Circle Game, continued

Doug MacRay (Ben Affleck):
I need your help. I can't tell you what it is, you can never ask me about it later, and we're gonna hurt some people.

James Coughlin (Jeremy Renner):
...Whose car are we gonna take?

"The Town" (2010)

That much thought went into my decision to ride a bicycle across the country. Depending on how long you've known me, your next comment is likely - "The planning stage was a feat of overthinking for the books." Depending on how long you've known me...

I've written profusely about this adventure, and will do so many more times during this 50th year anniversary, Good Lord willing and... All that. We intend to return to the bike trail in Eastern Colorado, camping near Eads and looking eastward across the Plains, as I did so many years ago. Return with the love of my life, the dogs, and the memories of a transformative road that led to...now.

Camp, Day One, Bigfoot Country

There were so many adventures, so many days of wonder and exploration, of finding that I could accomplish something wonderful if I let myself. I've told the story of Jeffrey City, WY and the unabashedly flirtatious teenage girls ("Long Time Gone"). "On Gossamer Wings" put the ride into a life's context.

I wrote two pieces about the late Charles Kuralt ("Preparing for the Road to '76" and "On the Road To '76") and his years-long journey to see an America most people either drive past, fly over or live in without noticing. Right now I miss Charlie, for the balance we desperately need as we are on the road to '26.

Glen Griffin makes a second appearance in "Like a River." Barbara Beck gets a paragraph in "It's the Mileage." Both figured far more prominently in the ride, and in where the "ride" took me afterward. than would be suggested by how many words I've granted them. 

Barbara and I kept in touch, met for a ski week in March 1977, and dated briefly after I'd moved to Colorado later that year (she was a student at DU). This is where the "intellectual exercise" of crafting life themes mentioned previously (Circle Game) collides with Alan Jackson's "Here in the Real World." When hearts get broken... Not fun enough. Not fun at all. But, stick with me. Shit continues to get real, and it's cool.

Glen...

I knew how to ride a bike when I started Bikecentennial, and the months of hockey coaching had given me the legs to begin the journey. Glen taught me how to be a cyclist, how to suffer in the saddle and not make a thing of it. How to solve problems on the road and make light of them. How to tell bike stories that involve you, but aren't about you.

We were in a camp in the Tetons. I'd been in an accident the day before and suffered minor injuries. He prescribed beer, a lot of it. A second group of riders asked if they could share the site with us, and then settled down to have a brew of their own. We were swapping stories, life on the road kinds of stories, and one of the new arrivals turned to me.

"Do you know who he is?" he asked, pointing at Glen.

"Glen."

"He was the road racing champion of California a few years ago."

No wonder I had such a hard time keeping his wheel. He'd told a bunch of race training stories, but never that he'd won a thing.

Some readers, especially those five of you non-family members who know me best (that's an inside joke) are now saying, "Wait a minute. That's a great story but do you really expect us to believe you sat around telling stories with people you hardly knew?" Yes. It was that kind of transformative experience.

Years later, as a bike patrol instructor... The echos of a thousand B76 miles in Glen's company - ha, in his wake - resonated as I tried to teach by example, to impart not just skill but the true love of spending a life on a bike saddle. Show, don't tell. 

We kept in touch for several years after, went skiing together (and he showed me some very interesting M-1 Abrams prototype photos). He sent me a wedding present in 1980, a stained-glass lamp he'd made. I still think of him often.

In Kansas, I learned a valuable lesson about saying "Yes." I was camping, alone, at a rest stop when a pickup truck pulled up. The gregarious, cowboy-hatted obvious rancher got out and struck up a conversation. He was delighted to hear the story, had a million questions and invited me to toss my bike in the back of the truck and join them for dinner at their nearby farm. Whenever I think about him and his very Kansas manners I regret saying no. It's what introverts are inclined to say, and this encounter helped me to say yes more often in life, if only occasionally.

The East Trailhead, Yorktown, VA

Ah, the painfully shy introvert side of me - it took an awful thrashing. People would just walk up to me, or us, and strike up conversations. By us, I mean other riders whom I'd befriended, which in itself was a miracle. We got used to the repetitive questions - most of us used up two sets of tires and, yes, the saddle sometimes made us ache - but tried to be good natured about it. I learned...humility.

