Annie did not lose her battle. Her every waking moment was a battle, day-in, day-out, for years on end, and she won victories every new successive day. That is not defeat. Annie is now celebrating those hard-won victories somewhere, I've never been more sure of anything. Her whole life was a series of not settling, of challenging herself, of tackling adventures. When she was tired of watching the boys screw it up, she jumped in and changed the playground games; when she set her mind on it, she became a lawyer, and a damn good one; when she was oppressed by cancer, she beat it back... twice; when she wanted to make the most out of her renewed take on life, she touched the lives of countless others by becoming a teacher and excelling at it. And she balanced all these remarkable accomplishments with her favorite and most important adventure of all, her family, and gave selflessly and wholly to everyone lucky enough to be in it. That's who she was. That's who we've lost. Through the past week, however, all I could think of was, appropriately, a line from one of J.K. Rowling's most beloved characters.

"To the well-organized mind," Albus Dumbledore says, "death is but the next great adventure."

Annie, you had one of, if not the, most organized mind I've had the honor of knowing, and I know that all you've done is move on to your next and greatest adventure. I wish you all the luck and happiness I can as you embark on it. For all the ones you gave us here, for all the memories, for all the love, our million thanks and awed appreciation, which we can never repay. Love you, Annie. You will be missed desperately.

Mischief Managed.

"I'll Write My Way Out"

I can remember how a friend of mine at school told me that she'd once had a history teacher who tried impressing upon the fifteen year old minds of her sophomore class that humans only recognized history when it was printed down for us in the print pages of a textbook, rarely -- if ever -- as it was unfolding livetime before us on our television screens.

Without meaning disrespect to that teacher and her years of experience, I can cite no less than four times in the last few many weeks where I'd take it to court that I'd disproved that theory. Such has probably been the case for a while, but now especially I feel like we're all witnesses to a general world atmosphere of a powder keg ready to blow. I personally can't remember another stretch of time where every log-on to Twitter was greeted with news of yet another gun violence death or a prominent world power Brexiting stage left. These are textbook-fodder events we've been going through on a day to day basis recently, and even though I thank my stars to have been personally removed from all of it, today's age of social media saturation means the degrees of separation between primary and secondary experiences are being chipped away with every cell-phone cam recording. 

Again, I can't stress enough how grateful and how aware I am that I'm safely on the periphery of all these events, but I'll admit without shame that I can only take so much "bigness" in the news before I need to balance it out with the small-scale, the personal, the day to day. I write. I run. I draw. I listen to music, often (very often) while doing any of those. 

Last week, in the midst of an otherwise busy summer, the Cooks took a trip down to the Big Apple, where Mom and Dad had a joint birthday celebration and I checked off the bucket list item of seeing a live Broadway show. Disney aficionados that we are, we were over the moon to be amongst a sold-out performance of The Lion King (and for anyone wondering, it was phenomenal... something I can't recommend enough for your own bucket lists, if you're able).
Oddly, though, that once-in-a-lifetime experience wasn't my lasting Broadway takeaway from the trip. Nope. That honor goes to the production happening literally the next block over, which we weren't even able to get in and see for ourselves. We and millions of other Americans are alike in that regard, because the bespoken production is the most unprecedented theater phenomenon I've witnessed in my lifetime -- and I suspect quite a few people in the older generations can say the same. As you can tell from this trip being my only Broadway expedition to date, I'm far from the savviest person on the theater scene (I still to date haven't seen Phantom of the Opera OR Les Miserables in any form in their entirety, much to my sister's shame), so tolerate that I'm a late bloomer with these things, and appreciate how monumentally my small-scale, personal, day to day music life has been altered for the better:

While on Broadway, I discovered Hamilton.

