Is Nothing Safe Anymore?

We read with interest a news item from New Hampshire in which 70 year-old store clerk Judy Brenner, who just spent 5 of her waning hours completing the Boston Marathon, outran a teen-aged (alleged) thief with a half-gallon jug of hooch under his jacket. The world is a different place than the one in which I grew up.

Thinking that our perceptions were a bit askew, we did a test with a half-gallon container of milk. Granted, this body is not what it used to be when it comes to endurance tests. We imagined, however, that we could probably outdistance our grandmother in a pinch. This writer is in his extremely late 30's (42, to be exact). Granny is 83 and some change. That puts us closer in age than Judy Brenner and her humiliated teen, but provides a decent benchmark for evaluating the state of the world.

Grandma thought we had either lost our remaining marble or were trying to cash in on whatever inheritance may be headed our way as first-born of a generation. She's a game gal, though. I donned a jacket capable of sequestering the milk and did a few deep knee bends to prepare for the experiment. Granny showed up in a track suit with a stop watch and a personal trainer who had far too much knowledge of her pulse rate, personal best in the 100 Meter Dash and unfair tips on accelerating around the corner of the house.

I had a panic attack that delayed the start of our exercise. I flashed back to the one week I spent on the 7th grade track team. On that first day in 1976, the track coach at Santa Fe Trail Junior High School, whose given name was The Sadist, as I recall, pointed to the oval asphalt track and told sixty 12-year-olds to "run". I was game. I was fast. The previous year I collected a pocketful of ribbons that testified to my fleet-footed acumen. So I ran.

I had no older friends who might have warned me that "Run" is a complete sentence with no modifiers. "Run" means "until you die" on the first day of 7th grade track practice. I ran until I sensed that my stomach was no longer on board for extended traveling. I ran until my lunch disembarked the vehicle. Then I didn't run.

The Sadist barked something at me, which, above the din of heaving and the Angel of Death wooing me to The Light, sounded like, "I hope you die! I've been waiting to kill you since birth! If you show up tomorrow, I'll throw rocks at you while you run!" Or something. It was a rude revelation that puking does not excuse a person from running. It was simply incidental to the exercise - like sweating, apparently. This went against my 12 year-old Core Values, which was a list of one: No Puking. That list has not changed substantially in the last 30 years.

I spent the next couple of days showing up to track practice and staring down The Sadist, all the while contemplating the wisdom of hurling myself through the air over a bar that seemed perfectly content not to be moved from its perch. I pondered whether I needed to heave a cannonball when modern munitions had made firing one at high speed much more effective. I eyed the javelin with nothing less than homicidal intent, shifting my gaze from The Sadist to the javelin and back again. It wasn't my first brush with murderous intent. I had already (allegedly) pulled a disassembled service revolver on my 6 year-old sister who failed to appreciate the sensuality of the older brother on Flipper. I was a force to be reckoned with.

The next week, I auditioned for the children's choir for the KC Philharmonic's production of Leonard Bernstein's "Mass". No running involved. I sang like my life depended on it. And I got the job - one of 12 from the entire known universe to be selected to sing on The Big Stage, as I called it well into my 20's. I sang my resignation from the track team to The Sadist - to his utter bewilderment. "RUN!" he barked. And I did. All the way to my newly found theatre dreams and my first choreographer! There is no barfing in dance, FYI.

I considered that making my grandmother chase me around her yard to retrieve a half-gallon of milk was an ill-conceived notion that could not possibly end well. If she dropped dead mid-race, I would never be able to brag openly about my victory. I would be The One Who Killed Grandma and Stole Her Milk. If she caught me, I would be on CNN alongside the New Hampshire teen, only this time as the 40-something man who died thirty yards into stealing his elderly granny's milk. I would go down in history as one of the most reviled, incompetent criminals of all time.

I think Grandma was disappointed when I faked a hamstring injury while stretching. I valued her pride and my inheritance too much to let her know that I'd let her off the hook. Perhaps when she's 90 and I really need the milk, we'll give it another go. Or not. Old folks are not made the same way as when I was a teenager.

Just ask the kid in New Hampshire.