At the end of each year, CVCA sends seniors and about twenty chaperons off for a few days on Senior Trip, a trip designed to bring the class together one last time, celebrate their impending graduation, enjoy general fun and goofing off, and take an opportunity to help the students with some good advice about their futures and their faith as they move ahead apart from the fairly protected environment of CVCA. This year, Senior Trip went to Maumee Bay State Park near Toledo, which is a beautiful state beach and associated lodge, resort, and cabins.

I drove Mer’s car to Maumee Bay; we both find it useful to have a car on site, and school bus seats destroy my back if I have to be on them more than an hour (it is about a two-hour drive). I got to the beach side of the park, where everyone was going to meet, and I beat the buses there, although the school vans were already there. The buses showed up about fifteen minutes later. We all assembled in the handy amphitheater for a general welcome session, at which team shirts were handed out (cabins were organized into informal teams of twenty students), and general rules were gone over; the gist was “have fun, but behave yourself.”

Since the CVCA chaperons were supposed to provide a grilled lunch and the grill had shown up late, we kicked in Plan B, which took the form of a tug-of-war contest on the beach. Jay Peters, a social studies teacher and basketball coach, did a magnificent job of running the tug of war between various teams for about forty-five minutes while the food cooked. By then, lunch was ready, and everyone sat around and ate before proceeding back to the amphitheater for the start of the “Senior Games.”

The “Senior Games” was the brainchild of Jay and the other coordinator, Booch. They wanted the kids to have fun, but it also never hurts to make the kids a bit tired as well. So, Booch and Jay came up with six stations, widely spread apart, through which teams had to rotate to finish certain competitions. Puzzles had to be finished, basketball shots had to be made on the basketball court, tennis had to be played, a five-gallon bucket had to be filled with Dixie cups, a hill had to be climbed, and once everyone was at the top, trivia questions had to be answered. In the amphitheater was the event of which I was in charge, with help from Mer and another teacher, LT. For us, the kids had to dance an Irish dance called The Walls of Limerick. The way the dance is set up, it allows for any number of couples, so everyone on the team had to dance for us. The kids were super-game souls, and really seemed to enjoy it; a few even said it was their favorite competition. Mer and LT and I had a blast.

The Senior Games took us until about 3:30 in the afternoon. We then all assembled again, and we were given our cabin keys and headed over to the cabin side of the park. I had a cabin with six guys, five of whom I knew already. Supper was at 5:00, so the guys spent the ninety minutes or so unpacking and then lounging around playing video games on their phones while talking. That was okay – the Senior Games had been pretty taxing.

Supper was in the lodge, and was excellent – it was a Southwest evening with regular and soft-shelled tacos. After supper, we went over to the next room, where Jay delivered a good message – he stressed to the kids that as they moved on from CVCA, 1) they had choices, 2) they always had options, and 3) they were responsible for the consequences of their choices. Jay fleshed it out with examples from his own life and from the lives of people he knew, as well as backing things up with Biblical passages. It was a good and timely message.

After that, students either had free time, or were to pile on buses to go go-carting and mini-golfing. I went with that group of about 120 students – I had not been go-carting in over fifteen years, and I was eager to try it again. Sadly, it rained some on the way over to the Toledo area, so we had to wait about forty-five minutes for the track to dry before we could drive. The batting cages and mini-golf were open, although the batting cages were a bit wild while the balls were still wet. Once the track opened up, I got in four or five runs, and it was an absolute blast. The carts’ center of gravity was so low that you could floor them and not have to use the brakes, although it took some nerves on some of the corners to go in at twenty to twenty-five miles per hour. We did not finish up there until about 12:45 in the morning, and so we did not get back to the cabins until almost 2:00 am. I was a bit tired, and I fell asleep almost instantly for my five hours of sleep.

On Sunday, Mer and I headed up early to Cleveland. Really early – we left the house at 5:00. I was on my way to run the 2013 Cleveland Marathon, and Mer insisted on coming to cheer me on, even though it is not a great spectator marathon since it is shaped like a bow tie, so spectators only see runners at the start, in the middle, and at the end. For comparison, Mer saw me five times in Birmingham last February.

We were supposed to meet my friend and running partner, Nate, near the starting line between 5:45 and 6:00, but we got snarled in traffic. Happily, Nate waited patiently, and we met up around 6:15. I guess last year I must have left the house nearer to 4:30, because I never hit traffic last year.

We wandered through Browns Stadium, and Nate used the bathroom. It amazed me how long the lines could be at a stadium that can seat eighty thousand people, but Nate guessed there were other bathrooms on other levels that were closed to us. We walked down the ramp from the stadium, and Nate and I squeezed into the starting chute just as the wheelchair racers were taking off at about 6:45. Mer watched us from the ramp until a race official cleared it of spectators, probably to help out with traffic flow. She found a spot higher up on the walkway and watched us start from there.