Well, I guess not technically. Because I don't live in a vacuum, I of course had some general awareness of composer and actor Lin-Manuel Miranda's hip-hop musical about America's "ten-dollar founding father without a father." I'd seen snippets of a 60 Minutes feature about it, had seen Miranda carpool karaoke it with James Corden, and most impressively, had heard it discussed during the last twelve months or so in reverent tones, by some of the unlikeliest people I'd have ever imagined to care about such a thing. That these ripples existed, and were able to reach me way out on the far outskirts of theater "know," signaled to me that Hamilton was already something different entirely.

So when we drifted into a Broadway store in a Hakuna Matata daze and I happened to see the Hamilton cast album on a shelf , I figured that "when in Rome," I might as well see what all the uproar was about. I popped it into the CD player during the drive leaving NY, and suddenly I find myself here ten days later, attempting to flawlessly karaoke hip-hop lyrics about the Battle of Yorktown (or, more accurately, the lyrics of all three principal leads, simultaneously), without any explanation as to how. The CD being without a warning label, I was unaware and unprepared for the all-consuming effect it's had on my life in the time since the Broadway shop. I get that I'm far from the first to discover this, but with only the evidence of the cast recording to go on, I want to state for the record that this thing is, in a word, flawless. 

Besides chronicling the majority of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton's remarkable adult life, rising and falling through his pivotal role in the tumult of the American Revolution and the subsequent implementation of the government system that's come down to us in the years since, the musical has some of the most ingenious and densely-packed writing I've ever come across in any form, and is actually in many senses a love letter to writing itself (you can understand my attraction). That it also accomplishes all these things through the use of race-blind casting and 21st century hip-hop sensibilities isn't just a novelty trick to put bodies in seats or gain a spot atop the charts -- it's integral to what Hamilton's all about. To paraphrase Lin-Manuel Miranda's own words, it's a perfect synergy of America NOW telling a story about America THEN.
Listening to Miranda and his castmates rap battle and freestyle in debates about government control, the United States' uncertain role in foreign affairs, and the devastating effects of gun violence in the form of both war and honor duels -- when a black actor portraying Vice President Aaron Burr drops a showstopper angrily bemoaning how he's left out of "The Room Where It Happens" as country-changing deals are cut inside without his inclusion -- it becomes harder and harder to delineate where that line between then/now even actually is. 

Most haunting, both in my first listen and the near-incessant listenings that have come since, is General George Washington's warning to Hamilton that "I know that we can win/I know that greatness lies in you/But remember from here on in/History has its eyes on you." It's a reminder to his young right-hand-man that every subsequent decision he makes, public and private, big and small, historical and personal, will be remembered and scrutinized by the generations to come. How, then, should he act, given this warning?
How, then, should we?
When generations look back at us in their history-teacher-approved textbooks, how will what's printed remember what it is we've been seeing on our TV screens? What's going to be our legacy? It's a problem that vexed our founding men and women themselves as they  navigated their own powder keg atmosphere, the ramifications of which changed the face of the earth in its burning, and I don't think it's a stretch to say that we continue their struggle with it.
Works of lightning-in-a-bottle, straight-up, flat-out (and any other way you want) sheer genius like Hamilton, while helpfully reminding us of this legacy, are therefore more important to me for another reason altogether. They are instances where art -- where creativity and passion and talent and even love -- fulfills its most inspirational role of uniting people... of taking human experiences (of which Alexander Hamilton's was unquestionably one), warts and all, and alchemizing them into something universal and remarkable. That is a legacy to be proud of.
Ironically, I'm jumping onto the Hamiltrain here right at a close of sorts: although the show goes on stronger than ever, it will do so without  Lin-Manuel Miranda and a sizable part of the cast, who don their revolutionary gear for the final time tonight, actually, before leaving to pursue other projects for a stretch. Mr. Miranda et al, please allow this to be my Alexander Hamilton-length thank you letter for reminding us all how music, theater, words retain their most important power, even -- especially -- amidst historical happenings like ours. So go. Get out there. Come up with your own.

Don't throw away your shot.

