Menopausal Mountie

Getting a reputation

Some reputations are built on fact, some on fiction and some on both. Here are two stories that contributed to mine:

Randy and I were called to a community at the edge of our coverage area for a complaint of two aggressive Rottweilers running loose. We signed rifles out of the gun locker, loaded them and headed out. Neither of us were thrilled about the possibility of shooting a dog, so we said little on the 45-minute drive.

In the ensuing years, I would be called upon to put down deer on the sides of roads after they were hit by vehicles and still suffering but that was different. On one such occasion, I had to stop traffic to put down a deer in an intersection at suppertime. Moments after the fatal shot, some idiot got out of his car and hollered for me to hurry up and get it out of the way. There’s a word for a person like that. That word is asshole.

I was also called once for a moose, and I remember thinking on the drive there, “Dear God, let it be dead, dear God, let it be dead”. I got there and the moose was lying in the ditch and didn’t appear to be moving.

I had read in the RCMP Operations Manual about shot placement for various animals and I knew a moose required a shotgun slug, but that was the extent of my training. Moose are massive creatures and family folklore has one exacting revenge on my great uncle for wounding him while hunting. The bull had beat him out to the road and efficiently stomped on his car, crushing it. So, alone in the dark with my shotgun at the ready in my right hand, I threw several rocks with my left hand until I finally hit the poor beast. Getting no reaction meant I could get close enough to confirm he was dead and not suffering.

The only thing the Rottweilers were likely suffering from was an irresponsible owner, which made the drive and the pit of my stomach quite uncomfortable.

Thankfully, when we arrived a solution had been found. The owner voluntarily agreed to surrender his dogs to the animal control officer, and we were no longer needed. Randy and I left in much better spirits with all rifle rounds accounted for.

“We have to come up with a better story that this,” he said.

So, we did. Or more accurately, HE did. My job was to be the straight man. We got back to the detachment, came in through the back and put away the rifles.

“I know who’s coming duck hunting with me!”, Randy said when we got into the office. “You should have seen her! The dogs were both coming at her and she shouldered that rifle as cool as a cucumber!”

As the story spread, a few people came to ask how I was doing. I said I didn’t want to talk about it, and they’d leave after giving a knowing nod. By the end of the day, the entire detachment knew that I had done the unpleasant job with aplomb and had ice running through my veins. This new insight into my personality and skills was taken as gospel.

For the record, nobody was making light of killing dogs. I’ve worked in detachments where we laughed and in several where we didn’t. I’ll take the ones with gallows humour any day. And Randy’s whopper of a tale reeled everyone in, hook line and sinker. The best laugh was when he told them it was made up.

But obviously not everyone was there for the reveal. I got called into the Staff Sergeant’s office two days later and was reprimanded for not filling out the forms to document that I had discharged a weapon.

“But I didn’t, Pete.”

“Didn’t what?”

“I didn’t discharge a weapon.”

“When you shot the dogs, Sandra.”

“I didn’t shoot the dogs.”

“Well, who shot the dogs?”

“Nobody. Nobody shot the dogs. When we got there, the owner surrendered them. They went with the control officer.”

Pete sat there looking at me.

“Pete, do you want me to get Randy?”

“Yeah. Tell Randy to come see me.”

The next fall, I was asked how I made out duck hunting. The story faded but my reputation didn’t.

***

The other story that contributed to my reputation involved a physical altercation of thankfully minor proportions. I was in the first weeks of my career, working closely with my field coach. One Friday night, we picked up two men for public intoxication and brought them back to the detachment to be put in cells for the night.

Despite what I was taught to do at Depot, the men were not handcuffed. My coach Dan was in charge, and I wouldn’t have considered voicing an opinion that we should do anything other than what he initiated. That’s just the way things were. Dan was an excellent coach.

By the time we got to the detachment, the pair in the back seat were getting mouthy and I was getting nervous. Dan took one man out of the back of the car and led him toward the side door of the building. I took the second man out of the back seat, consciously keeping him on my left, grabbing his right wrist with my right hand and holding his right upper arm with my left hand.

As we walked toward the door, I was going over in my mind what I would do if he tried something. And that’s when Dan and the other guy started scuffling and my guy raised his left fist and swung at me.

