November 27, 2023

A free library stands outside the Cancer Institute. It’s just a box of used books mounted on a post, one of those casual collections you see in neighborhoods. Anyone can take a book, the idea is that at some point you leave one. Our daughter Laura went with me to my last appointment. As we left she noticed the library. She opened the plastic door and pulled out Eats Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss: It’s (not “Its”) a book about punctuation.

Read this sentence: “A woman, without her man, is nothing.” Then this: “A woman: without her, man is nothing.”

And: “Dear Jack, I want a man who knows what love is all about. You are generous, kind, thoughtful. People who are not like you admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me for other men. I yearn for you. I have no feelings whatsoever when we’re apart. I can be forever happy—will you let me be yours? Jill”

Then: “Dear Jack, I want a man who knows what love is. All about you are generous, kind, thoughtful people who are not like you. Admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me. For other men I yearn! For you I have no feelings whatsoever. When we’re apart I can be forever happy. Will you let me be? Yours, Jill”

Punctuation. For most of mankind and womankind it’s a monumentally tedious subject. Lynne Truss, a longtime critic and columnist for the Times of London, recognized the epidemic of misuse of punctuation in the U.K. and U.S. In 2002 she started a lighthearted BBC radio series called “Cutting a Dash” about punctuation pitfalls. The show led her the next year to write Eats Shoots & Leaves. Sales are around 500,000 copies in the U.K.

Truss’s book traces the history and function of punctuation: apostrophe, comma, period (in the U.K. called “full stop”), comma, semi-colon, colon, dash, ellipse, exclamation point or “mark” (U.K), question mark, italics, hyphen, and quotation marks, single and double.

If you doubt there’s a chapter’s worth to write about each, read her book.   

She writes that some grammarians define punctuation as stitching—the basting that holds the fabric of language in shape. Another describes punctuation marks as the traffic signals of language that tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop. So, she asks: what happens when punctuation isn’t used? If punctuation is the stitching of language, without it, “language comes apart and all the buttons fall off.”

In Truss’s elementary school students learned Latin, French, or German grammar but were expected to pick up English grammar by reading, rather than studying it. That led to such puzzles as “its” and “it’s.” What is the apostrophe for?

She writes that “grammatical sticklers are the worst people for finding common cause because it is in their nature … to pick holes in everyone, even their best friends. What an annoying bunch of people.” She says, unhappily, that “my personal hunches about the state of language were horribly correct: standards of punctuation in general in the U.K. are indeed approaching the point of illiteracy; self-justified philistines are truly in the driving seat of our culture.”

The earliest known punctuation, Truss says, is credited to Aristophanes of Byzantium around 200 B.C., who created a three-part system of notation to cue actors when to breathe in preparation for long or short lines. A comma then was the signal for the short line. St. Jerome, who translated the Bible in the 4th century, introduced punctuation to aid pausing when reading aloud. The word “comma” was adopted into English in the 16th century.

She zeroes in on everyday apostrophe glitches, not just “its” instead of “it’s,” but “I’ts party time!” She notes an advertisement for decorative services for “wall’s, ceiling’s, and door’s.” In 2001 a popular TV show created a singing group called Hear’Say. The name, she says, marked a significant milestone on the road to punctuation anarchy.

She lays out the rules for apostrophe use, e.g., possessives, plural and singular (the boy’s hat, the children’s playground, the babies’ bibs) and the rest. She notes the 17 (yes, 17) rules on comma use, principally to illuminate the grammar of a sentence and to highlight, as in musical notation, the literary qualities of rhythm, direction, pitch, tone, and flow. Comma use, she says, requires discretion—that is, common sense: For example: “The convict says the judge is mad.” Then: “The convict, says the judge, is mad.”

Truss gives the same treatment to semi-colons and colons. They propel you forward in a sentence. A colon is nearly always preceded by a full sentence: “Man proposes: God disposes.”

As she walks through all this, Truss agonizes over the creeping substitution of electronic communication, emails and texts, for the printed word, with the presumption that computers and cellphones eliminate the need for punctuation in favor of LOL, IMHO, FWIW, etc.

“The printed word is presented in a linear way,” she writes, “with syntax supreme in conveying the sense of words in their order. … The book remains static and fixed, the reader journeys through it. Picking up the book in the first place entails an active pursuit of understanding. … All these conditions are overturned by the new technologies. Information is presented to us in a non-linear way. … Scrolling documents is the opposite of reading: your eyes remain static, while the material flows past.”