It took me and Nate a little over a minute to get to the starting line, and then the running lanes were still quite crowded. I was dodging runners even up through miles four and five, and the field did not really clear out until the marathon broke off from the half marathon around mile twelve. I had to stop and use the bathroom between miles two and three, and Nate kept going. He said he would stay on the right side of the road if I could catch him, but I figured out that I would not be able to, and I never did; Nate finished his half-marathon one minute ahead of my reaching the halfway point of my race.

The day started out humid, and when the humidity began to go down, the temperature went up pretty quickly. Most of the second half of the marathon was on streets with no shade, and the sun was out. I tried to run smartly – I was running the race as a fundraiser for a woman with cancer, and finishing the race was more important to me than getting any particular time. So, when I started to feel myself overheating, I started walking some, right around mile eighteen. By my best guess, I walked about one-and-a-half miles of the last eight miles of the race. I think it was the right call – I stopped to help three other runners who were tending another runner who was clearly suffering from heat exhaustion – he was staggering and panting. I jumped back in the race when a nurse showed up and took over and a police car was visibly on its way. Still, it was a hard reminder that the day was hot.

Mer was near the finish line cheering me, and that was a huge boost. One of the reasons to run the marathon is the rush at the finish, and the spectators were really into it. Mer had found a spectating friend based on the other woman having a map, but not being sure where she was. They had a good time chatting and moving a couple of times to get into place to cheer for me and the other woman’s husband. I was very happy Mer had found someone with whom to be companionable, and she was also smart to remember to bring a collapsing chair to sit on while grading while waiting for me.

I got through the finish area and worked my way over to sit in the shadow of the Great Lakes Science Center’s windmill, where it took me about thirty minutes to cool down to somewhere near normal. Meanwhile, Mer had gotten there just ahead of me and had not seen me, and had settled down to grade on the other side of the windmill. The result was that we missed each other until I felt well enough to get up and look around, about an hour after I finished. The extra rest time was not a bad thing.

So, I finished marathon number eleven. Nate is already taking about running the Akron Marathon next September, so that might be number twelve if I can manage it. Here are my 2013 Cleveland Marathon stats:

26.2 miles
3:44:32
8:34/mile
Finished 422 out of about 2800 finishers (top 15%)
Finished 45 out of 227 men in my age group (40-44) (top 20%)

I had promised a man at church that I would bring him one of CVCA’s retired computer projectors, and I knew I was not going to be in church on Sunday because of the Cleveland Marathon. So, I used it as an excuse to take Mer to Hartville to go to the Hartville Kitchen, a huge and hugely popular Mennonite restaurant. We got there about 7:15 on Friday, and they close at 8:00, so the supper rush was over and we got seated right away. We both thought about ordering lighter meals, but in the end both went for a full meal, which is hearty. Mer got pie for dessert, and I tried the brownie sundae, just to see how it was. It was good, but the Kitchen is known for its pies, so I’ll stick with those in the future.

After supper, we headed over to church, but it was locked, since it was after 8:00 on a Friday. I thought we could drop the projector off at Pastor Ken’s house. Ken’s wife, Janet, was home, and she invited us in. We chatted until after 9:00, when Ken got home. Ken and Janet love games, so they invited us to play Gang of Four, a card game based on Chinese hierarchies. We love playing Gang of Four with Ken and Janet because all four of us keep a running commentary going. Ken is really good at the game, and he kept winning hands. And winning. And winning. It took us eight hands before Meredith’s score went over the top to end the game (low score wins), and Ken had won all eight hands and scored no points. He asked Janet if he could frame the scorecard. It was a really fun time, even though Mer and I both ate too much by continuing to much on snacks at Ken and Janet’s.

On Saturday, we got together with a former student whom Mer and I had both had (Mer in class, me in Ceili Club and Royal Fools), and her friend John. Sarah wanted to join us to see The Great Gatsby, and John had never seen it or read it, so it was set up to be an interesting evening.

Mer and I were both impressed with the film. We both thought the film did a fantastic job of displaying the opulence of wealth that the book portrays, and the cinematography was amazing. The parties were huge, and the representation of the Valley of Ashes was great. Both Gatsby’s house and Tom and Daisy’s house were jaw-dropping in size and splendor, and it was well cast and well acted thought out. Sarah and John seemed to enjoy it as well, and it was fun to be part of a party to introduce someone to Gatsby.

We wandered next door from the theater to go to supper at an Italian restaurant called Jimmy Dadonna’s. Mer and I had been there once before, and Sarah and John were game for Italian. The food was plentiful and quite good, and we had a good time getting caught up with Sarah and getting to know John a little.