I’m not sure who was more surprised at what happened next, me or the three men. I did what I was trained to do. I threw my weight into pushing his upper arm away and down while yanking his wrist toward me and up. He ended up wedged against the brick exterior wall in an arm lock, not very happy about the whole thing. His bellow interrupted the other two and we made it to cells with no further issue.

The men were released the next morning, sober, apologetic and spreading a story that cemented my reputation. Unbeknownst to me, I knew jiu-jitsu or taekwondo and had flipped both of the men in some Jackie Chan inspired action sequence.

They were telling a good story about their run-in with the police, and I was grateful that the guy weighed 100 pounds soaking wet. It was the only hand to hand physical confrontation I had at that detachment. But it was epic, just ask the two guys.

“Have you ever driven a stock car?”

The Canadian Tire had burned down and I was standing next to the backhoe operator, each of us waiting for the rubble to stop smouldering. Me for the fire marshal to release the scene and him to do whatever they wanted him to do with the backhoe.

“No,” I said.

“My sister usually drives in the powder puff race and she can’t this week. We’re looking for a driver.”

All I knew about stock cars was that they smashed into each other and were generally homemade franken-vehicles. It sounded like a lot of fun.

“I don’t see why not.”

“Can you drive a stick shift?”

“Yup, but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell everyone who was driving.”

And so it came to be that a few days later everyone in the bleachers heard:

“WATCH OUT FOR NUMBER 71 TODAY BECAUSE WE HAVE ONE OF OUR COUNTY MOUNTIES AT THE WHEEL. GIVE IT UP FOR SANDRA CHRISTOPHER’

I didn’t hear a thing over the roar of the engines .

I arrived at the track early. The reality of what I had agreed to do had hit me about 10 minutes after saying yes, but backing out would have been worse than whatever public humiliation I was now facing.

They showed me what I needed to know about the car and gave me a four-word lesson.

“Just go for it”

“What do I do if I get hit?”

“It’s dirt, you’ll slide. Hit ‘em back.” “Oh, and if you come in first, second or third, go straight to the winners circle and they’ll come to the car and give you your trophy.” If you don’t place, just drive back to the pit.”

Jesus Christ.

My legs were shaking so badly as I drove to the starting line that my left foot was bouncing off the clutch. What the hell was I thinking? The other drivers looked tough. And then it started, I hit the gas and my head was on a swivel. The track was wet and the cars in front of me were kicking up mud on my windshield. I got bumped and jostled. I swerved and spun the wheel and my back end almost caught up to my front end in the turns. But I stayed on the track. Between trying to turn on the wipers and avoiding the cars that were aiming at me, I’m not sure I used the brake. All I know if that I eventually made it across the finish line.

There was a car just ahead of me as I crossed but I wondered if I had been lapped. I headed for the pit. My two-man pit crew (now that I’m a race car driver I can say that) were hollering at me and pointing back to the track. I hadn’t been lapped. I drove around again, back to the grandstand and collected my 2nd place trophy.

It was an absolute blast and went a long way in helping me become part of the community. And did I mention I got a trophy? One that wasn’t from a debating tournament? I was beyond impressed with myself.

Keep that in mind while I tell you some of my other driving stories.

At Depot, there was a pool of older model, stripped-down police cars for practice driving in anticipation of the ‘famous’ road test. Like all of the training benchmarks, stories circulated between the different troops about how difficult the test was or wasn’t and any Mountie who had gone before us would invariably say how much harder it was back in their day.

I first learned to drive in high school through the Driver’s Education program and got my licence at 16. I had driven my high school boyfriend’s standard K-car, some friends’ cars in university when they were drinking but never had my own until after I got my badge.

Not passing the driving course at Depot would send you home, so it was serious business. Nevertheless, the instructors were generally quite nice. After telling one of the instructors at the track that I didn’t have much experience driving, he told me that even if I drove fast enough to veer off into the grass, I wouldn’t flip because the area was flat and the cars were heavy. He instructed me to open it up and “see what she would do.” I did as I was told and went around the track like I was in Dukes of Hazzard driving the General Lee. His theory was tested and proven to be correct.

The cars at Depot were either Ford Crown Victorias or Chevrolet Caprices. They were huge compared to today’s cars, with the front and back bumpers coming to rest just above the parking lines if one were so skilled as be able to parallel park one. I was not. So in the evenings and weekends, I could be seen around Regina doing 47-point turns trying to parallel park.