She notes that some users think their keyboard punctuation marks are decorations for creating cartoons like <:-), meaning “dunce,” and so on. She’s appalled especially by emoticons (☹😊).

She goes on: “Even in the knowledge that our punctuation has arrived in its present state by a series of accidents … it is a matter of despair to see punctuation chucked out as worthless by people who don’t know the difference between who’s and whose, and whose bloody automatic ‘grammar checkers’ can’t tell the difference either.”

Yet in her last chapter she writes, “while massive change from the printed word to the bloody electronic signal is inevitably upon us, we diehard punctuation-lovers are perhaps not as rigid as we think we are.”

So, she suggests, we should calm down. Truss and her fellow “sticklers” are working hard for us. We’re probably helpless to stop the unsettling, even bizarre evolution of our language and with it, punctuation. But let’s understand where we’re going, not where were going.

November 20, 2023

The Intercoastal Waterway stretches down the East Coast, around Florida, then north along the Gulf. When Kevin settled in Sarasota with his wife, Jean, and picked up kayaks and paddleboards, it was inevitable, a matter of time. That is, that all of us: Amir, Archie, Chris, Kirk, Paul, and I, the old Lake Ridge, Virginia THuGs running group, would meet at Kevin’s place, put boats in the water, and navigate the Waterway.

We arrived from the incomprehensible chaos of the world around us. Florida’s Gulf Coast is, for a brief moment, a kind of dream, a respite. And it was Veterans Day, a day of dignity, our special day.

Kayaks and paddleboards are graceful craft. Obviously they’re not “boats,” just as a Navy ship isn’t a “vessel.”  With the right paddling technique they move through the water gracefully. The kayak has more mass, but is easier to handle in choppy water or wind than the paddleboard. The paddleboarder can stand or kneel. In the standing position, it seems, paddleboarders can put more of their back and leg strength into their strokes.

The plan was to transit a couple of miles, according to Kevin, to a bar/restaurant on a spit of land called Casey Key, where we could get drinks and catch our breath. Amir, Archie, and I were new to this, we went with the kayaks, leaving the paddleboards to the others. Kevin has the experience, eight trips on the course between Siesta Key and Casey Key. 

Our little flotilla set off, maybe a little nervously, Archie and me in the lead for a quarter-mile. At the first turn we went left, Kevin yelled go right. We struggled with our paddles to pivot, blinking against the bright sun and rich blue Florida sky; the others turned in the right direction.

It was exhilarating to try out our never-before-used kayaking skills. Kayaking is very different from rowing or canoeing. You’re stroking alternately left and right with the long two-bladed paddle, trying to keep the strokes even. Since I’m left-handed I could put more energy into the left. That meant compensating with more shallow right-arm strokes, banging my paddle on the side of the kayak with nearly every stroke.

The paddleboard team stood erect on their boards and cut through the water, making a turn around a tangle of mangrove bushes. We got past the mangroves and sailed into open water, a stretch of the Waterway that resembles a huge lake. Kevin pointed south at the horizon, which appeared as a dark pencil line. We dug in and paddled.

Amir, with his big shoulders, moved ahead of us. Chris got the hang of paddleboarding early and cruised in the lead, a dot in the distance. Paul, in a bright orange shirt, was in the middle of the pack. Kevin stayed a few hundred yards ahead of Archie and me. Kirk was off my starboard. I bore down, trying to establish a rhythm.

We slogged into the middle of the wide, lake-like stretch, the horizon looking no closer. Chris had disappeared into the faint haze ahead, with Kevin not far behind. I pulled closer to Paul. The sun blazed down.

I tried to stay on a straight course but drifted east toward the channel markers. Within a few hundred yards into the lake the first boat purred past us. I waved, a woman in a bathing suit waved back. Then the swells of the boat’s wake rocked the kayak, throwing me out of my paddling rhythm.

I kept stroking, watching the others ride the wake. Another boat appeared from the opposite direction, moving faster. The swells were heavy, I bobbed up and down, clenching my teeth. Another boat cruised by, I tried to steer into the wake, but it rocked me higher. A guy aboard yelled, “You’re in the middle of the channel, get over to the side, you’re going to get run over!”

