A collective memory

To follow the bike and walking trail by the creek near my house, you need to go from near the water and take a hill up to the street, cross the street, and then reconnect with the trail. The park board has plans to redesign this area, so that trail users won't need to go up and cross the street. The board also plans to separate the bike and pedestrian paths here, which can't come soon enough.

Some of you may remember the story that follows. Before I had to call 911 and describe the bottom-of-the-hill location to an ambulance, I used to try to avoid this part of the trail when biking. Since then, I always exit to the street about a quarter mile before approaching this area, and bypass it by a couple of blocks.

What happened? My cousin, her husband, their daughter, were visiting from Ohio and we were riding our bikes home from the library. Knowing that the hill is an area just waiting to be the scene of an accident, I slowed down and called out far in advance that we were passing on the left. A woman in her mid-80s turned her head and looked back over her shoulder, lost her balance, and fell and hit her head. It was horrible. My sweet cousin took care of her, while I called 911 and, after a really long wait, directed the paramedics from the street to the woman. The wait was really frustrating. On the bright side, once the woman could speak a bit more clearly, we were able to send a bystander to go fetch her son.

My cousin gave the son my contact information. When my husband said that someone had stopped by the house and dropped off a package a couple of days later, my lawyer brain thought, "Is he suing me?" No. He dropped off flowers. His mother and I spoke on the phone a few times and exchanged a couple of cards after she got out of the hospital and, when the son was running for city council, I saw him at a debate and asked about his mother. She was fine.

Today, I was flipping through the paper (unusual) and was turning through the pages and my eyes hit the obituaries (even more unusual). I saw that the woman died of complications from a stroke. I so very much hope that her head's arteries and veins were not compromised by that fall. Anyhow, I read her obituary. She was 89. She graduated from the U of M in 1948, was a journalist, and won local awards for her work, which I think is really interesting. Also interesting? She set up a scholarship fund for high school students wanting to study journalism. I wonder how the study of journalism today compares to 1948.

I told my cousin, who mentioned that her daughter (who was about 4 at the time) remembers that day vividly, as do we.

RIP, Dorothy. Thank you for teaching me that people can be very generous, forgiving, and kind in really crappy situations. 

For every ladder you climb, a snake is waiting?

Well, hi there. How's it going? Yes, yes, I know, I know, it's kind of rude to just drop off the face of the earth with no explanation. You've kept pace with me these past few months as I've slowly made my way up to square 84. Such good progress over the summer - biking a lot, eating fresh foods, living a pretty clean existence, doing some fundraising.

Now I'm on square 86, in the throes of my fall work travel schedule, blogging while cookies on an airplane after having a big ol' beer with my airport restaurant dinner, with a die that only has ones and twos on it... What's it going to be? Is my fall going to end up being one big roll of a one? Or will I persevere and roll a two? Oh, the suspense!  

"All games have morals; and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures, as no other activity can hope to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder you hope to climb, a snake is waiting just around the corner, and for every snake a ladder will compensate. But it's more than that; no mere carrot-and-stick affair; because implicit in the game is unchanging twoness of things, the duality of up against down, good against evil; the solid rationality of ladders balances the occult sinuosities of the serpent; in the opposition of staircase and cobra we can see, metaphorically, all conceivable oppositions, Alpha against Omega, father against mother." - Salman Rushdie (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snakes_and_Ladders)

Biking virtually, literally

Last week, I wrapped up reading the excellent, non-fiction best-seller Boys in the Boat and, today, finished the opposite-end-of-the-spectrum (in all but one respect) and also excellent sci-fi book Ready Player One.

Ready Player One involves a virtual reality in which people interact through their avatars. The main character hunkers down, not leaving his apartment for over six months (and needs anti-anxiety meds when he does). As an aside, the reader is told that the protagonist realizes he needs some exercise and sets up his system so that he has to meet daily exercise requirements to log into the virtual reality system. If he doesn't meet them, then he gets locked out for two months. He says, "This meant that I couldn't go to work, continue my quest, or, in effect, live my life."

While I can appreciate his fitness goals, this seems a little extreme. It also is sad that living is primarily done via avatar.

The chores I did at my parents' house this weekend to help get things ready for fall, and the sensory aspects of that work (stinky mud, brush scratches on arms and legs, feeling the rope vibrate as the chainsaw cut through the tree, bugs working through the rotting apples on the ground), would be tough to experience via avatar.

Also, biking through an avatar would probably be unsatisfying absent a really fine-tuned system, except to the extent that you could ride anywhere in - or outside of - the world, and at any time of day, as long as the route was loaded up on your computer. I could get behind that.