Levy Trail North/Hash/Oaklawn Park

I walked Levy Trail North this morning in 33:48.
This afternoon I walked for 49:44 primarily with B.J. on a Hash run from a house in Bryant that belongs to Nathan, Cassandra's boyfriend, who this evening was given the Hash name Give a Dog a Boner.
Yesterday I lost $2 at Oaklawn Park. I failed to report my losses from the day of the Smarty Jones Stakes, on January 17. Adding those in, I'm down $10.80 for the season after four trips.

Paragraph(s) of the day from A Different Closet

Hardman stood and reached for the basketball in Keith’s hands. “You ready to play?” he said.

Keith pulled the ball against his chest. “No, because there’s one more thing. You just said Rock Hudson made the wrong choice, as if he had one, as if that’s what homosexuality is, a choice. The fact is, Ron, you should know better. Now, I’ll grant that I’ve heard the argument that we do have a choice, that gay men can still choose to marry and sleep with women, but I say that no one should ask anyone to make such a choice. I mean, just imagine, what if someone, or some god, insisted you should only marry men, or sleep with men? What if that were in your bible? Where would you possibly find any morality in that sort of requirement? The point is, I’m gay just as you’re black. We didn’t have a say, and neither of those characteristics should be held against either of us.” Keith handed the ball to Hardman. “Now I’m ready to play.”

“You don’t know anything about politics, do you?” Hardman said.

“No, I guess not.”

Shoemaker bent over to adjust his shoelaces. “Well, he does know something about basketball,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Levy Trail Loop

This was the easiest kind of fast walk I've taken in a while. Late this morning I walked the Levy Trail Loop in 29:48. It's already 68°F in Levy, and also sunny and windy as heck. We're hoping for a nice, productive day at Oaklawn Park. I'll be there for the King Cotton Stakes, a six-furlong race for horses four years old and up.

Levy Trail 5K

I walked the Levy Trail 5K early this afternoon in 49:31 and went through three miles in 48:19. At about one and a quarter miles, I had an experience with a blonde-colored chihuahua, just as I crossed 47th Street, headed south on the northern edge of the Levy shopping district. He was headed north, and it looked as if he might run in front of traffic in front of me, but I turned to a truck headed east and the driver slowed it to a stop. The dog then ran to me, and I picked him up. After about thirty seconds of consideration, I dropped him into the backyard of the T-Shirt Shop. There are frequently three or four yapping dogs in that particular fenced area. For maybe two seconds, I considered taking him home. He never once barked, wore no collar, and seemed perfectly at ease in my arms.

Paragraph(s) of the day from A Different Closet

Due to a summer and fall of commentary, Keith was excited as he walked into the foyer of the New Covenant Church Gymnasium and Special Events Center toward the basketball court. Months earlier, Karen Shoemaker told him her father had insisted the court be made to look like the Boston Garden and that the builders had done a masterful job. Anyone he met who learned of Keith’s basketball past and knew of his  connection with the Shoemakers mentioned the gym. He heard echoes of balls bouncing and men’s voices flow from the court as he walked up from the entryway, sounds common to the exterior of every basketball gym Keith had ever approached. He stepped into the darkness of the court’s perimeter and immediately acknowledged the accuracy of what he’d heard. He thought it looked like a perfectly preserved or restored antique. The single tier’s five-thousand yellow wooden chairs and parquet floor combined to reflect almost exactly what he had seen when he watched the Celtics televised from Boston.

Levy Trail

I walked with the Geezers on the Levy Trail this morning for 37:30 but had to cut out early to visit my parents.

Burns Park Loop/Levy Trail Loop

We Geezers walked the Burns Park Loop this morning in 1:40:51. It was 33°F when we started. The gang was composed of Ron and Elaine, Sandy Venable, Brass, Rosemary, and Chrissy Ferguson. I told Bill there's a decent chance I'll be sore tomorrow.
Early this evening I walked the Levy Trail North in 34:43.