I tacked west, but it didn’t help much. By now our order had shifted, I was closer to Paul and Amir, Kevin and Chris were farther ahead, Kirk was a couple of hundred yards west, Archie was behind me. The horizon seemed closer. After passing the next channel marker Kevin signaled a pause to regroup. I laid my paddle across the bow, my shoulders throbbing.

Kevin pointed at the shoreline. “Turn right just past the bridge,” he called. We pushed on towards the bridge and landfall. We moved closer to a grove of mangroves near the bridge, past “Danger” signs warning boaters away from rocks. Then we saw our destination, a short beach, a gang of sun-drenched folks lounging under a thatch canopy at a bar, a rock band playing.

We hauled our craft halfway out of the water, caught our breath and got drinks. The lead singer yelled “Happy Veterans Day!” The crowd cheered. “Who’s a vet?” he asked. We raised our hands above our sore shoulders. “Alright!” he shouted, and pounded his guitar. The band launched into a Beach Boys tune. I think it was the Beach Boys.

We talked a bit and looked around. The crowd were mostly in swimsuits and Hawaiian shirts, enjoying the Florida sun. It was an older bunch, fifties, I guessed. I laughed: I should talk about older? They were having fun. We took some photos, stretched our legs, then turned back to our beached kayaks and paddleboards. It was time.

We climbed aboard and headed to the Waterway convoy style, under the bridge and into the wide stretch. We pounded away, Paul and Chris in front, the rest of us more or less abreast. My left wrist ached and I stroked harder with the right. The shoreline crawled by. The northern end, our target, again seemed miles away. We bent our backs harder, the channel markers loomed ahead then fell behind. The surface seemed calmer, the boats had disappeared.

Eventually Kevin yelled, “Head for the condos!” We could see the roof of a condo building beyond the treeline. We tacked left then crossed the lake. I moved closer to Paul, he surged ahead. Kevin held back, surveying the team. We sailed past the last of the mangroves then into the quiet channel. I paddled harder, making less progress.

With the ramp in sight I lay the paddle down and glided, catching my breath. My shoulders felt numb. We pulled the boats from the water, hosed them down, and hoisted them into the pickup. We climbed into the van and the pickup and slumped in our seats. I tried to raise my arms and groaned. Kevin started the van, Chris drove the pickup. As we headed for Kevin’s place I closed my eyes. The THuG navy had come ashore. 

November 13, 2023

Most people save cherished things: photos, letters, jewelry, wedding and birth announcements, obituaries. We do, too. I also still have two oddball things: my teeshirts from the 1990 Marine Corps Marathon and the 2011 New York City Marathon.

The New York City Marathon came and departed last week, a glorious hiccup in the sports world. My niece Christine ran, so the excitement came back for us. We watched the live feed from the finish. For some who staggered across, arms raised in joy, it may be a place for love: a guy stepped over the line, got down on one knee, and proposed to his runner-partner. It looked like she said yes.

For the 99 percent of the population who will never run a marathon, the idea, running 26.2 miles, is nutty and eccentric or masochistic and reckless. The months of training required, the risk of injury, the expense, the pain of recovery—the reality of the marathon—brings a loud “Hell no.” 

The NYC Marathon is the biggest deal in the running world. A total of 51,402 entrants finished, 28,501 men, 22,807 women, and 94 “non-binary” runners. The New York Road Runners Club, which sponsors the race, says the club received more than 128,000 applications from 153 countries and all 50 states. The male and female winners in the Open Division (only professionals are eligible) get $100,000, second gets $60,000, then on down to $2,000 for tenth. Prize money also goes to top American finishers and wheelchair racers.

Last week was Christine’s first. I quit running marathon road races years ago, after 16 of them, including three Marine Corps, four Washington, D.C., marathons, and five in Nashville, and shifted to trail running. Trails are slower, easier on the joints and on older folks. But then, the marathon doesn’t go away. It draws you back.

“How to” books have been written about marathons Some of them lurch into philosophy, hinting that the essence of running long distances, e.g., discipline, perseverance, faith, has something to do with discovering the truth about life, about finding joy in sacrifice, pain, and loneliness. We all have some mystery in our private lives. And who knows? The ordeal of the marathon may help us, or some of us, confront and understand it.

Yet the marathon is the marathon. The runner awakens on race day, slips on his/her outfit and running shoes. Most will eat something, a bagel, banana, energy bar, sometimes more. They show up at the start, stretch a bit, strut to the line, and stay silent for the national anthem. Some check their GPS watches. The gun goes off, they surge ahead, feeling the adrenalin rush. If the field is large they’ll tapdance a few steps, banging elbows.