On Orlando

While I was in England last October -- a long story better explained in a previous posting -- one of the unbelievably kind people I was fortunate to meet was, besides a great chili cook and a speed demon runner, an English policeman. As I suspect is how most English-American conversations go down, we eventually got around to comparing-contrasting details of our daily lives. As he talked about his job as a policeman, there was no talk of Kevlar vests or shooting range training that comes up a lot when talking to American cops.
"You don't carry a gun?" I eventually had to ask him.
"Why would I carry a gun?" he responded, genuinely meaning it. "Your voice is always the best first line of defense against the bad guys"
It's a writing cliché, but I was literally stunned silent by this. I just stared at the guy for a few seconds.
"But what if the bad guys have a gun?" I asked eventually.
Now it was his turn to look confused.
"Erm... they don't."

I've perhaps never been more painfully aware of my American upbringing and identity than I was during that conversation, and I think that's disgusting. Even with all the blatantly touristy things I saw and did over in another country, nothing marked me as an outsider as much as my inability to grasp the concept that guns were just not a reality of everyday life in that part of the world. I literally couldn't comprehend that world view, and I've never looked at ours the same way again afterwards.

I'm not ashamed to be a proud U.S. citizen, and hope never to be anything otherwise until the day I die. I'm thankful every single day for our basic constitutional rights, not least of which because they allow me the freedom of speech to maintain this silly blog here and tell you stories about the ridiculous things I get up to sometimes (and which similarly allows you to read -- or not read -- it of your own free will).
A lot of people have been exercising their own freedom of speech over the last few days to try and make sense of or express their grief for the monstrous attack in Orlando, FL. Social media is just a stream now of people sharing talk show hosts or screencap'd tweets articulating those thoughts for us in a very public way. I'm usually of the mind that such talk is better left to people who actually have business talking about it -- "give every man thy ear, but few thy voice" is usually my go-to for not contributing to the overwhelming wall of white noise that often marks the aftermath of these kinds of national tragedies.

After all, what perspective do I have to offer that makes my opinion worth a damn here? I like to think of myself as a LGBTQ ally, but I myself am not gay (and furthermore, I'm not a PoC in either of those communities, a fact which I feel has been unfortunately overlooked in a lot of this); I've been to Orlando several times on family vacations, but I can't say I'm too familiar with the town outside the boundaries of Disneyworld; hell, I can't even say I've ever been a regular on the club scene. Those are the kinds of voices that should obviously speak loudest here, not a societally-privileged adventure chronicler with a Pixar-themed blog site. But even though I'm not a LGBTQ clubbing Floridian...
I'm an American citizen.
And today, that makes me just as susceptible to an attack like anyone else.

I'm having a hard time right now believing I live in a country where that ugly, ugly "fact of life" is par for the course, so today I need to take a break from the stuff I usually post and get my thoughts down here instead.

In my year in the world of teaching now, I've had to make peace with the possibility of an armed threat on any given school day; of the reality, in a day of reading stories to kindergarteners or 3rd graders, that there have to be contingencies for mass shootings. "How am I gonna save the kids today if a psychopath gets into the school?" is a real, actual thought I have actually had go through my brain.
For the last few years, every trip to the movies for me has begun with a general environment sweep to find the closest means of exit in case of an emergency, and every person who gets up out of his or her seat during the course of the movie makes me inadvertently tense up, when in fact they're just going to the bathroom.

This is my script now. This is the script of 21st century American society. And I'm horrified by it.