One of my troopmates thankfully helped me practice, standing on the curb calling out directions, or sitting in the passenger seat explaining yet again how to judge the angle and when to cut the wheel. Buddy Quant was older than most of us and carried himself like a true gentleman with patience to spare. Thank you again Buddy, wherever you are.

Another part of the driving instruction was the gravel road drive. Each instructor took out three cadets and everyone headed out to drive the back roads and meet in a town an hour away for lunch.

I was only behind the wheel for a short while for that drive.

“Where are you from?” the instructor asked.

“New Brunswick.”

“That explains it. Pull over and switch.”

I had driven and biked on enough dirt and gravel roads in my rural province to understand the dynamics of driving on loose material. Ken from Manitoba didn’t stay behind the wheel long either. He and I ended up trying to keep our breakfasts down in the backseat while city boy Derek from Vancouver fishtailed us along the gravel roads and slid us into several uncontrolled intersections.

At my first posting, the actual driving began. Yes, it was serious business when you had to go Code 3 with lights and sirens, but there’s no denying the thrill of hitting the two red toggle switches and driving like a bat out of hell. For a girl who grew up in the seventies and learned about the Queen Mother in Brownies while the boys made campfires in Boy Scouts, it was pretty cool.

One of the calls to which I drove Code 3 was for a gentleman who had been found unconscious in his yard. The man lived on a farm down a very long narrow, winding driveway bordered by a ditch and a barbed wire fence. I got there just before the ambulance. When the ambulance arrived and were loading him in the back, I realized that for them to get turned around and leave, I had to get my car out of the way. The only way to do so was to back out of the driveway.

Backing up was like parallel parking for me. I could do it, but it didn’t come naturally. I made it past the second curve going backwards before things went awry. I ended up in the ditch, tipped at about a 45% angle with the driver’s side firmly up against the barbed wire fence. I gave a half-hearted wave to the ambulance as it drove past. After gathering my dignity, I noticed the three neighbouring farmers who were quietly watching me. The only way out of the police car was to crawl unceremoniously up and out the passenger door. The three men said nothing until I clambered out, righted myself and brushed myself off.

“Want I should get my tractor and some chains?”

“I’d appreciate that, thanks.”

And so he did. Nothing was said, and the three men pulled me out of the ditch with a blue Ford tractor and sent me on my way.

When I wasn’t driving code three or embarrassing myself, and the paperwork could wait, I would just drive. I would drive to learn my way around the assigned coverage area, check in on a few seniors and see what there was to see. But I avoided parallel parking. In fact, when I worked in Liverpool, I would park a block away from the courthouse when I was scheduled to attend because my parking skills decreased proportionately to the number of people who were watching.

When I transferred to Oromocto, in my home province, the first thing I did was get some maps. On one late spring day, I decided to familiarize myself with the roads around Rusagonis. I found a secondary road on the map that ran from the 101 back toward Fredericton and headed there.

A few kilometers in, the road began to narrow and I started looking for a place to turn around. It was wet on either side of the road and I worried about getting stuck. I’m sure you know where this is going. With no choice other than to keep going, I went until the road said no. Literally. When my front tires started to sink, I knew I was fucked.

I called AA towing. In later years, after local tow companies complained that we were playing favourites, we had to follow a convoluted policy that dictated which company we called. They were right, we did play favourites. When you’re stuck 10km into what turns out to be a woods road and the tow truck operator has to back in the entire way in order to pull you out, you’re going to call the guy who knows you by name, comes to get you without a fuss and keeps his mouth shut. John Carter was that guy, may he rest in peace.

Leading up to the Francophone summit in Moncton NB, around 2000, I went on a VIP driving course at an abandoned military base. It was probably the most fun I had behind the wheel. We learned pit maneuvers, flying J’s and practiced high speed decision making. After reaching a specific speed, we would arrive at a light bar like you see in movies about drag racing. If the rightmost light flashed green, we had to go around it on the right side. If the leftmost light flashed green, we went left. If both left and right lit up, we had to decide. At such a high speed, the movement of the wheel was miniscule, and the foot stayed far away from the brake.

The course also involved an obstacle course, which I was able to master with help and practice. Going forward, that is. Going backward, my historical nemesis, was a problem. I could do it, but I couldn’t get it done in the time allotted. After my second unsuccessful attempt going backward, I saw the instructors huddle while I caught my breath. The reality was this: I was the last woman standing. The other female member had just been sent home. If I didn’t make it through this portion, they would finish without a single female driver qualifying. With the number of female dignitaries expected at the summit, the pressure was on.