Within a quarter-mile the field starts to extend. The faster people move ahead, creating space. Runners settle into their pace. They maneuver alongside and around each other, measuring progress by noting landmarks along the course. They hear the cheers of the crowd. Then they see the one-mile marker with a clock showing time elapsed since the start.

The first mile of the New York City Marathon crosses the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, which links Staten Island to Brooklyn. Runners cross on both the upper and lower spans, the view of the city skyline and Lower New York Bay is spectacular. The one-mile marker of any marathon fills the runner’s heart with hope. One down, twenty-five point two to go. This thing is doable.  

The Las Vegas Marathon starts in late afternoon so runners navigate the Strip with its night glitter and roaring crowds. Nashville’s Country Music Marathon course passes the honky-tonks of Lower Broadway, the city’s glitzy, scruffy tourist district. On the other extreme, the Washington, D.C., race hauls the runners past the squat bulk of the Commerce and Treasury Department office buildings.

Runners pause at aid stations, grab and gulp cups of water and nod at the encouragement of the volunteers. The field has extended farther, but in the straightaway segments runners can look ahead at the colorful river of humanity flowing ahead, then gracefully making the turns.

The mile markers are passing, the runners are keeping their pace, trying to stay with their race plans. They may be slowing on hills and picking up speed on downhills. The weather matters—too warm can sap energy and spirit.

By the half-marathon marker the field is well spaced. The runners see the marker and feel a jolt of encouragement. But the legs know the body has come only halfway. Many are alternately walking and jogging, some are struggling. Miles 14, 15, 16 come harder, slower. The street is littered with discarded water cups. The course now seems a desert, hot, humid, the crowd thinner. Thighs and calves may seize up with cramps, meaning stop, stretch, work them out. Then keep going.

Around now, when the middle of the pack blends with the back of the pack, runners remind themselves of the “wall,” the overwhelming urge to quit, to stop running forever. Legs feel like lead, hamstrings burn. “Keep moving,” they tell themselves. The philosophy, the “you got this” cheers seem pointless, empty, cruel. Hitting the wall, it’s called, when stopping the pain seems the only reason for living.  

The wall may break runners, but they overcome. The miles creep by. Then at 20 six remain, a 10K, the standard road race all marathon hopefuls have run many times. Finishing now seems possible. Then the 22- and 23-mile markers. Three to go. The wall passes, runners may be walking, backs bent or jogging, but moving. All those chilly early morning runs, the 10Ks, the ten-milers, the agonizing long training runs, now worthwhile.  

The finish line is still a dot in the distance. But the crowd is building, yelling, waving signs. The pack is slogging forward, the energy returning, euphoria building. The pack breaks up, pounds ahead.

The arch of the finish gate is suddenly there, runners feel their bodies surge again in one last burst of will. Then the footfall on the line, a quick glance at the clock, a volunteer is smiling and offering a bottle of water and the finisher’s medallion. The runner glances around, legs stiffening, then moves slowly forward. Behind him or her, others are crossing the line. The sensation is pain, but relief, then joy.

November 6, 2023

Actually, we didn’t see many teeshirts for sale in Dillsboro, North Carolina. Some shirts offered were branded “Great Smokies”; the national park is a few miles west. Which makes sense; who’s going to buy a teeshirt advertising Dillsboro?

The town, announced population 232, is in a pretty place, wedged among the rugged peaks between Asheville and the Tennessee state line. It’s the turnaround point for the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad’s four-hour foliage tour out of Bryson City, which is next to Cherokee, a hamlet that boasts imitation Cherokee gear and a casino, next to an entrance to the park.

We drove up to Bryson Sunday because our kids gave us tickets to the tour for our anniversary. We sat in the Cherokee car, our seats shared a table with a couple from Atlanta.

The train left Bryson City promptly at noon and chugged east along the Tuckasegee River, a fast-moving stream that flows west for about 60 miles to huge Fontana Lake at the western end of the state. The train hugs the riverbank out of town. As we crossed a bridge, the conductor pointed out a bunch of crashed cars that have been partly buried along the riverbank for erosion control. We could see the shiny chrome protruding from the soil.

