Horn Bar

This past Saturday (October 18, 2008), my little sister Kristin ran her first full marathon in Indianapolis. That’s her in the top right corner, 23rd from the right in the white t-shirt.  And visor.

Her twin brother, Kirk, and I inspired her so much with our high school running exploits, that she took up running herself at AHS, and never stopped running.              Kirk and I did. 

She had been running 5K races for years, once while pushing one of those three wheeled racing strollers carrying her sleeping four year old twins.  The twins finished ahead of her.  Once, she ran a small 5K with a couple hundred or so runners, and the twins watched from the side, and jumped out at the end to finish the race with mom, and run through the finish chute.  Race officials were not amused, and caught them before the five-year old’s could finish, and potentially alter the race results, by confusing the place-counters at the end.  You can’t be sure if a five year old did NOT run the entire race, and beat some adults out of their age group.

 But I digress…

At some point, Kristin had decided she wanted to run a marathon just once, so she began training with some running partners from her hometown of Wadsworth, Ohio.  As it turned out, Kristin was going to be traveling to Anderson to join family for Mom’s 75th birthday party, and when she saw there was an Indy Marathon that weekend, the plans just fell into place.

The race itself went very well, and Kristin finished 575th at 4:08.  She failed to qualify for Boston, but she said this was her first, and last marathon, so there.

Saturday night, at Mom’s birthday party, someone questioned how a Casino in Anderson, Indiana could get Aretha Franklin to play there, and how desperate she must’ve been to take the billing.  This is when Kristin told us that Indy had somehow managed to hire Meatloaf to perform on a race route street corner to entertain the runners as they passed.  She swore it was him, and that it had been too early in the race for her to be delirious. The oddest thing was that he was singing    "I Would Do Anything For Love, (But I Won’t Do That)", instead of the more obvious "Paradise By The Dashboard Light".  I guess he would’ve needed a girl to accompany him.  Or a drunk college student.

Google has since informed me that, much to my surprise, this was not, in fact, Meatloaf on the street corner, but instead one of the famous Perkins Brothers Celebrity Impersonators of Bardstown, Kentucky, who had been hired to perform during and after the race.  Apparently, the elder Perkins brother does a first-rate Elvis, though I always prefer "50’s Elvis" over "70’s Jumpsuit Elvis".

My two other favorite moments from the marathon my sister ran, while I was at work less than 26.3 miles away in downtown Indy were almost as good as a bad Meatloaf song.  Somewhere near the midway point, Kristin was cruising along at 9:28 minutes per mile pace, when someone yelled out 

"Runner down!"

Fearing a Tour de France style mass pile-up, Kristin instinctively braced herself for the inevitable log-jam, but was surprised when the "runner down" turned out to be a dead squirrel in the road.  It’s just another tragic reminder that, nuts are a good source of carbs and energy, but you MUST hydrate properly, or you pay the price.

I also enjoyed hearing Kristin tell us that she pulled out her cell phone around Mile 22 to call husband Mark, and let him know about when she would be at the finish line.  I was concerned that she had elected NOT to use any sort of hands-free devise as she ran.  But at least she wasn’t texting.

Sunday morning, as I was leaving for work, and Kristin was preparing the family for the return trip to Wadsworth, I asked how she was feeling, and she said she was not too sore, at least yet.  I found out tonight that, Sunday night, when they got back home, Kristin had cut the grass at their new house with the big yard.  And apparently, she had done it in less than four hours, best in her age group, or her immediate family.

I’m so proud of my little sister.

Ali, you were a fighter for all of your five months.

R.I.P., and tell Snuggles hi for us….

Friday night, Debbie and I traveled to Eastern Hancock
to see her son Sam, and the mighty Lapel Bulldogs
play high school football.
I was haunted by Macy’s email this morning, telling me that
JT and HSE were playing "Big-Boy football" in Zionsville tonight,
but he asked what "God forsaken cornfield Lapel was playing in"…

In truth, it was surrounded by corn on only three sides, and I-70
on the North side.  The visiting grandstands were maybe 50 yards
from the four-lane highway, and the truckers were honking at us all night.  We eventually stationed a cheerleader out by the road to at least organize their enthusiasm.

