Just Call Me Coach … For a Couple Days

My resume has held all manner of things over the years, but never once has it included coach. Until now. Well, substitute coach. Pseudo coach. Stand-in or placeholder coach. Three-day coach. Sounds like something you would buy off a late-night infomercial. But that’s what I was for the briefest period of time last week — a short-time cross country coach. My daughter was so proud. “You’re the coach!” she screamed when I told her. You would have thought I had just announced I was Santa Claus and had brought her a pony named Stan.

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Honey, For Your Birthday … An Addition

Here is exactly what I e-mailed my diligent and hard working contractor, Mr. Chad: “Nancy’s birthday is this week, and all she wants is a CO (certificate of occupancy). You and I could both be in trouble if we mess that one up.” A certificate of occupancy is that final step — that critical inspection — you need right before you officially occupy your new house, or in our case, addition. It’s that prize, that finish line, that little jewel that dangles down for you, always seemingly in reach, but always just a day or two away. It’s doubly difficult when you’re living in the old part of the house and the new part keeps teasing and tantalizing you — just within your grasp, but blowing you raspberries. To get to our old bathroom, we had to walk through our new addition. Sometimes I would avert my eyes, trying not to long too much for it while the final finishing touches were put into place. “Darn, if I just didn’t have to pee!” Finally we were down to, well, nothing but the CO. And it fell perilously close to my wife’s birthday.

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Wild Stories and Babyjogger Bonding

The kid in the baby jogger leaned her head back as far as it would go and peered at me through the plastic window in the red sun visor: “Do you want to hear a story?” she asked. “Sure,” I say to my 3 1/2–year-old daughter, knowing I’m about to go on some mesmerizing trip. Oh, the stories she tells while we’re out on these runs. “See the thunder birds and the lightning birds high in the sky? They’re high as the clouds. Do you see them?” I think this is what she says. I really have no idea if I’m hearing this right. I’m struggling to push her and the jogger — a combined 50+ pounds that feel like they’ve attracted double the gravity — and I’m trying not to succumb to heat stroke while bobbing and weaving around cars. Could be I misheard her, or even that I’m hallucinating.

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Freshman Memories and Blankets on Ceilings

I felt for the kid — this freshman who walked up to me on the Flagler campus and asked where a building was. Midway through the question his voice cracked — the most God-awful squeak. It could have broken glass. Man, when you’re young, why does your voice always let you down at just the wrong moment? No doubt it was from the jitters that come with the first days of college — this big, new, unfamiliar, intimidating, alien place. So different from the comfy world you just left. I felt for the kid and pointed across campus to the towering 5-story building. “It’s that big one,” I said, thankful the building he was looking for wasn’t the one we were standing in. That would have really been embarrassing. He trudged off and I watched him, remembering back almost two decades to when I was in his shoes trying to get the lay of the land at this very same school — unsure, nervous and overwhelmed, but at the same time excited, eager and too clueless to know better.

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