Paragraph(s) of the day from A Different Closet

James Shoemaker married Ellen Millar in June of 1949 between their junior and senior years at Baylor University. He remembered they shared a twin bed for nearly a year in their collegiate poverty. They made the typical progression through bed sizes but for some reason stopped at queen until 1982 when Ellen persuaded him to purchase the king they lay in, three feet apart on this wintery January night. As was frequently the case when he relented to her requests, he wished he had let her have her way sooner. He was able now for the first time in his adult life to lie with both feet supported by a mattress. Noise from the party still buzzed within him, like road sounds that cling after a long drive completed just before bedtime, and Shoemaker lay in the quiet darkness, regretful for his reaction when he learned of Keith’s possible congressional race. He had asked in a consciously angered tone why he was not told earlier, before Keith left. Why had Keith not told him? He then insisted on calling Keith or Ronald Hardman or both, but Ellen and Karen in tandem insisted he not.

Orange Street Loop

I walked the Orange Street Loop late this morning in 46:56. It's warm in Levy. The snow is gone, except where people made snowmen.

Paragraph(s) of the day from A Different Closet
“Come now. You have to know.” Green stopped, disappointed to find Keith at all puzzled by this. “Don’t you know that Stephen holds you in utter contempt?”

“Well, sure, of course I do. That’s why...”

“No, wait just a minute. Let me finish. You have to see that he thinks of you as nothing more than some hick sportswriter from Arkansas and, furthermore, he believes you are contemptuous of him, which you are. It’s only natural. The cultures you two came from are as foreign to each other as they are to tribes in the furthest backwaters of the Amazon, and Stephen was raised to be forever disdainful of your ilk. Also, he sees you as an interloper, which again, you arguably are. I once thought Stephen might be the one to elevate SAGA beyond our current status as a mere support group. From the start he imagined a leadership role, at least on a local level, perhaps in politics. And then when Gerry Studds stood on the floor of the U.S. Congress and declared his homosexuality and was re-elected after everyone knew he was gay, we all could imagine the possibilities. Keith, you must recognize that Stephen has paid his dues. He’s worked very hard for our cause. He has aided it tremendously and felt he had earned an opportunity like the one I’ve proposed for you, and as far as he's concerned you haven’t done anything but knock out a professional football player. Stephen has been at this for years and, in his mind, all it’s given him is the opportunity to watch you become at least temporarily as famous as Sylvester Stallone.”

Maple Street Loop

The roads have improved. I walked the Maple Street Loop at lunchtime today in 33:18.

OVERHEARD
"Why would anyone want potato chips that taste like biscuits and gravy?"
—man talking to no one in particular in the snack isle at Edwards Cashsavers

Paragraph(s) of the day from A Different Closet

He assumed from the start someone he interviewed might contact Ingram, or Green, but he wasn’t particularly concerned. After all, he was merely in search of the truth. Lardner had just turned north onto I-55, was almost home and felt all he heard over the previous thirty-six hours helped confirm his belief. There was the evidence from Hillman and Julie Hopper, from Ingram’s city-league basketball teammates in Little Rock, and from backstretch workers at Oaklawn who said Ingram’s obvious love for Cam Luru had left them stunned by the primetime exposure of his homosexuality. Lardner spoke with an openly gay business writer from the Gazette named Jay Quattlebaum, a friend of Julie’s and a man as handsome as Bobby Green, though nearly fifteen years younger. Quattlebaum had been a frequent guest at the Ingrams’s house, and their friendships endured the divorce. “Keith and I went out for drinks now and then,” Quattlebaum told him. “I’m a bit of a sports fan, and we became good friends, but no, I’d have to say there was never anything about him that for a minute made me think he was gay. I don’t think he is. He took the job in St. Louis for a raise in pay, and you know what, I don’t blame him. You can bet that for twenty-thousand more a year I’d lie that I was straight.”

Maple Street Loop

I alternated one-minute jogs with four-minute walks to complete the Maple Street Loop this morning in 36:30. I don't know what the official snowfall was last night, but we have seven inches in Levy.
They measured 7.1 inches at the North Little Rock airport, which is about four miles north of here as a crow flies. I guess that explains the extra tenth on a inch.