As we settled into our comfy aluminum bleacher seats, still saturated by the all-day rain,
I saw a guy and his wife approaching our side, and recalled that I’d seen him at
each Lapel game this year, and he had looked really familiar.
I had a hunch, but it didn’t completely make sense, so I asked another Lapel
parent in the stands, and my hunch proved correct.

Jerry Miller grew up on Winding Way, near the "new" Edgewood School,
and neighbors with the Ginleys, Funk’s, Vance’s, and Kendall’s, to name a few.
His dad, Harold, was our basketball coach at North Side Junior High, but
he taught us so much more than how to beat the zone press.
I’m not sure when the Miller’s moved out to some farmland way out on West 8th Street,
but we lost track of Jerry long before we forgot Coach Miller.

I do recall that Macy, Funk, and I will readily attest that the hardest day of work we EVER
did was the day we baled hay for Coach Miller, and Jerry never wavered in the summer
heat, as he threw the 50# bales UP into the barn, as the rest of us struggled lift our
flannel sleeves to wipe our dusty, sweaty brows. 
We gained eternal respect for Jerry that day.

I knew I had recognized him these past few games, and I’m glad I finally approached him tonight.
We talked, and caught up until the game started, and then we turned our attention to our Bulldogs.

By the way, in real life,  Jerry has been with the Anderson Police Department for over 20 years,
and I don’t recall how long he said he has been a Detective, but it’s been awhile.
It was good to reconnect with an old familiar face, although I may have more remembered
the face from the attached 1969 Edgewood School yearbook. 
Jerry is smack in the middle of the bottom row.

I’ll take my camera to the next Lapel game for an updated shot.

oh, and Lapel won on Friday night, and Sam had his 3rd interception of the year.

I love high school football games……

Last month, my sister’s mother-in-law, Lois passed away, and her funeral and service was in her hometown of Harrodsburg, Kentucky.  The visitation was on a Saturday, and Kristin’s twin brother, Kirk, and I decided to drive down into Kentucky to be with our sister, and maybe help keep an eye out for her own seven year old twins that afternoon.  It might have helped if I could have kept up with them, but they had a forty year jump on me.  So they did what children do at a funeral service….they ran in circles until they were red in the face.

And we did what adults do at a funeral visitation….we shared stories.

And nobody in Harrodsburg, Kentucky can tell a story like Cousin Rex.  That man can spin a yarn.    

Rex grew up in, and never really left his hometown for most of his 45 years.  He mostly grew up in the farm house of his grandparents, and his life around them was full of great memories.  Like the his & hers spittoons beside both Grandpa and Grandma’s sittin’ chairs, as they both chewed pure tobacco from early teen years until they died in their nineties.  

Their farmhouse sat on a modest five acre plot of Kentucky land, made modest only by the hundred acre farms that surrounded them on either side.  For some reason, Grandma never liked or trusted the Phone Company, and when they began to plant telephone poles along their country road, she intercepted them, and made it clear that they would not be planting poles along her front yard, and she waved her shotgun at them to emphasize her resolve. 

Rex naturally supported his grandmother, and on that day in his tenth year, when Grandma had finished making apple pies, she handed him a pie tin of gone-bad apples to toss out into the fields.    

As Rex approached the nearest field, he was forever distracted by the man working on top of the telephone pole across the property line, and the apples never reached the fields.  Instead, Rex started chunkin’ the rotten apples at the Telephone Man at the top of the pole in the next yard.   Once he got his attention, Rex had the guy on the pole duckin’ and hidin’ behind the pole, as best he could.  Rex was out of apples when Grandma came out and began to holler at him.   But the guy on the pole shouted back to Grandma that it was ok, cuz he hadn’t been hit, and it looked like the kid was fresh out of apples anyway.  

I don’t recall if Rex got apple pie after dinner that night. 

You could tell that Rex loved to tell this, and many other stories, and he could easily draw a crowd, just as he had at the funeral parlor.   Then he told us of a business luncheon a few years back he had attended while working for his cable and electronics company.   As the large group of telecommunications workers enjoyed their post-lunch coffee, Rex got to tellin’ his stories, and naturally, the Apple story was widely enjoyed by all.  And then an older, retired gentleman at the fringe of the group stood up, cleared his throat, and said, "The boy’s tellin’ the truth."          Everyone turned to see who had spoken, and one man asked how he could be so sure of it.