Even the counterarguments are scripted now. One that I'm frankly sick and tired of hearing is that, "guns don't kill, people do," or, better, "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." To me, both are maddeningly reactive measures, steps to be taken once an incident has happened/is happening which will, hopefully, put a stop to it. To me, it's as if the general attitude is like, "Chemotherapy is the only thing we can do against cancer." Chemotherapy is undoubtedly one of the greatest medical advances in history, and it's the reason several friends and loved ones are still with me today. But having had to witness loved ones and friends alike go through their unbreakable experiences, I can attest even secondhand to the fact that it is a devastatingly RAVAGING treatment which, absurdly, often makes the original problem seem small in comparison. Chemotherapy saves lives, yes, but other parts of the body are destroyed in the meantime. Not for one minute has the scientific community ever gone, "Yep, job well done, we've done as much as we can, this is all we have to work with now," and washed their already-scrubbed hands clean. Not for one minute. Isn't it far, far better instead to ask:
What if we could just cure cancer in the first place?
What if we didn't have to worry about chemo, because there was no cancer necessitating its use?
We haven't solved that problem yet, but dammit if it's not the Holy Grail of modern medical research. We as a country raise BILLIONS of dollars every year in fun runs and walkathons and buzzcuts to fund research towards that end. It's a PROACTIVE strategy that recognizes, yes, there's a problem at hand, yet is optimistic enough to dare and say "Let's not accept this as the status quo. We can do better. We will do better."

So what the hell's the difference?

In my opinion, gun violence has become a cancer on a national scale. Terrorist or mental illness or homophobe or just general garbage, it doesn't matter -- nothing about any of those motivations makes a person dangerous to others so much as putting a rapid fire assault rifle in their hands, an occurrence which borders on unbelievability in its ease and frequency. It's become essentially as convenient now to buy a kitted-out assault rifle (I maintain that it's literally impossible for something to wear its statement of intent as conspicuously as "ASSAULT rifle") and a Call of Duty sized bag of ammo than it is to buy an advance ticket for the movies ... and like I've said, those purchases are becoming more and more likely to come into contact. It's laughable, except for the fact I've probably never been more scared by anything.
Sure, your second amendment rights that allow you to carry a gun are no less valid than my first amendment rights that allow me to say all this. I just maintain the fact that the second amendment was written at a time when our defense against an invading redcoat force consisted of "Hey Sam, grab your musket and meet us down on the common at 9am if it's not too big a problem," and you were lethal with said musket if you could fire off more than a round a minute. I truly wish there was a way (outside a Lin-Manuel Miranda musical) that the founding fathers could somehow lend their opinions to the actual debate that somehow still persists today of "does a military-grade AR-15 automatic rifle still fall under the umbrella of it's just for self-defense?" when that same weapon has been singly responsible for five high profile mass-casualty shootings in as many years (not to be confused with the other 133 U.S. mass shootings that have taken place just within the 165 days of 2016 thus far).

Those more world-weary or experienced than I have all the right in the world to sneer at me now, and maybe this is your evidence that I should just have kept my mouth shut about things I have no business talking about. Maybe guns are just too ingrained in our culture, and too many people adhere to an absolutist extremism, that we'll just treat the Orlando tragedy like every single one that's come before it... send "thoughts and prayers" to families torn apart beyond the help of either, observe obligatory moments of silence, and vaguely vow to do better the next time. In other words, nothing. Because as I've just said, without a change of any sort, the implication is that there is going to be a next time, for certain, unchangeable, unavoidable, scripted.

I'm a writer. I use words, blog posts like this, as a sort of self-helping cleanse to organize my thoughts about complicated issues like this (and if other eyes but mine get to read it, hey, I count it as a bonus). As a writer, when I see a script with problems, I put on my editing hat and get to work revising it. I don't know or even care what it is, but we, together, need to revise this script, cure this cancer, before it does any more irreparable damage. I'm rarely outspoken, angry, like this in any kind of public form, but I'm sick and tired -- hell, I'll even admit I'm jealous -- of seeing other countries with other scripts that have already been cured, looking at us, seeing ours, and asking "what are you waiting for?" Because at this point, I'm just not sure what the answer to that question is.

Ragnar-OK?