Bernie Arbour, a member close to retirement and one of the kindest men I knew got in the driver’s seat next to me.

“You have one try left, Sandra.”

“I know.” I said, trying to stay calm.

“Do you trust me?”

“Yes,” I said, and I meant it.

“I can get you through this if you do what I say.”

When the signal went off, I hit the gas.

“Wait, wait… wait, NOW!” Bernie yelled and I cut the wheel.

“Good, stay off the brake. Ease off the gas…. wait for it…NOW!”

And just like that, I managed all of the 90 degree turns and finished under the allotted time. Or at least they said I finished under the allotted time. Either way, no pylons were harmed and the instructors got one woman through the course.

I would go on to drive in the prime minister’s motorcade when he was in the province. I usually drove one of the cars in the rear that cleared the lane so that the armored Cadillac could pass, and I had a whale of a time doing it.

I would also go on to lock myself out of a marked police car in the rain after stopping a transport truck and drop two tires off the culvert at my house trying to back out at 3 in the morning during a snow storm.

It was humbling, driving a police car. But I remember it all with a smile on my face.

One little, two little, three little students…

My high school English teacher, Mrs. Wanda Jessulat would label this as a ‘plop’ if you look at my writing as a story line. Last week however, I received a lovely email from the parent of a student I taught a long time ago which brought me to this post. If you are enjoying my writing, please share with your friends. I do enjoy an audience.

I taught at George Street Junior High School in the early 90s in downtown Fredericton NB. The school itself is brick with a wide stone staircase leading to the doors that first opened to students in 1924. In 1931, a rectangular annex was added. By the time I did my student teaching there in 1991 the city had grown up around it leaving it without greenery or a playground.

The classrooms were large and sprawling with high windows that needed to be pulled open with a pole. The Art room downstairs was a mysterious place to someone like me who could barely draw stick people. There were tables and shelves with partially finished paintings, papier mâché projects, boxes of paints, pastels and any number of things I could neither name nor use. The library was run by Duska Slipp, who was likely the closest to me in age, at about ten years my senior. I was by far the youngest employee in the building.

Not much seemed to have changed since I had been a junior high student in another part of the province. Desks were still lined up individually, often in alphabetical order by last name. The Pigman and The Outsiders were read in English class and some old guy with readers and Einstein hair taught history by pulling out the same lined yellow pages that he used from one year to the next.

The profession was still staffed by my father’s generation, and teaching contracts were hard to come by. The pay for a substitute teacher was $84 a day. After ten consecutive days, the pay went up to over $100. The next benchmark came when the number of consecutive teaching days triggered a contract.

The first time that I was days away from the magic number (and being able to afford cheese), I was called to the principal’s office. Conard Symonds was a nice man with kind eyes, and I knew his words and his disappointment were sincere.

“I’m really sorry, Sandra” he said. “The District called and you have to stay home tomorrow”.

“Couldn’t I stay home one day next week?” I had been replacing the same teacher for several months and had no plans ready for my own supply teacher. I also was broke.

“I’m afraid not,” he answered and that was that. I had a day off without pay, the magic clock went back to zero and my daily wage went back to the starting line. This would happen at least once more.

My shot at a permanent contract finally came with a phone call the week before school started in my third year of teaching. Conard Symonds explained that there was a .6 position with a grade 7 homeroom that needed to be filled. Technically, it hadn’t been posted and wouldn’t be for at least another month, but he was excited for me and was hoping I’d be interested. I was. I went to work the next day.

“How many Scoobys do you have?” a teacher asked me as I walked by him in the staffroom with my first ever stack of student files.

“Scoobys?” I hadn’t a clue what the question meant. The teacher asking was one of the heavy smokers in the staff room who generally did not engage in small talk with me. I was pretty sure he wore a toupee. My mind was picturing Scooby Doo.

“Indians,” he added. “Wagon burners. How many in your class?”

I don’t know how or if I responded but I do know that I didn’t make the connection between Scooby and what he was asking until later. I likely muttered something unintelligible and got out of there as quickly as I could. I had textbooks to track down, combination locks to sort out and a classroom to set up.