Sarah and John are both slim young people who decided to pass on dessert. Mer and I are not those people, so we headed home via Handel’s. My compromise with having to run a marathon the next morning was that I got a medium ice cream instead of a large. How stoic of me. Gatsby would have gotten a large….

Last Saturday, Mer and I discovered a new (to us) section of Cleveland. Shannon and Jolene had strongly recommended a play called There Is a Happiness That Morning Is – a play inspired by some of William Blake’s poetry, even to the extent that the play was written in rhyming meter. The play was being performed at Cleveland Public Theater, of which we had never heard. It is on the west side of Cleveland, in an up-and-coming arts neighborhood called Gordon Square. It was pretty great, and we had no idea it was there.

We started the evening by having supper at the Latitude 41 N cafe, which is cozy and comfortable and casual, with huge helpings of great food. I had asked Mer to dress up, and I was in my suit (why not?), but we still felt comfortable there. What a great place.

Cleveland Public Theater has at least two theater spaces, both relatively small. Happiness was either sold out or close to it, and it probably seated 150 people. Mer and I claimed front-row seats.

How to quickly sum up Happiness? The play takes place at a small Eastern liberal arts school, the morning after two English teachers have been caught having sex outside on campus. The two teachers are either husband and wife, or long-time lovers (they have been living together for fifteen years or more), and they either need to apologize to the student body or be fired. The man lectures from Blake’s Songs of Innocence, while the woman lectures from Songs of Experience, with each teacher viewing events in those lights. Later in the play, the college president shows up and reveals that he has done everything he could to provide an ideal situation for the two teachers, and the play wraps up from there.

The play was excellently acted. Most of the time I forgot the play was in verse, since the actors were speaking in such a natural way. Since I like idealists, I got a little tired of the woman’s (“experience”) tirades against love and officials and such, but that took quite awhile, and I expect we are supposed to get a bit tired of both of the teachers’ views.

The only slight downside to the play was that Mer and I both felt strongly that there was a lot of evidence pointing to the college president being a God figure. If that is the case, the play’s solution to a semi-perverse God is that God should be either ignored or actively spited. That clashes pretty directly with our worldviews, but it was still thought-provoking, if only for us to figure out why we disagreed with it.

We finished out little exploratory evening out with dessert. We wanted to try an ice cream place down the street, but it was packed to the point that there was nowhere to sit, and a long line, to boot. So, we found a nice coffee shop called the Gypsy Bean and Bakery, where we each got a piece of cake and talked about the play for some time. It was a great introduction to a pretty cool neighborhood.

Last Friday was the last Royal Fools improv show of the year at CVCA. We had a really good and active crowd of about 150 people. They were a high-energy crowd for whom to play, and they stayed into the show, even though we went an hour and a half, which is long for an improv show.

The show went off very well, with no slow skits and lots of laughs. I heard back through students that they were being told it was the best show of the year. I always take that with a grain of salt, since primacy has a way of coloring memory, but it was a good show.

Every year I end the season by playing a game called “Party Quirks,” where I host a party for all of the senior Fools. Each Fool is given a strange quirk or personality trait or such, and I need to guess what it is. This year we had fourteen seniors, so there was no way I could give a “party” for that many students. Happily, Clarice (my assistant director Fool) came up with a solution whereby I hosted a party for seven pairs of Fools, who were matched up in some way. So, we had good and evil, black and white, cats and dogs, a couple obsessed with shoes and socks, and so on. It worked really well.

After the show, we headed up to Hudson to Cold Stone Creamery, where we met up with our friends Nate and Rachel, as well as a friend of theirs and her two kids. With Nate and Rachel’s two kids, we were quite the merry little party. We spent a long time chatting, and I went for a walk with the three kids old enough to be mobile. I have a theory that kids like me because they see me as one of them. At any rate, we had a good time on our walk around the new square and library in Hudson. We met up with everyone again at Cold Stone, where the last of the ice cream was being finished, and we wrapped up a fun evening.

Friday – CVCA prom at Sheraton, after-party at Tallmadge Rec Center
Saturday – Hike Herrick Fen Trail in the afternoon, La Dolce Vita in Little Italy in Cleveland for supper

Tuesday (23rd) – Rich Girl in Cleveland (Educators’ Evening)
Saturday – Fiddler at CVCA with Aunt Mary, Dale, Carlene
Macaroni Grill (outside)
Short walk in Bath Hill Park
Handel’s

Saturday – A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Kent State

Wednesday – War Horse education evening – with five CVCA teachers and their spouses/friends (ten in all)
– Pre-show talk with puppeteers and Joey
– Pizza
– Pre-show talk with background of the the play
– War Horse

Monday – Daffodil Trail with Mer