{"id":259,"date":"2006-03-26T17:46:34","date_gmt":"2006-03-26T22:46:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.xorph.com\/uj\/2006\/03\/26\/now-and-at-the-hour-of-our-victory\/"},"modified":"2007-07-07T22:40:59","modified_gmt":"2007-07-08T02:40:59","slug":"now-and-at-the-hour-of-our-victory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/uj\/archives\/259","title":{"rendered":"Now and at the hour of our victory"},"content":{"rendered":"

March experiment—day twenty-five—<\/span> I spent my 30 minutes of silence at Mack’s increasingly dilapidated cabin praying fervently for my uncle, who’s fighting his way back from critical care, so he can get the heart surgery he desperately needs.\n<\/p>\n

I ran back to Danville afterwards, just as I had run the five miles out to the cabin, but my legs became alarmingly stiff at nine miles or so and I had to walk a bit. I smiled to think that only a few minutes before I’d been advising J M on how to accomplish his 50-miler next month. Obviously, I’m no ultra-marathoner these days. When I mentioned it to Dana at breakfast she reminded me that it’s been four years since I did mine. True enough.\n<\/p>\n

After the silence, our friend J R (Buck) shared eloquent words about how an aging athlete faces the traumatic decline of the physical body. Fortunately I have no experience with this subject, so far. Uncle Joe does—more than he deserves.\n<\/p>\n

For decades, there was no greater advocate for physical fitness in Southwestern Ohio than Joe Sullivan. He’s had a positive influence on hundreds of educators and literally thousands of young people. He introduced things like tumbling mats and trampolines to the region and designed numerous state-of-the-art gymnasiums. And that doesn’t even touch on his contributions to coaching or his achievements as a college professor. You would think that he’d earned some points that would spare him the pain and indignity of a physical breakdown—he of all people, but it looks as though the Lord makes no such deals. Grace, on the other hand, is another issue.\n<\/p>\n

I will continue to pray the Hail Mary<\/span> for Uncle Joe.\n<\/p>\n

Today’s sight bites—<\/span> The march of ditch clutter, to the lower left of my stride, a parade of Newport packs and green Mountain Dew bottles—c-l-i-c-k—<\/span>Little Caesar’s cartons—c-l-i-c-k—<\/span>blue Bud Light cans—c-l-i-c-k—<\/span>Long John Silver’s boxes—c-l-i-c-k—<\/span>red McDonalds French-fry pockets—c-l-i-c-k—<\/span>Arby’s bags—c-l-i-c-k—<\/span>dip containers, soda straws, and orange candy wrappers—c-l-i-c-k—<\/span>with the helpless notion that I should at the very least interpret all this as an artistic statement, an homage to Kurt Schwitters<\/a> called Scenic Kentucky Highway 52<\/span>…\n<\/p>\n

Tomorrow—<\/span> Drawing a good friend in Africa, plus an important call to Virginia (the Mother of Presidents, not Mombo—the Mother of Me—although that’s not a bad idea)…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

March experiment—day twenty-five— I spent my 30 minutes of silence at Mack’s increasingly dilapidated cabin praying fervently for my uncle, who’s fighting his way back from critical care, so he can get the heart surgery he desperately needs. I ran back to Danville afterwards, just as I had run the five miles out to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,12,45,21,18,8,37,25],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/uj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/uj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/uj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/uj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/uj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=259"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/uj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/uj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/uj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/uj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}