Paragraph(s) of the day from A Different Closet
Lardner met Julie Hopper, the former Julie Ingram, at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock faculty dining room for lunch. Their table sat next to a row of windows, through which they watched students walk to class or congregate in an open area of concrete and brick, with a three-story, redbrick library a hundred feet away.

“Someone told me he’d moved to St. Louis, but that’s all I knew until right before Thanksgiving, when all the fuss started,” Hopper said. “Then it was like, ‘Did you know he was gay,’ or, ‘Can you believe Keith’s gay?’ I couldn’t. Seriously, nothing could’ve surprised me more.”

Julie was blonde but in every other way seemed cut from the same cloth as Karen Shoemaker. Her hair was shorter, above her ears, and she wore no more than a touch of makeup. Lardner thought she was beautiful.
“If you don’t mind my asking, why were you so surprised?”

“It was just the way he was, you know, all boy all the time,” she said.

She told Lardner about a game Ingram liked to play. “Wherever we went, he’d pick out the prettiest girl and name her after the place. Like, for instance, the best looking girl at a Waffle House would be Miss Waffle House. It was endless. There were Miss Walmarts, Miss Pizza Huts, you name it. The game got old, but he never quit with it. I’m not sure, but I don’t think gay men play it.”

“No, I don’t believe we do.”

Ridge Road Loop

I walked the Ridge Road Loop this morning in 1:06:33. The newspaper's Website says we will get between three and six inches of snow tonight and tomorrow morning. Weather.com says we'll get less than an inch. Who knows, but I'm cheering like two motherfuckers for weather.com.

QUESTION OF THE DAY
Who would win a dogfight between the ten best U.S. Air Force and Navy fighter pilots?

Paragraph(s) of the day from A Different Closet

Green knew of Lardner’s ambition to reach one of the pinnacles of the gay and lesbian movement, perhaps to assume a role similar to the one Harvey Milk held nearly a decade earlier in San Francisco, as a player in the political mainstream, but Green also knew that Keith Ingram was the one most likely to live Lardner’s dream. The second mid-term election of the Reagan administration would come the following fall. Campaigns would soon start. With Keith Ingram, Green suspected he was bringing into the SAGA fold the first openly gay man popular enough to make a run.

Orange Street Loop

I walked the Orange Street Loop this afternoon in 47:02. It's cold in Levy, 33°F at 4:43 p.m. I hope 2016 breaks the new 2015 standard for hot years, polar bears be damned.

Paragraph(s) of the day from A Different Closet
Keith was still full as he lay reading in his bedroom three hours after his meal at the Shoemaker’s, and he could hear Karen’s voice, unintelligible from so far away as she talked on the phone. Karen laughed enough that Keith was swept by curiosity from his bed and down the hallway into the den. She laughed again, turned to Keith, covered the mouthpiece of the phone and whispered, “It’s Bill Seale, for you.”

Karen was talking to Seale about a conversation Keith had with her father at the dinner table earlier that evening. She said he told her father that he thought God was a creation of man, dreamed up thousands of years ago to contribute to our sense of purpose and to help explain our existence.

“Dad said, ‘So you don’t believe Jesus died for you?’ and Keith said, ‘No, I do believe that, and I’ve always felt badly about it. The thing is, he shouldn’t have.’ ”

Keith, from five feet away, could hear Seale laugh over the phone. He walked to Karen and leaned his head close to the receiver.

“Holy shit, what did the Reverend say?” Seale said.

Hot Springs/Oaklawn Park

I walked out and back from the Oaklawn parking lot at lunchtime today for 35:13.
Later I lost $0.80. I was there Friday and did not place a bet, so after two days I'm down $0.80.
A nice three-year-old colt named Whitmore ran well today. He should get his name in the paper soon, in fact probably Monday as part of the Smarty Jones Stakes advance.