"Because it was me on top of that pole dodgin’ apples that day". 

(Aunt Rosemary & Uncle Julian–April 30, 1960) 

Uncle Jay died last weekend.

Not me.  My actual Uncle Jay.  

And my nieces and nephews call me Uncle Georgy.

Actually, it was my Uncle Julian (Chapman), but everyone
outside the family knew him as Jay, which was confusing
when I was around, but I’ll get to that in a minute. 

Seems like most people I have known have lots of aunts,
uncles, cousins and large extended families.

My mom was an only child, and my dad has just one sister,
Aunt Rosemary. So I’ve only ever had one Uncle, and that was Julian.

I grew up in a relatively simpler, and less distracted time in the
1960’s and 1970’s.  Although we lived nearly two hours away,
it seemed like every weekend, Mom and Dad would load all five
of us Horn kids into the family station wagon, and we would
spend the weekend visiting all of my grandparents and cousins
in Lafayette.  And they would visit us often while we spent
three weeks at the lakes each summer. 

I don’t remember the Chapman’s ever living anywhere except the
house I was at yesterday after the funeral.  They must have built
it around 1961, when my oldest cousin was born. 

I always thought of the house as being out in the country. 
Their "neighborhood" was not quite a dozen houses on a half-mile
stretch of a gravel road that didn’t quite leave room for two cars,
but that didn’t happen very often, and the road was built more for
John Deere than for Henry Ford.  It was surrounded on all sides by
old growth trees and woods, cornfields, and rolling Indiana countryside. 

As a kid, I always thought it was unfair that they got so many more
stars in their night sky than we did in Anderson. 

Being "city-kids" from the big GM town, it was such a change
of scenery and culture to visit the Chapman’s "out in the country".
The surrounding neighbors had cows, pigs, rabbits, mice, corn,
soy beans, and lots of grass and mud, and gardens bigger than
our whole house back home.  

And the kids drove tractors, mini-bikes, dirt bikes,
and occassionally, the old farm pick-up, if you stayed in
the neighborhood.  We were very jealous.  But they had
much more practical experience on two motorized wheels,
and the only time I tried to take the Yamaha dirt bike for a spin,
I ended up too close to a patio full of family, and too unfamiliar
with the difference between the throttle and the brake of the bike,
and I managed to scatter the patio, and drive halfway up the brick
side of the back of the house.  I haven’t been on motorcycle since then.

I was reminded of that several times yesterday. 

The neighbor kids were fun to hang out with, especially
when they shared their toys.  Roger, Larry, Scott, Mike,
Scott, and JD, as well as our cousins didn’t seem to mind
the city cousin invasions, and they are a large part of my
memories of visiting my cousins in their "country neighborhood". 

Yesterday, I was back at the Chapman’s house for the first time in
15 years, and the neighbors were all there.  I learned that the
neighbor boys had grown up, married and had kids, and a cool thing
had happened;  Over time, they had all bought up the neighborhood
properties as they became available, and they have all moved back
to the gravel road.  They even bought the thirty acres of woods and
Wea Creek behind them to fend off unwanted development to their flank.

I suppose they might not recognize or describe this Utopian community
as my Rose colored glasses saw it yesterday, but the idea feels nice. 

(Kristin and Kirk are thinking of Mrs. Adair right now…)

In real life, Uncle Julian was Jay Chapman, who worked at the Lafayette
John Deere dealership for as long as I can remember.  Besides the
dirt bike patio incident, one of my enduring childhood memories
from being at the Chapman’s was the time the phone rang one Saturday,
and one of my young cousins answered. 

They must have asked for Jay, because I was handed the phone.
I was a little confused when the frustrated farmer on the other
end began describing the problems he was experiencing with his
John Deere Combine.  I don’t recall if I tried to relate the time that
I had to use a paperclip to reattach a wheel to the the toy John
Deere tractor that Uncle Julian had given me, but eventually,
with the help of John Deere Jay, we managed to get the combine
back up and running. 