No, that title's not in reference to Ragnarok, the Norse mythological apocalypse, but to the epic running event this last weekend that's finally brought me out of my blogging drought.
Ragnar Relays are a series of 24-hour races all around the country, where twelve crazy dedicated individuals form a team and take turns running continuously over the course of a whole day, for a total distance of around 200 miles. As one of the biggest tests you can challenge yourself to as a runner, I've wanted to do a Ragnar for a little while now, but as you may well imagine, they're something of a nightmare to organize -- the sheer logistics of organizing twelve people, leapfrog-transportation for them all, and a slew of other things has kept me away for a while.
As luck would have it, though, one of my good friends from school texted me a few months ago and said she was on a Ragnar team in need of an extra man, so natch', I jumped at it!

The Dirty Dozen, pre-race

My friend Karina, about to lead our team off on the first leg. They never mentioned this kind of stuff in detective fiction class!

Our team name was Zeta Theta Theta Mu --or just call us Z.O.O.M. for short!

These legs are about to run from Hull, MA, just outside Boston, all the way to the very tip of Cape Cod in Provincetown, if you can believe it

The beach bums of van #2 are only this energetic because we still hadn't embarked on our turn yet

Also running this year was Lowell Sun reporter and speed demon extraordinaire (and fresh off a blistering Boston Marathon performance to boot), Rick Sobey. Rick and I shared the same legs of the course -- I'm just glad we didn't share the same pace, or I'd be typing this with an oxygen mask!

The side of our van, helpfully reminding me of the order of our legs so I wouldn't need to keep track of such higher brain functioning

A van would drive to a scheduled "transition zone," one of us would meet the runner finishing his or her leg within a designated area, and then the van would leapfrog to the next transition zone, to repeat the process all over again, three times for twelve runners. I had signed on to take almost 22 miles total, with a 10-mile run at 5:30pm, a 5.5-mile run at 2:00am, and a 10k run at 9:15am. Each of those on its own didn't seem too intimidating, but together, and with hours placed between them (during which time it'd be easy for my legs to stiffen up while crammed into the back of a van), I knew this was going to be a challenge right from the outset.

My first 10 miles near the coast were hot and muggy, but I managed to finish before the deluge that began soon afterwards and lasted long into the night. I seized my opportunity in the nice weather to represent everyone's favorite wall-crawler

Hidden in the darkness here are DOZENS of bananas, granola bars, every imaginable running aid you could think of, and several bags of increasingly-smelly laundry. It may not have been glamorous, but it was a lot of fun, besides being a fantastic crucible to make some friends with!

The Ragnar powers that be dictated that every nighttime runner had to be equipped with a high-visibility vest, blinker, and coal-miner-esque headlamp to ensure any late-night drivers would see us coming a mile off. Having never really done a night run like that before, this was one of the most memorable parts of the whole experience for me

After a masterclass in hand-offs, Karina's OFF!!

Our van crew literally opened a diner in Orleans. The looks of these sleep-deprived runners about to scarf down some delicious diner fare in advance of their final leg a few hours afterwards actually prompted our waitress to ask at one point "Are you guys ok?"

Breakfast eaten, we're rallied and ready to bring it home!

Captain America's all about peace and freedom

Despite a hard 40% chance that I was going to see breakfast again while running, I managed to power through the final 10k and was greeted with this as my finish line for a reward

200(ish) miles later, the new brothers and sisters of Z.O.O.M. have some nice hardware to show off.
"TO-GA! TO-GA! TO-GA! TO-GA!"

A studious pair of scholarly-type Holy Cross alumni

This was easily one of the craziest things I've ever done, but it was a BLAST, and was, in a word, EPIC. My deepest thanks to everyone who made this the adventure that it was - it's sort of amazing to me that I'd only known one person in the group before we set off, considering how close we became in just a short amount of time. I'll stop now before I get any more schlocky, but I'll end with saying that, although this was my first Ragnar, it definitely won't be my last. I'll be ready to lace 'em up the next time one of these comes round again, no doubt.

Like the man said: "I could do this all day!"