Paragraph(s) of the day from A Different Closet

Shoemaker pulled an old rag from a handle on the grill to wipe sauce from his hands. “Keith, I’m uncertain of this genetic wiring within us that you speak of, or the extent to which it influences our actions and deeds, but regardless, I believe that in almost every case it is merely that, an influence, and ultimately not the causative factor. It is perhaps persuasive in the choices we make, but it nevertheless leaves those choices for us to make on our own, consciously and independently. Does that make any sense to you?”

Maple Street Loop

I alternated one-minute jogs with four-minute walks to complete the Maple Street Loop tonight in 29:01.

Paragraph(s) of the day from A Different Closet
He turned off Manchester onto Sublette Avenue just as the thump returned to his consciousness. It turned loud enough to squelch thoughts of SAGA and become familiar. Its source began to take root in Keith’s mind and finally sprouted into certainty with the onset of a tug to the right, conveyed through the steering wheel from the passenger-side front tire. Of course. With his sensory data now sufficient, Keith was relieved. Changing tires fit into his mini-manifest of automotive expertise. He was a three-minute walk from home, it was warm out, and time-consuming expensive repairs were not needed, not for this.

“Why don’t you buy a new car?” Karen said.

“What are you talking about? All I had was a flat tire.”

“You need a new car.”

“No I don’t,” Keith said. “This one works fine.”

“It’s going to blow up.”

“Of course. All cars blow up. When they do, you buy a new one.”

“Whatever. What you really need is a dose of common sense.”

Keith responded with his standard rebuttal, that common sense was no more than the sediment of advice handed children for the sake of security, consistency, and safety. He acknowledged its usefulness but argued that underlying truths essential for progress were often buried beneath it, and that someone had to do the digging, even if it incited comments like Karen’s or led to cars blowing up.

Levy Trail

I walked the Levy Trail 5K this morning in 50:28 and went through three miles in 48:50. We have some perfect horse racing weather going on here.

Paragraph(s) of the day from A Different Closet

Keith was conscious of having barely spoken during the proceeding half hour. He was mesmerized. “I had no idea. I didn’t know anything about your story or any of these I’ve heard. I hadn’t even considered them.”

“Most people haven’t,” Bush said. “Mr. Ingram, here’s the thing. We’re not asking for special treatment. All we want is a fair shake. You know, freedom, equal rights. That’s it. I know Bobby’s convinced you can help us, and I think you can, too. When I left San Jose last night, all my friends were excited that I was coming to meet you. You’re big news and good news, and that’s something we can use. Please help us, Mr. Ingram, will you?”

Levy Trail

We Geezers walked the entire length of the Levy Trail and back this morning in 1:40:51.

I PLAN TO STAB...
...the next woman I see wearing red horn-rimmed glasses

Paragraph(s) of the day from A Different Closet
Keith’s Chevette ran well as he drove to SAGA Midwest on this cool and diamond-bright morning. He stopped two blocks from Karen’s house at a convenience store for gas, walked in and turned to the clerk, a tall and skinny teenage boy. Keith had seen him there dozens of times.

“I’d like five dollars worth. I’m at pump...” He looked through the glass toward his car.“...heck, I don’t know. It’s the yellow Chevette.”

“OK, five bucks on six,” the clerk said. He looked up from the register as Keith handed him five one-dollar bills. “Hey, you’re Keith Ingram, aren’t you?”

“I am.”

“I knew that. I knew I’d seen you here. I saw you on The Today Show yesterday.” Keith had seen this boy’s look on the faces of children at games when they met their sports heroes. “I mean, we were all in here going, ‘Hey, that’s the guy that buys Milwaukee’s Best.’ We all thought you and Carmichael were great.”

Keith entered the SAGA office mindful of the clerk’s attention. He shared the story with Green. “My fame has now reached, what, eight days.”

“I believe it will continue to serve you,” Green said. “My hope, of course, is that it begins to serve us.”

Central Avenue

HOT SPRINGS—I walked for 39:15 minutes out and back, or north and south, on Central Avenue from the Oaklawn Park parking lot at about 8 o'clock this morning. It was 22°F.

Paragraph(s) of the day from A Different Closet

A moment later Dampier’s car coasted to a stop in front of Karen’s house. “Keith, that was fun. We’ll have to do it again.”