I always knew my Uncle to have such a positive attitude that I
never seemed to see him stressed about anything life threw at him. 

Not even a second round of multiple heart bypass surgery two weeks ago.

This triple-bypass lasted nearly twelve hours, but when he awoke in
recovery, they say he was already joking around. 

If only the heart could’ve remained as strong as his spirit and attitude. 

At his memorial service Tuesday morning, I was happy to hear one of his
close church friends talking about his good friend and Christian, Jay.

Although I was deeply saddened for my Aunt and for my cousins,
my spirit was lifted, knowing that Uncle Jay is making new friends
and seeing old loved ones in Heaven this week.

And I am comforted in knowing that one day, I will hear his laugh again.

And whether we knew him as Uncle Julian, Jay, Dad, or Grandpa, we will
certainly miss him for now, but we will all look forward to hearing that laugh again.  

Snuggles  RIP

 April 1997-May 2008

It was a cold, windy, rainy night tonight,
best suited for hunkering down on the
Ikea couch with popcorn and a good movie. 
Probably a Disney, Pixar, or Tom Hanks movie,
if Grandma Debbie had a choice.  
It could’ve been "Wizard of Oz", with this weather.

But instead, they held the Indiana high school track
Sectionals tonight, so our high school heros braved 
the elements, and ran against gale force winds
400 meters at a time.

And we sat huddled together in the stands, like
emperor penguins in a blizzard, fighting valiantly
against Mother Nature and physics to keep our
umbrellas from becoming inverted, or airborne.
That is, if we had thought to bring umbrellas. 
Or rain gear.  Or an actual coat.  Dad warned me.

Fortunately, Uncle Samuel got to run the first event
of the evening, the 4 x 800 relay, before the flying
monkeys arrived, accompanied by treacherous
backstretch winds that felt like you were hitting the
wall out of Turn 2.

Sam echoed memories of his recent conference meet,
and kicked in his last 200 meters to beat his previous
personal best time by nearly 5 seconds, and stop the
clock at 2:10, which is a tremendous time for a Sophomore.

As nasty as it was to sit in the stands in the typhoon, it
had to be worse to be running 800 meters in it, especially
dressed in the minimalist nylon track uniforms.
And as good as it must have felt to finish this season’s
track adventure on a high note, with a personal best time
in the rain, it probably felt good for Sam to eventually regain
the warmth and comfort of home after the meet, knowing that
the season is over.

After all, there’s no place like home…..

My 15th birthday, 32 years ago Monday (3/10)

My brother-in-law, Charlie, died of a massive heart
attack on Friday.  He and my oldest sister,
Kim have been together since 1974, or so.  Our family
was huddled together with Kim at her house Friday night
when they took Charlie and his music away. 

He will forever be the proud father to my niece and nephew,
Karli and Jordan Smith.

Seems like Charlie has been in our family for most of my life.
I’m pretty sure he bought me and somebody (I won’t tell, Mace)
beer at the Boat Club at least once when we weren’t quite 21.

As much as I like guitar, but have never played, I always thought
it was cool that my brother-in-law was this hip guitar player in the
Indy music scene.  Too bad I wasted too many years away from
Indiana, and didn’t get to see him play that much.

I always thought I’d have him teach me how to play.

He taught guitar to countless kids over the years, and Charlie’s
music lives on in them, as well as, the two Jazz CD’s he released.

He played in the Bob and Tom Band for years, and they have posted
a very cool tribute to him on their website. 

http://www.bobandtom.com/gen3/index.htm

go hug somebody. 

13 years ago, I lost one of my best friends from high school.

Jeff Smith died in a car accident on December 3, 1994, at the age of 33, leaving behind a wife and a family of sons, as well as, countless friends and memories.  I’d recount some of the memories here, but it’s just not the same if you didn’t know the guy, or the context.

Although, hitting a drive off the 9th tee directly into a full Edgewood Country Club swimming pool on a hot summer day will always be funny, especially when his response was a hearty, "It’s IN the pool!!!"

I miss my friend, but 13 years after his death, memories of Big Smitt come often, and always with a smile.  His spirit lives on in stories shared among our gang on emails, and especially in his sons.

Here’s to the memory of a big man, with a big heart…..Big Smitt