Tuesday, May 09, 2006

Saturday, May 6

I'm thinking I might have the time to think soon, and that's a scary thought. The house is empty and silent, eerily so, and in this brief moment of quiet and calm I've become aware of the fact that there is much to ponder and process. The Bryan side of life is complete for the most part, and the Herald side is nearing an end, meaning decompression mode will fall upon me soon. So to help the processing, I'll start back with Saturday, one of the strangest and most tiring days I've ever had.

The alarm went off early Saturday morning. I spent the better part of a minute shaking my alarm clock furiously, shouting obscenities at the machine because it wouldn't stop blaring its warning, before realizing that I had in fact set my cell phone to go off. First on tap for the day was the Strawberry Chase, a 5K/10K footrace through downtown Dayton. I wouldn't have normally minded going to take photos, but this was graduation weekend...the end of the school year, which entails high emotions, time investment and the occasional running off of scavengers looking for leftovers from those who have moved out. I stayed at the race until about 9:30 a.m., mainly out of curiosity about this guy to the right.

Guillermo Loaiza is a freshman at Bryan and an all-around nice guy. He runs for the school's cross country team and also knows how to make a mean cheeseburger in the cafe. I graduated with his brother Isidro. They're from Costa Rica. Anyway, I stuck around to see where he would finish, because one wrong turn near the race's two-mile mark quickly changed his plans to run the 5K into an attempt to win the 10K race. He was leading and a good 15 seconds ahead of Steve Chambers, another all-around good guy that goes to Bryan, when he missed his turn. I'm not sure where he realized that he was on the 10K route, but I thought it would be pretty remarkable if he, having trained in cross country for 5K-type races, actually won the longer race. He came ended up 17 seconds behind the winner, which is still amazing in my opinion. Guillermo wasn't the only person struggling with following the course either. Entire packs of runners crossed the finish line from a completely different direction than the actual course route. Pretty funny stuff, though none of the runners or organizers were laughing about the miscues.

Another humurous moment was watching a young teenage girl come charging down the home stretch and crossing the finish line with arms raised overhead. The girl was wearing jeans and was barefoot. So what was funny? She didn't have a race number, indicating race registration, anywhere on her, so I knew that there was absolutely no way she ran 3.1 miles in jeans and without shoes. Reminds me of the true story of a pair of guys that were hungry and decided to go kill their neighbors cow for food and only later admitted to the crime after police pointed to the bloody trail the pair left in the night's fresh accumulation of snow. Genius. No one seemed to pay attention to Saturday's shoeless Prefontaine.

I packed up my stuff and headed up the hill to Bryan's 76th commencement ceremonies and got to the Triangle about 15 minutes late. This had to be about the seventh graduation I had attended, but this time the ceremony held more significance than most of the others, since five of my guys were walking across the podium. Graduation is a lot more tolerable when you're not sitting in the sun wearing a shirt and tie, I found out. I spent the better part of the time milling through the back of the crowd in the shade, talking with old friends while snapping some shots of the crowd and the guys. On a side note, as much as I hated the fact that the administration decided against allowing students time to speak at the podium, I've decided the change is one of the smartest moves Bryan College has ever made. It's the difference between a 2-hour and 3.5-hour ceremony, which can be the difference between life and death in Tennessee's humidity. At one time, I thought that the people that didn't say anything at graduation were just "too cool" to speak. Now I realize that they were the real students of the game and just wanted to survive.

I was struck by the thought that it had been five years since I graduated and realized that I would have to move out of Woodlee-Ewing and do something else with my life besides go to school. I vividly remember coming to grips with this fact moments after walking out of the Triangle and then walking over to Bruce Morgan, the dean of students and my current boss, to ask if I could live in his upstairs apartment. I've always found a way to make Bruce laugh, but I wonder now if it wasn't just pure bewilderment that made him agree to the temporary housing situation that lasted three months. He is a good man.

I really like this shot of Drew Phillips, one of the Rhea House grads. The guy bleeds coolness.

"I graduated college, man!" is what I imagine he said right here.

After graduation, I spent the rest of the day splitting time between the Strawberry Festival softball tournament (it's not as exciting as it sounds, so I'm not posting any pictures), saying goodbyes to guys in the house and cleaning up some of the mess created by the mass exodus of 16 men leaving the building that has housed them the last nine months. It could have been a lot worse, but finding three-month old food lodged behind couches never gets normal. I never even looked in the bathroom.

Later that night, Davio and I decided to meet up at the first annual Strawberry Festival Rodeo. I was really looking forward to the rodeo, mostly from a cultural experience standpoint, and I wasn't disappointed. There were an estimated 900 people in attendance at the small arena to see goat roping, steer wrestling and the mother of all rodeo events...bull riding. The cowboys and cowgirls were not what I would call extraordinary professionals, but they were entertaining.

I can't take credit for this shot, taken by my other boss John Carpenter, but it was too good not to post. The epic drama of man vs. beast.

I realized that a lot of the "hey Billy, watch this" stigma that is often attached to rednecks can probably be traced back to rodeos. During the steer wrestling competition, the announcer explained that you could understand what it was like to jump onto the head of a cow by doing this: "Find yourself a buddy with a pickup truck, stand in the back and ask him to drive 20 mph down the road. When you see one of those big rural mailboxes, jump on top of it. That's what steer wrestling is like." That was it. No "don't try this at home, kids" or "I'm just kidding." That was it. I turned and looked at Dave, and it was obvious we both had the same thought. Later that night, somewhere in Rhea County or in the surrounding areas, someone that was in attendace at the rodeo was jumping off the back of a truck onto a mailbox. You could put money on it.

Another instant classic came during the kids calf chase. It is what it sounds like. The announcer invits all the children 12-and-under into the corral to chase down a 100-lbs. calf that has a flag tied to its tail. There must have been 150 kids in the corral when the announcer let the calf go, and the kids took off running. All it once, it was like every parent in the arena suddenly realized this was probably not the best idea. The calf immediately took off running to the farthest part of the arena away from the kids (cows are actually quite smart, because anyone would run in the opposite direction of 150 screaming kids), but once it reached the edge of the corral it made an unexpected turn and headed right into the sea of kids. Half the kids seemed to realize that being in the path of the calf was not a good idea and turned to run, but the other half of the kids had other thoughts and unintentionally forced the first half to remain in pursuit. Meanwhile the calf was screaming and stampeding its way through the crowd, and dust was flying everywhere. When the dust cleared (literally) some girl that was well over the age of 12 had the flag, a dozen parents had climbed the six-foot fence to find their kids and several other kids were staggering out of the corral shell-shocked either from being knocked down or having gravel thrown in their eyes from the petrified calf. It was without a doubt one of the funniest and most absurd scenes I've ever witnessed, and I couldn't help wondering how the rodeo doesn't get their chaps sued off at every show.

Poor cows. What did they ever do to him? I think the cow in the picture to the left is the one that went through the trauma of being chased by the kids earlier in the evening, explaining its look of terror.

That was Saturday, May 6.