“Sure, why not,” Keith said. “That was great pizza, and I really had fun.” This was the moment about which Keith had worried most. It humored him earlier to think his concern was similar to those he’d had before and during all of his first dates, except that his perspective had changed for this one. His question wasn’t whether or not he should lean in for a kiss, forever the greatest dilemma of first dates, but how he would react if it were Dr. Dampier who leaned. Keith reached forward and pulled the door latch, turned his head toward the house, and began to step up and out of the low sports car, when Dampier placed a hand on his arm. Keith was never quite sure what motivated his response, though he always suspected something very close to instinct. He literally jerked his arm away. “Oh,” Dampier said. “I was about to say that I hoped to see you again, but I guess I won’t.”

Keith paused. As uncomfortable as he was, this ending was no good. He sat back down. He would have to adjust, improvise, lie. That was manageable, he knew, but habitual deceit was still new to him. “You know, I am sorry,” Keith said. “I just, uh, I get a little claustrophobic sometimes. Please, please, please don’t take it personally.”

Dampier laughed. “You know, it’s kind of hard not to take it personally when someone reacts to me as if I were a hot pan.”

Maple Street Loop

I alternated one-minute jogs with four-minute walks to complete the Maple Street Loop late this morning in 29:20.

Paragraph(s) of the day from A Different Closet

It occurred to Keith when he saw the front of Black Thorn Pub that he might have immediately proposed marriage to any woman who had selected this bar as the site for their first date. He was momentarily delighted, though not enough to eliminate his anxiousness.

Black Thorn was a block west of the South Grand business district on Wyoming Street, which he and Phil Dampier walked across toward the door from Dampier’s year-old, silver Corvette. Keith could see through the window exactly the things that attracted him to neighborhood pubs. Several men sat at the bar in near darkness, with a basketball game underway on an overhead television. Younger men and lovely women played video games, pool, shuffle board, and foosball in back, where it was brighter. Warmth and cigarette smoke and the smell of oregano and bread rushed through the door, accompanied by jukebox music and loud talk and laughter. From the back he heard the clack of pool balls and electronic pulses and chirps from video games. Pitchers and brown bottles of beer and columns of smoke lined the bar and rose from the tables. The waitresses wore blue jeans and orange rugby shirts. One of them—a tiny brunette—touched Keith’s elbow. “Hi fellows,” she said. “Find a place to sit and someone’ll be right with you.”

Levy Trail 5K

I walked the Levy Trail 5K this morning in 47:33 and went through three miles in 46:02.

Paragraph(s) of the day from A Different Closet
From the moment Keith recognized in Elsie Seale’s voice the tone of a matchmaker, even before she began her litany of tributes to Dr. Phil Dampier, he tried to figure a way out of this date, but it apparently was arranged and settled upon before Elsie called him the night before, minutes after he and Karen returned home from their first meal at Candy’s. “Trust me, don’t waste your time fightin with her over it,” Bill Seale said. “They ain’t no way you can win. You just gotta do whatever she says.”
Dr. Dampier was due in ten minutes, and Karen could feel Keith’s discomfort, which encouraged her, though she would not of course admit to Keith that she was jealous of the man on his way. “Tell me again,” she said. “You’re going out with one of the best looking men in St. Louis. He’s a cardiologist, which means he probably makes more money in a month than you and I do in a year, and Bill and Elsie both say he’s wonderful, not to mention that he sounded perfect on the phone. So tell me again. What are you so worried about?”

Lakewood Lake No. 3

As the lone Geezer, I walked one lap of the outer loop and one of the inner around Lakewood Lake No. 3 for a total of approximately two miles in 31:55. It was cold and rainy, and no one else showed.

Paragraph(s) of the day from A Different Closet

Seale sat in a large recliner. A college football game was on television with the volume turned down. Green walked the den’s perimeter, reading dust jackets among the hundreds of books shelved floor to ceiling, examining art and photographs on the dark paneled walls as wood crackled in the fireplace. He stopped at a black-and-white photograph of a middle-aged white man walking with two black teenagers. They each squinted as they marched through what must have been bright sunlight. “This is from Selma, isn’t it?” Green said.