I felt like I was in a time warp. I had been raised in a middle class suburb and had never heard racial slurs spoken in my home. I remember using the ‘n-word’ in the eeny-meeny miny song when I was very young and being corrected by my mother who told me that we didn’t use that word anymore. The black licorice doll-shaped penny candies she liked from McArthur’s store changed to licorice babies around that time as well.

‘Native’ was the word I was taught to use as an adolescent when referring to Indigenous people. I knew that ‘Indian’ was not only inaccurate but dated to say the very least.

And then there was the Indian Attendance Form that showed up on my desk.

“You’ll know who the natives are” one of the teachers told me when I asked her about it.

“How?” I asked. “By how they look?”

I knew that many natives had dark straight hair and dark eyes but so did my cousin Michelle who wasn’t native and most of my mother’s family. My uncle Frank, who easily could have passed for native used to threaten to drop us off at the nearby ‘reserve’ and leave us there when we were being pests.

“Well, that and their last names” the teacher clarified.

“Last names?” I didn’t know a single indigenous person well enough to know their full name.

“Francis” the teacher said. “And Sacobie, and Polchies…”

That’s when I connected the dots. Sacobies. Not Scooby-Doo.

There was no Erin Brokovich moment for me. I went on to figure out which students needed their attendance recorded on the form. My teaching days consisted of figuring things out, loving it, and feeling like someone was going to catch me impersonating a grown up at any moment and send me home. I learned which teacher I could go to for help and which ones to avoid.

When the teacher across from me offered to help me set up for my first parent-teacher meeting, I was relieved. I thanked him when we were done. “I just wanted to watch your ass while you picked up chairs,” he said. And so it went.

The parents of my students started a petition in October when they found out that I couldn’t apply for my own job and would be leaving once it was filled with a ‘qualified’ candidate. The District Superintendent faced a classroom full of these parents one evening. I sat in the back, humbled.

“The job itself requires a science degree, and unfortunately the teacher is question does not have one. This in no means implies that the teacher in question…”

I was teaching one class a day of Grade 7 science using the thick textbooks that predated my birth. The thing I’ve always loved about teaching is finding different ways to explain and demonstrate a concept. For the life of me I can’t remember any of the actual science lessons, but I do remember getting the students to bang rulers on their desks. They loved it, and none of them questioned my qualifications.

I raised my hand. “I’m the teacher in question, sir. You can call me by name.”

It was already a done deal, I knew that. But it was awfully nice for the parents to try. More than 35 years later, it still warms my heart. Not getting the job wasn’t the hardest part though. The part that broke my heart was telling my students.

“I won’t be going far,” I told them “I’ll still be a supply teacher here. And I want you to give your new teacher a chance. It’s a difficult situation for him, starting after the year is underway and I know that each of you will be respectful and kind.” Whatever else I said was equally full of platitudes. I was broke, back down to 84$ a day and my fog was heavy with a new kind of grief that I didn’t know was part of teaching.

Three of the girls in that science class were indigenous. The trio were a head taller than most of the girls, and I can still picture them, owning the middle of the hallway as they walked. They sought me out a few weeks after their new teacher had started.

“Miss Christopher, he doesn’t like natives.”

I didn’t hold it against the guy for getting the job, but I certainly didn’t have it in me yet to make small talk with him about the students I considered ‘mine’ so I had avoided meeting him. Surely the girls were wrong. I said something vacuous to them about giving him a chance while hoping that my smile looked sincere.

Eventually, I did run into him.

“Hi, I’m Sandra.”

He introduced himself, smiling. He hadn’t connected the dots.

“Miss Christopher.”

“Oh.”

We chatted about something, maybe the weather, maybe the coffee. I can generally drum up a conversation with anyone. I finally asked about my three girls.

“How are they doing?”

His response amounted to “You know what Indians are like.”

There’s no moral to this story. I was broke, discouraged and decided that maybe teaching wasn’t for me. I would go back to it 25 years later and sometimes teachers would comment on my very long hiatus.

“Things aren’t what they used to be are they?”

No. No they aren’t.

THE CLOTHESPIN LADY Part 2 HANG TES HARDES

My lack of marketing experience was evident when I named my clothespin Facebook page “Hang tes Hardes”. Unless you are Acadian, you wouldn’t know what that means, nor would you be able to pronounce or remember it. But I thought it was grand idea at the time and I love the way that Chiac expression rolls off my tongue.