Keeping with Kipling

The graduate class I'm enrolled in now about the publishing industry is one of the most darn enjoyable I've ever taken, for several reasons -- not least among which is that there's only ONE major assignment due over the course of the entire semester. I can certainly get by alright with that kind of workload! The assignment in question is to thoroughly research an already-published "children's book," and then try to re-pitch it to a modern 2016 audience as if it never existed. Having just read them for the first time over winter break, Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Books were the first thing that sprang to mind, and so I've been spending a fair bit of time with Mowgli and company over the past few weeks.

In my best impersonation of a 60 Minutes investigator, therefore, I took advantage of this week's February school vacation to make the scenic drive up to Brattleboro, Vermont, to visit Kipling's residence there. I can happily report: for anyone with even a passing interest in Kipling and his works, or those familiar with the addictively-catchy 1967 Disney cartoon, or even those history buffs among you fascinated by Victorian culture, this place is an absolute MUST to check out.

History lesson time: Kipling, an Indian-born English writer, moved to Vermont during the first year of his marriage while awaiting the birth of his first child. There, he constructed his dream estate: Naulakha, a Hindi word meaning "priceless gem." Everything about Naulakha was designed for comfort and privacy; it's a long, narrow house, only wide enough to fit one room and a staircase across, with all the rooms stacked longwise and facing outward on the slope of a hill to catch the light (and, more importantly, the views), elevated an entire floor off the ground to keep away from curious eyes.

Everything about Naulakha today is EXACT to how it was during Kipling's ownership: the furniture, the room layouts, the floorboards, even the piping has survived intact over the last century, making Naulakha a sort of time capsule into privileged life from the 1890s. Even cooler, it functions today as an honest-to-God resort house -- seriously, you and seven friends can rent it out and spend a night eating on Kipling's table, sleeping in his bed, & showering in his bathtub (I'm struck all of a sudden by how some things sound much creepier on the page than they do in my head). It's a pretty penny, absolutely, but I still think it's kinda cool to have such free use of a historical literary site in this day and age.
And speaking of literary history...

Kipling's actual study, the original work space where he cranked out each of those works listed on the plaque above, remains intact, and just that one solitary room made the entire drive up to Vermont more than worth it.

My personal version of heaven looks an awful lot similar to this, if I had to guess.

The resemblance is uncanny, no?

Also, they had hats. Very cool hats.

Kipling would sit at this very desk every single day from 9am-1pm and just write, write, write. So, just to conveniently sum up, that's
Andrew's dream spot:✓
Andrew's dream job:✓

There are several artifacts like this scattered around the estate, testifying to the happy outcome of those writing sessions

I've never felt such an urge to smoke a pipe in my entire life

One anecdote in particular pricked up my ears during an already-fascinating tour: while at Naulakha, the Kiplings hosted all sorts of international dignitaries and members of the writing elite. Frequent among these was a dear friend of Rudyard's from England -- a certain Scottish medical doctor who dabbled from time to time in "charlatan" mystery stories, by the name of Arthur Conan Doyle. Now THAT'S a writing club I wouldn't have minded getting in on...
Doyle, a consummate Scottish sportsman, brought several of his favorite pastimes across the pond with him during these visits, and so Naulakha boasts the first tennis court in the state of Vermont. Doyle even strong-armed Kipling into a few rounds of golf on the nearby snowy hillsides (with red-painted golf balls for visibility purposes), thus their official status in the Professional Golfers' Association as the inventors of "winter golf" in the United States. Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "the game is on!"

Speaking of those snowy hillsides, the grounds surrounding Naulakha are pretty breathtaking. Amidst sprawling fields that offer views of the Green Mountain foothills, the Kiplings planted their own tree corridor and made some pseudo-Grecian ruins for decoration.

"Gardens are not made by singing 'Oh, how beautiful!' and sitting in the shade." 

“Otherwise, he would be far away in the jungle; tasting, touching, seeing, and feeling new things.”

And finally, the other Lord of the Jungle (and the ace photographer behind all these shots), taking in some new ideas for a home expansion project

An absolutely unforgettable outing, of the stuff lit. buffs like me only dream of! Happy readings!