“Well, it’s right there somewhere,” Seale said. “I cain’t remember exactly where that picture was took.”

“Is this you?”

“Yeah, about twenty years and fifty pounds ago.”

“Which day was this?” Green said.

“I think that’s from the second march. Have you read much about ‘em?”

“No, not a lot. I’ve read your stories, of course.”

“Well, good, so you know my somewhat distorted truth. Good for you.”

“Distorted?” Green said. “What do you mean?”

Seale seemed momentarily distracted by the game. Green looked at the set long enough to see that a team in orange jerseys was close to an end zone.

“I’ll tell you,” Seale said. “I’ve always maintained that writers always distort the truth. I mean, they don’t do it on purpose, but they just cain’t help it. You see, in my mind, a writer or a reporter can only tell the story the best he sees it, and the best he sees it is gonna be at least a little different from the way anyone else saw it. That’s why you cain’t really believe nothin you read. All you can do is hope it was close to the way whoever wrote it saw it.”

“So how do you know what’s true when you read the paper?”
“I’ll tell you, that’s a hard thing to ever really know. Truth ain’t nothin but an inner quality, at least to my way of thinkin. It ain’t really transferable. They’s almost never any sort of absolute truth. Mine, yours, theirs, hell, they’s all different. I’ll tell you this. If you write about somethin and someone who lived it tells you that you got it right, or even most of it right, then you got lucky.” Seale pushed himself up from his recliner to stand beside Green in front of the photograph. “I had a few people from them marches tell me I was close, but ever time, ever one of ‘em, they all said, ‘But here’s somethin you missed,’ or, ‘That was good, but you left this out.’ One young fella said, ‘We wasn’t all marchin for freedom. I just didn’t have nothin else to do, and they was all them good lookin girls.’ I don’t think I put that in there anywhere. So you could say I missed the truth, and hell, they still gave me the goddang Pulitzer. I probably wouldn’t of got it if I’d of put in there that at least one of them kids was marchin for pussy.”

This was something very new for Green. He had never experienced genius so beautifully disguised, at least not in such a pure and talented man. “You remind me of Mark Twain,” he said.

“Hush son. Flattery won’t get you shit around here.”

Two Rivers Park

We Geezers walked from Two Rivers Park this morning for 1:42:36. As part of our out-and-back route, we crossed the Big Dam Bridge to see the flooding on the North Little Rock side of the River Trail.

Maple Street Loop

I walked the Maple Street Loop this morning in 31:09. In about an hour, I will ride with an old friend named Kirby Shoffner and his brother in law Blair Griffen to the Liberty Bowl in Memphis. The Razorbacks will play Kansas State this afternoon. We're going without tickets and hope to get in for five dollars or less. These are two men I often went to games with from circa 1986-89 but not since. I saw Kirby for the first time in at least fifteen years when I was with the Hash at E.J.'s a few days before Christmas.
The Razorbacks beat the Kansas State Wildcunts, 45-23. The game was a sellout, tickets went for $75 to $85, and  five of us got in for a total of $45. Ples Spradley, another of the old gang, and I got in for free. We offered a woman $10 each and she said, "Oh no, I just want to give these away so they don't go to waste."
Our seating arrangement was fantastic, the best anyone could possibly have ever experienced at a sold-out bowl game. I mean anywhere ever, outside of someone who offered space in a private box where they were handing out free blow jobs. This trip was the most fun I have had surrounding a football game since a couple of high school state championships I went to in 2005, or maybe the Vilonia drummer game from the same year. I'm telling you, I laughed at least once a minute, nonstop for twelve and a half hours.

OVERHEARD
"C'MON RAZORBACKS, KICK THEIR TEETH IN, IN A CHRISTIAN WAY, I MEAN."
—Blair Griffin, midway through the first quarter

"ALL RIGHT RAZORBACKS, WAY TO KICK ASS IN A CRAPPY, MEANINGLESS BOWL GAME."
—Blair Griffin, with about two minutes left in the fourth quarter