My parents and younger brother drove down to Virginia, to pick me up after it was all said and done. I was sitting in the lobby of a hotel when my mom caught sight of me. Her three steps toward me covered the fifty feet in nothing, flat. I had had an adventure. She had worried every day. I would only understand when I had kids of my own. 

I returned home, and enrolled in the police science school at the Rochester Institute of Technology, intending to transfer the credits to Northeastern, to graduate there with my Class of '77 as I had promised my parents. A course in Creative Writing sounded like fun, and it was. It gave me the chance to write a few essays about the summer I'd just experienced. It gave me something far more valuable.

The prof asked me to read one aloud, the story of a rider who was killed on the road. I had passed her group as they gathered at the local police station shortly after she'd died, and then encountered the woman's entry in a guest book. Someone had placed an asterisk next to the writing, noting that she had passed on the highway nearby.

I wrote about the anguish of losing someone to a road accident, how it made us all feel vulnerable. How the bright sunshine of enthusiasm and zest for life contained in the guestbook writing had made it all seem worse. How looking at the beauty around me was muted every time the sound of a vehicle approached from behind.

When I finished, there was silence in the room. The professor said she had encountered one of her assistants weeping at a copier. She'd been given the task of making copies, and had read the essay as the machine droned on.

I think it was the first moment I realized that, perhaps, I might explore being a writer. I had written from my heart, and touched someone.

A little over a year later I found myself in Denver, alone. I'd long since said good bye to Barbara, who returned to California and enrolled at USC. I was working a nothing job that allowed me a small apartment, with an occasional chance to ski. Police departments were hiring, but I was very slowly learning how to answer their oral board questions. It was a painful, often embarrassing process.

I was driving near Washington Park, looking for a place I would visit for one of our client insurance companies - yet another small change case where I interviewed someone on disability. There were crowds standing along the roadway within the park, so I stopped to investigate. Anything to delay a work assignment I hardly relished.

It was a bike race, the 1978 Red Zinger Washington Park Criterium. It was the day I truly fell in love with Colorado.

Less than a year later, I got a call. Maybe the call.

"This is Sergeant Christenson, of the Greenwood Village Police Department. We're ready to hire you. Go buy a gun."

To be continued... 

Circle Game

 First, I wasn’t hearing it. I had 19 different things on my mind, but then I did, and C.J., it was magnificent. It was genius. He built these themes, and at the beginning, it was just an intellectual exercise, which is fun enough, I guess, but then in the fourth movement, he just let it go. I really didn’t think I could be surprised by music anymore. I thought about all the times this guy must’ve heard that his music was no good...

Jed Bartlet (Martin Sheen), The West Wing, "Galileo" (2000) 

There are certainly a few things that focus a person. One of them is to have a nurse hold out an IV bag containing this week's bi-specific chemo/immuno infusion and confirm - "Jim Greer, (birthdate) 71..." One can have nineteen different things on their mind and suddenly eighteen of them are bullshit.

The one thing that does not fade away as the nurse accesses the new "IV Port" surgically implanted in my chest is that the fourth movement has been played, for all of the world to see. What is left is reflection on the themes I have built in my life - bicycles, hockey, police work, family. We are, as Joni Mitchell wrote, captives on a carousel of time.

It's easy to write them in that order, because it's the way I built them. Bicycles were part of life from almost the beginning. Riding around our little neighborhood in Southhampton, PA with friends, tinkering (until she passed in 2015 my mom bought me a screwdriver every Christmas, as a reminder), and exploring ever larger circles of my home town.

We moved to Pittsford, NY in 1964 and had an even bigger, more rural environment to explore. My parents bought me an "English" bike - 26 inch wheels and three speeds in the rear hub. My brother Dave chose a purple Huffy Sting Ray, with high-rise handlebars, a banana seat and a 5 speed derailleur. I loved my new ride but the exposed shifting mechanism on the Sting Ray - there was technology to fire an imagination. It began a lifelong obsession.