“J’vais hanger my hardes sur la ligne si qu’y mouile pas” literally translates to “I will hang my rags on the line if it doesn’t wet (out).”

Chiac, the patois that is primarily spoken in Southeastern New Brunswick, is a convenient mix of French and English. It makes absolute sense to me and is rather efficient in my humble opinion. Why speak one language at a time when you can pick from two? “Worry pas ta brain je te callerai back” is understandable on both sides of the language line and is rather fun to say. My Southern American friends would recognize Chiac as the grandmother of Cajun.

But with a name like Sandra Christopher, why Chiac?

I was born in 1969 to a mother who grew up speaking French and a father who grew up speaking English. 1969 was also the year that New Brunswick passed the Official languages Act making New Brunswick the only Canadian province with two official languages. I didn’t learn French any more than I learned English. I just always spoke both.

I went to French schools until high school and sang with the Jeunes Chanteurs d’Acadie (Young Acadian Singers). I functioned mostly in English at home, French at school and French at choir. When recalling conversations, I sometimes couldn’t remember which language was used. Admittedly, my mental operating language is now English.

Writing about Chiac brings up some great memories – My grandmother Beatrice LeBlanc used to serve me poutine rapée (while smoking a Benson and Hedges) and to me that will always be the original poutine. For those of you not in the know, poutine rapée looks like a dirty snowball the size of a softball. It’s made with mashed potatoes and grated raw potato made into a ball around a center of chopped or ground salt pork. It’s then boiled in a large pot of water. I like to eat mine with salt and pepper but there are those who prefer brown sugar.

Modern poutine is a plate of fries, with cheese curds (real ones that squeak on your teeth) all covered in a brown gravy. It’s delicious, but not ‘real’ poutine in my books. Poutine rapée is the OG. Neither dish has anything whatsoever to do with clothespins. I am however starting to get hungry. How did I get here? Oh yes, Hang tes Hardes, Chiac, Acadian… oooohhh now I’m thinking about tourtière.

All that to say, “Hang tes Hardes” wasn’t really working in the marketing department. My woodworking friend and great neighbour Tom Stuart started calling me the clothespin lady and it stuck and went on to earn capital letters.

One of the next challenges I faced was finding a spring manufacturer. I had been buying springs 50 at a time from Herrick Kimball in the US, but with his blessing, I decided to find a Canadian manufacturer. I started my search by emailing spring manufacturing companies and leaving voice mails. The first and only company to respond back was Ammtech Springs out of British Columbia. They asked me to mail them a few springs to see if they could replicate them. I did, and they could. The first production run Ammtech did for me was 2500 springs. The last production run they did for me was 20,000.

I’ve had many inquiries over the years about my production process and about the springs in particular. Sometimes it was out of curiosity, sometimes it was someone looking to start their own clothespin business. I’ve always been happy to share the information with anyone who asked however I was a little hesitant with the author who wanted to know about clothespins for a kink novel. To each their own, but clothespins? Don’t look it up. Trust me on this.

When I look back on my business, there was no real plan. I figured out one thing at a time. I never did get good at the paperwork side of it, but I managed. I found a niche that I wasn’t looking for by making a product I couldn’t find to buy. It was never a full-time job for me or a big income producer, but it certainly was a part of my life.

And that my friends, it how I became The Clothespin Lady.

Lache pas la patate, mes amis.

The one and only foot chase I ran  during my policing career involved a young woman I’ll refer to as Annie. In the three and a half years I worked in her community, I had numerous interactions with her, none of them violent but all of them sad and leading in a direction that I sincerely hope changed for the better over the decades that followed.

Annie had violated conditions of her release and was arrestable, so when I saw her in town, I pulled over. The young, slightly built teen was in a T-shirt, shorts and sneakers and didn’t see me walking toward her. It was a sunny day on Main Street with the usual locals milling about. Telling ‘cop’ stories is a bit of a challenge, because practices change over the years and the world is now full of arm-chair quarterbacks and YouTube experts willing to tell you what you did wrong. There are lot of things that I could have done differently that day but it worked out nevertheless.

I told Annnie she was under arrest as I took hold of her upper arm, but her reaction was quicker than mine. She easily twisted away from me and started running up the sidewalk. With little thought of anything other than “Oh, shit!” I started running after her. Within seconds we were both across the street and headed toward the small graveyard in the center of town that led through to the next block up. My duty belt was rattling and jiggling, and I remember holding my radio and hoping that I could outlast her bare, skinny legs that were pumping like pistons.

