Computer Geeks and Rowing Crews

I have a tech guy---young, cute as a ladybug if ladybugs were males that wear black leather pocket vests full of tiny tools. I’ve loved those pocket vests since I first noticed them on gutsy photo-journalists running around dodging bullets to report on some long-ago and far-away war. It’s the one piece of clothing that I’ve lusted after for decades but would never let myself purchase. Maybe if I become a bag lady a pocket vest would be become a necessity but for now I’m too vain to add that much bulk to my already bulky mid-section. But every time Nate makes a house call to fix my computer woes he kick-starts the vest lusting all over again. This time the guy was sporting what I’m guessing was a two-day old beard. Talk about a lethal combination! A black beard with inky dark eyes, dimpled checks and that leather vest. Be still my heart. My days of seeing him might be coming to an end, though. He suggested we set up my two computers so he can do repairs and maintenance remotely from his shop for a fee of seven bucks a month. My computers would send him reports when things need doing or aren’t working and he’d do what needs doing. Every time he walks through the door it costs a hundred dollars so on one hand, his suggestion would save me money, but on the other hand I’m not sure I want to give someone a backdoor into my computers. Even though I know and trust Nate, there are others working in the business. It’s a local chain with five locations.

While he’s here we always have interesting conversations but this time I was struggling with my voice. I’ve just come off from a round of Prednisone (for joints inflammation) and one of the side effects for me is my voice gets very hoarse and soft which is shocking at first because I don’t get Prednisone often enough to remember this happening. I googled the drug and learned that sometimes your voice doesn’t come back! I’ve had the Prednisone medrol dose packs five-six times in the past---a year apart each time---so I know it’s just a matter of time when I will get my voice back but for the two days when I didn’t remember this side effect, I was bummed out thinking, First my eyes, then my ears, now my voice! What’s next?  But I know what’s next. I have to do something about my clicking, painful jaw. In the mornings I’m starting to have trouble opening my mouth wide enough to shovel cereal inside. Google is telling me there isn’t much that can be done except exercises so I’m letting it ride until my next dentist appointment. 

This week was my monthly book club and we had a great book to discuss, The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown. The cover describes the book in one precise sentence: It’s a true story of “nine Americans and their epic quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.” Almost 400 pages long but, boy, did I learn a lot about rowing crew teams and what it was like to grow up during the Depression, the socioeconomic landscape of the 1930s that molded the characters of these nine young men. The research and details that went into this book is mind boggling and it includes a lot about how Hitler prepared his country for the event. The boys in the boat who won the Gold in Berlin were the sons of loggers and shipyard workers in the Pacific Northeast, college students at the University of Washington in Seattle. If you like Olympic sports history you’d like this book. But it’s also a very human story about overcoming family dysfunction, nearly impossible odds and never giving up. 

George Yeoman Pocock, a designer/builder of racing shells and a mentor to the 1936 Olympic Team was quoted near the end of the book as saying, “Good thoughts have much to do with good rowing. It isn’t enough for the muscles of a crew to work in unison, their hearts and minds must also be as one.” Couldn’t the same be said of families and other groups to succeed? We have to give up our individual desires for personal fame or power in favor of working together, setting one goal to move forward.

Most times when I leave my house I go past a place on the river---a shell house---where rowing crews from the area high schools store and launch their shells. In the fall, when they start practicing again I will have a new appreciation for a sport I erroneously thought was just for yuppies. I look forward to pulling into the riverside park and watching for a while. I’ll know if they’re doing sweep-oar rowing (one oar per rower) or sculls rowing (two oars per rower). I’ll have a label---the coxswain---for the person who sits in the back and coordinating the rhythm and power of the crew, who has to factor in the wind, the weather and the position of the other shells in the race as he/she barks out orders. That’s what good books can do for us, they can make us see our own little world through a new and broader lens. ©