1968 Schwinn catalog.

I bought my first ten-speed bike with paper route money, a blue Schwinn Continental.
27" wheels, down-tube shifters, hooded brake levers... There was no place I couldn't go - up hills, long rides in the farmlands surrounding Rochester, to work at Ward's Natural Science in the Village...of Pittsford, near the high school. This was not just useful technology. It was freedom.

I also bought skates, a particular kind. A very special kind.

Western New York introduced us to what actual winter looked like, and with it to skating. And hockey. We grew up on the frozen ponds surrounding our neighborhood, and one winter convinced our dad to build a rink in our back yard. My brothers chose wisely - Dave a forward, Mike a defenseman - the "tools of ignorance" fascinated me and I became a goaltender.

I didn't play organized hockey until, giving in to an insistent father's "suggestions" I tried out for the new high school team, expecting to be an early cut. By whatever fates I'll never know the young volunteer coach, a retired Rochester American professional named Don Cherry (you might have heard of him) thought I had some skills. For the next three years I improved from a fair pond hockey player to an established high school starter.

But, I needed goalie skates. As you can see, they are different than those worn by the other players. They are built lower to the ice surface, and are honed flat. Oh, that big plate on the side? The puck still hurt like hell after a "kick save, and a beauty." This is what they looked like, circa 1970.

Which takes us to a day in the fall of 1975.

My youngest brother was trying out for the new high school team - the Pittsford High I'd graduated became Pittsford Sutherland, his school, the new one, Pittsford Mendon... Named after the streets they were on. My dad - "There aren't any war heroes in Rochester they could name them after, for Christ's sake?"

 I took my brother to try-outs and sat down with a book. I was on hiatus - my mom refused to let me say I'd dropped out - from Northeastern University in Boston where I studied criminal justice, preparing for a career in law enforcement. I was working nights as a security guard at Xerox Corp. (1970s Rochester, remember) to make money for the cross-country bike trip I had planned during the Bicentennial summer, which left my afternoons free.

The team's goaltender situation was...fluid. The young coach, in his first years of teaching after growing up on Long Island, consulted with his senior players about how to solve his dilemma. I would later learn the conversation went something like this: "See that guy standing there," one of them said, pointing at me. "He was Pittsford's starting goalie when they went undefeated and won the league championship."

It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship that has outlasted time, distance and difference of opinion. Two and a half years later, in the booklet distributed at the season-ending banquet, I was "Asst. Coach Greer, who rode his bike across the country last summer and will complete his studies at Northeastern University this spring in anticipation of a law enforcement career."

At that point, it was just an intellectual exercise, which was fun enough. 

To be continued...     

   

Easy Read

 "I was in line behind this man, he was very skinny. I love skinny people, we are all God's children, but he says, 'How small is a small?'"

"It's small. The Mediums are medium, the Large is large. If you have to ask how small a small is you're not hungry enough, come back later. GET OUT OF THE LINE." 

The late John Pinette, at a Phoenix, AZ Dairy Queen.

I monitor my Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) dashboard periodically - meaning I look a couple times a day, to see what's cooking. Usually, it's "Eight-Balls." Zeroes. A few times a month I make a sale or three, or someone reads some pages. When your marketing budget is k-cups and internet access, even something weekly is worth celebrating. Then, there are moments...

Yesterday, someone picked up A Matter of Principle and read it. I mean, they read it. They blew through 477 pages (out of 497), the last twenty of which they polished off today. Holy cow.

There are several explanations for this much, this quickly. Here is the most plausible, derived from several comments and reviews from other James Greer novels.

Principle is an easy read.

How easy is easy?

Amy Painter is a straightforward kind of character. She is happy to share with the reader what's on her mind, and in her heart. She does hero things but doesn't require notice, or accolades. She is a professional without driving the point home unnecessarily.

And fully capable of making a point.

The story isn't complicated. It's believable, a reader can point to people they know who would do the things the characters are doing. They know people like Amy who have stood up when being counted mattered. Then, they look at the trade-offs in their lives and say:

"I'm not hungry enough."