When we entered the graveyard and started weaving between the headstones, the smooth leather soles of my black ankle boots met the wet grass and my feet came out from under me. As my rear-end unceremoniously hit the ground, I could hear an ‘oooh’ from the small crowd that had gathered on Main Street. Fueled by adrenaline, pride and a body much younger than the one I now occupy, I thankfully popped back up and the chase continued.

By the time we were halfway through the graveyard, I hadn’t closed any of the distance, but neither had Annie gained any ground. It was a moving stalemate.  Annie didn’t break stride the first time she glanced back to see where I was but just as she crested the hill leading back out onto the road, she looked a second time and her pace slowed as her eyes met mine. Just as quickly as she had sprinted off, Annie stopped, her whole body drooping in defeat. My heart still aches for her all these years later.

With both of us working hard to catch our breath, I handcuffed Annie and spoke the words placing her under arrest and advising her of her rights. We slowly and carefully walked back down through the graveyard, past the silent audience to my police car. Annie was searched, placed in the back seat and neither of us said a word on the drive to the detachment.

I hadn’t thought of Annie in decades, but she popped into my head recently on a run.  Running and writing are both things I’ve found my way back to lately and so I have been giving a lot of thought to the mental aspect of both.

Marathoning for Mortals by John ‘The Penguin’ Bingham and Jenny Hadfield had been my motivation and guide for getting into running after my second child was born in 2004.  Somewhere in my dog-eared copy was the quote “The miracle isn’t that I finished. The miracle is that I had the courage to start.” Looking back now, I appreciate the work I put into getting to the starting line. With a newborn and a five-year-old and carrying 50 lbs of ‘baby weight’, my running had begun with circling the suburban block where I lived. If the front door light was on when I chugged back into view of the house, it meant the baby was awake and I needed to go in to nurse. If the light was still off, I was good to keep going. The block was such a monumental distance for me that I would quietly wish for the baby to wake up. I was too self-conscious to run through the neighbourhood in the daylight.  I had a treadmill in the basement with a portable DVD player strapped to it, and I recorded every mile in my logbook, following a run-walk plan that would take me to my first half-marathon less than a year later.

The first full marathon I ran was the Nike’s Women’s Marathon in San Francisco two years after my son was born. It was a huge accomplishment for me and I was very, very nervous. I don’t know what I thought a ‘real’ runner was at the time, but I was certain it wasn’t me. I was heavier than I wanted to be and felt like a pack mule with my mini water bottles strapped around my waist.  I worried about my running shorts riding up, my digestion, my dignity, getting to the finish line and a myriad of other things. I measured myself against the women runners who appeared to have no body fat, no structural worries about their sports bras nor any obvious concerns with flabby bits rubbing together and spontaneously combusting. Once I started the run, I noticed that many of the participants were running for a cause – childhood cancer, in memory of Dad who died of heart disease, autism awareness, etc. and my negative dialogue became even louder. Not only was I not a ‘real’ runner, I also hadn’t raised any money and was running for myself. I was fat AND selfish.

I didn’t feel any sense of wonderment in the 5+ hours it took me to finish. It was a complete slugfest, mentally and physically. With about 5km left, I hit the proverbial wall and had to will my hips to drag the concrete blocks that had replaced my legs. My goal became simply to finish upright. And I did.  When I got back to work, one of my colleagues, walking past me in the hallway, asked me what my time was. Silly me, I answered truthfully and he responded with “Did you even train??” He was the last person I admitted my time to. It saddens me now to think of how hard I was on myself. Allowing someone else to confirm my bias was a mistake I would not make again, regarding running at least. There must have been some enjoyment, because I did go on to run two more full marathons, and when someone would ask about my time, I would respond  “I finished the same day I started, and I had a smile on my face”.

At 57, with a fledgling return to running, I notice that my mental dialogue has changed dramatically.  I’m not sure if it’s because of  therapy, all the self-help books, the passage of time, or none of the above, but I’ll take it. I am a runner just by virtue of the fact that I run. Will I run another marathon? Maybe. I do love a good logbook, a detailed plan, a spreadsheet, new tech, new sneakers and a lofty goal. But right now, I just want to run.