The antique diesel locomotive hauled the train at around 25 miles per hour past farms, forest, and trailer parks that line the riverbank. Railroad tracks, after all, are built on the cheapest land; well-off people don’t want a track crossing their front lawns. I recalled the view from the Amtrak Metroliner route between Washington and New York: Maryland and New Jersey factory backyards strewn with rusting machinery.

Although Bryson City is nestled in mountains, the track, following the river, is uniformly level, we climbed no heights and saw no spectacular woodland vistas or breathtaking sights. The foliage in warmer South Carolina was still at peak autumn brilliance, the forests of the cooler Smokies already had turned pale brown and started to shed their leaves. 

As we approached Dillsboro the conductor announced we’d pass the burnt-out hulks of the locomotive and bus from the crash scene in the 1993 hit movie, The Fugitive, starring Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones. The county and the film producer apparently agreed it would be too expensive to remove them, and—maybe—they’d become an oddball tourist draw.

Our Atlanta seatmate mentioned he was a construction manager and didn’t believe the bus/locomotive story. “If we left old equipment on a site we’d be hit with thousands in fines,” he said. Then we passed the junked bus and locomotive. “The laws are a little looser here,” I said. The battered ruins lay along the river; the train passengers, including me, snapped pictures.

We pulled into town about 1:00. The conductor warned passengers to be back in their seats by 2:50, meaning the four-hour excursion included a nearly two-hour stop, presumably for lunch at the Forager’s Canteen and the Innovation Brewery, and shopping in Dillsboro’s business district. We detrained and ate our homemade sandwiches at a table next to the track. That took maybe twenty minutes. Sandy surveyed the attractions and opted to get back aboard. I crossed the track and wandered through town.

While about half the train passengers enjoyed lunch or sampled beers at the brewery, the rest strolled along Front Street, browsing the shops. I noted signs that seemed vaguely familiar:  the Chocolate Factory, the Front Porch General Store, Dogwood Crafters, Country Traditions. Familiar, that is, similar or identical, to the names of places in other little towns on the tourist circuit. I walked past some, stepped into others. The salespeople smiled and asked, “How are you?”

The merchandise included things I had seen elsewhere, most tourists have seen: brightly woven quilts, necklaces and earrings, coffee mugs and glasses branded “Great Smokies,” Christmas decorations, rows of jars of jams, jellies, hot sauce, aromatic soaps, dishes with prints of bears. Then teeshirts and sweatshirts. I stepped back onto the street. Although I didn’t buy anything, the clerks smiled again as I left and said, “Have a blessed day.”

A short block away, a small Presbyterian church with a picturesque steeple announced Sunday services. Looking past Front Street I spied a post office, a barbershop, the Haywood Smokehouse, the Artsy Olive and the Corn Crib. I peered through the windows, more quilts, mugs, jams, soaps. My fellow passengers crowded in, the clerks rang up their purchases.

The shopping stretched down the end of the street, where the train crew were shifting the locomotive to a side track to reposition it for the trip back to Bryson City. No industrial sites or other non-tourism businesses were visible. A few old homes lined the side streets beyond the shops.

I wondered what the local folks do when the bitter Smokies winter sets in. The trains operate through the year, but winter schedules are limited, fewer runs, weekends only. Presumably, as in other tourist places, they earn enough in the busy months to tide them over. Or they leave town.

Available history notes the town once had two sawmills, two clay mines, a pin company, a corundum crushing plant, a tannery, a hotel. But the larger sawmill moved to nearby Sylva in 1894. Population declined but the tourist business grew to serve the folks coming on the trains.

This is the way it is in dozens, maybe hundreds of small, isolated American towns. Businesses close, young people move away, life gets hard. Some, like Dillsboro, are lucky to be near a tourist attraction or railroad junction. The economy becomes selling stuff to visitors.

I climbed back aboard the Cherokee. The shifting of the locomotive to the opposite end of the train meant—I didn’t know this—that the return to Bryson would follow the same course as it did to Dillsboro. The conductor announced that all passengers should trade seats with those on the opposite side. The four of us switched with those who had sat across from us.

We watched the opposite-side scenery flow by. The car teetered along a rock wall that blocked the sunlight. Past that, we noted a farmhouse festooned with a 100-foot-square American flag. The train picked up speed, we flew by the trailer parks and across the Tuckasegee. A few fishermen stood flycasting in the rapids. At Bryson we jumped off, a full load of passengers were eager to board for the 5:00 run. Dillsboro was waiting.