I don't take "It's an easy read" personally. In fact, I glory in it. If it only takes you a day to see what Amy Painter does when confronted by bullies, it leaves you more time to discover what happens to Karen Sorenson when she goes undercover on a sailboat in the Bahamas. 

As Time Goes By

 Play it, Sam. Play...As Time Goes By. Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman), Casablanca, (1942)

Our phone rang, twenty five years ago. I want to recall I was sitting in our dining room, drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. In the great scheme of things... Right?

The caller was Sue O'Brien, at the time the editorial page editor for The Denver Post. Okay - "Oh...hello?"

There are several ways to tell this story. Start from the very beginning - a mild temper tantrum, a published letter to the editor of rival Rocky Mountain News? A stray comment from my wife - "There's a writing contest The Denver Post does every year. You should enter." Defying all previous life experience and actually sitting down, reading the list of entry requirements, writing something... No, this is the best way.

Daughter Katy and I are at a Rockies game, back when they actually might contest the outcome for more than an inning or two. We're wandering the lower level, probably getting a hot dog, and my cell phone rings. It's Sue. There is a problem with the column I've written as a Colorado Voices essayist, one scheduled to appear in a few days on the editorial section of the paper. It has been OTBE'd - overtaken by events.

Timothy McVeigh (The Oklahoma City bomber) was set for execution, but there was some sort of procedural wrangling involving (shocking, I know) discovery foul-ups by the FBI. My column was a review of the record - he did it and everyone knew it - and WTF was the justice system waiting for? In a sane world there was only the sentence of death to carry out. Etc.

Except, between the time I'd submitted the column for publication and...then, the procedural niceties had been addressed and the sentence was going to be carried out. The writing was stale.

Not to worry, she said. Together, we re-wrote sections that expressed surprise things had taken so long, that even the defense's submissions seemed muted because he'd obviously confessed to his attorneys, and that the sooner he was no longer with us the better for everyone. Satisfied that the writing was once again meaningful she wished Katy and I a pleasant day at the ball game and we hung up.

That's when it hit me. Sue O'Brien was a whirlwind, a force in public Colorado halls, a woman pioneer in jobs usually filled by men. She'd been in TV, had been a tenured CU professor, had important jobs for governors Dick Lamm and Roy Romer (his campaign manager) and now oversaw the editorial page of an established major American newspaper. And... We'd just worked together to rehabilitate something I'd written so it would appear under my byline. Me, a patrol sergeant at a modest police department with an entirely normal family life.

Sue was also the kind of gruff and straightforward that any cop would admire. During the initial phone call, to tell me I was one of twelve (I think) successful applicants who would write six columns each in the 2001 Voices cycle, my expression of glee was apparently insufficient. "This is an honor," I said, somewhat blandly.

"You're goddamned right it is," she snorted. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

As an alum I had a chance to do a guest column from time to time. I wrote one questioning the conduct of the Tattered Cover book store and the sanity of the Colorado Supreme Court. "You aren't being fair," Sue said. Then she printed it. Two weeks later, a card appeared in my work mailbox - Colorado Governor Bill Owens had liked my opinion piece. "Keep writing," the note said. 

Sue passed away two years later, the victim of cancer. At her funeral Dottie Lamm, former First Lady of Colorado, told the story of Sue bringing a "dime bag" - marijuana - to the Governor's mansion, to help with Dottie's nausea during chemotherapy. At the time, depending on the amount, that was a serious act. Apparently, Sue was just brassy enough not to care. Even the priest conducting the service broke into unrestrained laughter.

On the wall of my study hangs a framed example of the column Sue said was her favorite of mine, presented to each of us at a luncheon after our gigs were over. It is a celebration of the Colorado Avalanche Stanley Cup win in 2001, the great Joe Sakic to Ray Bourque Cup pass. I glance at it from time to time, to remember.

I've written millions of words since my last work for The Denver Post. But that phone call, that voice... An assurance from one of the tough people who made up Colorado journalism at the turn of the 21st Century, that I was a good writer who deserved whatever success I enjoyed.

Twenty-five years on, I wish I could send her one of my books and tell her what that all meant to me.