Ewte Talk

And, SO, I did it. I finished my first triathlon in nearly twenty years this past weekend in just under three hours (2:57). One mile swim, 25 mile bike, 6.2 mile run. My cheering crew unfortunately never did show because of threatening weather, but when I arrived home they presented me with a spectacular paper trophy with a swimmer, biker, and runner on top. I felt like a champion, and by the look on my boys’ faces at my surprise, I realized I was a champion, triathlon or no.

After recounting my war stories, I jumped in the shower, grabbed something from the front of the fridge, and bolted for an hour long massage, which lasted an hour and forty-five minutes. Awesome. With endorphines doing laps around my brain, my lymphatic system emptied, and feeling a lighter shade of ethereal, I floated over to Barnes and Noble, rested in their cozy chair with a couple of books until kabob time with my guys who were ensconced in front of the World Cup.

IT WAS THE MOST PERFECT DAY!! Thank you thank you God, World, Grandma, Whoever arranges these kinds of days. I love you!

By Monday morning I was a regular old mom again, but sometime this week I’m going to make it over to the grocery store to see if my face has made it onto the Wheaties box yet.

Yesterday a collegue of my husband’s so graciously extended an open invitation to anybody in a large group of people at the office to join him on his boat out in the Chesapeake for some sun and get-away for an afternoon. Three couples accepted, all with children of varying ages, and the Captain’s own son and his friends were down from New York, so the Captain had himself a crew.

I thought maybe I’d bring along a treat for everybody on the boat. Why not? It was a holiday weekend. Of course, why do things ahead of time when you can always wait until the very last possible second? That morning was a scheduled back-to-back bike-run workout where I do the bike and run legs of a triathlon I am entered in at the end of June to practice a quick transition. For a runner, this kind of thing can be fun because of the rubbery tired leg feeling you get when you go from bike to run: something a little different. Also, it’s something that can eat up the morning hours before you know it, so the baking I wanted to do for the boat trip then turned into a speed bake. As I worked on my baking transitions, I found I am a much faster baker than I am a cyclist:

Bakers take your mark, GO! Grabbed Joy of Cooking, flipped to Chocolate Chip Cookies, yanked butter, chips, flour, sugar, soda, salt, etc., etc. out of cabinets, flipped switch on oven, furiously concocted batter that held together, flung it onto baking sheets, winged it like frisbee into oven, wham bam thank you ma’am. Stop the timer!

What resulted, apparently, were the best cookies this side of the continental divide.

Procrastination breeds masterpiece.

After we all situated ourselves on the boat and headed out of port, my little family sat up front to take in the scenery and the gorgeous weather. Years ago my mother had given us a story book about tug boats and from it we learned about “red right return”. I noted to the boys, “See guys? The red buoys are on our left now. That means we are leaving port. They’ll be on our right when we return. The green on our left.”

We passed by Fort McHenry where a huge American flag floated on the warm air like a striped raft out at sea, slowly moving up and down with the air waves, seductive and solitary. We moved by enormous ships with over-size Nordic names painted along the side, some with the front section of their hulls flipped up to allow for freight to pass through to dock. We passed under a bridge partially wrapped for construction that I couldn’t resist calling the Christo Bridge because Christo is an artist who wraps giant structures like that. It was a dorky comment that my husband thankfully understood.

We moved slowly along as the sun warmed us. It was such a different world out there on the water and our suburban chaos was suddenly a distant memory.
Just this weekend our summer truly did begin here in the Washington/Baltimore area. To date it’s been unseasonably cool. As I laid down, a little drowsy from my early morning alarm and workout, all I could think of was how delicious the sun felt on my body. I could hear a shuffle of people coming and going. My kids wanted to go back into the cabin, so Bill went with them. I couldn’t help myself, so I laid there just another tiny little bit longer.
But as I lay there, as I assumed my husband was tending to my children, my children were in fact stealth-inching their way closer to their grand plan which sat vulnerable on the counter in the smoke-filled kitchen in front of the partying New York crew: Mom’s platter of cookies. Given the fact that later, every one of the New York group came up to me and gushed about how amazing the cookies were, I have no doubt that once my two sons reached the galley what they must have seen certainly produced in them a classic feast-or-famine response. Surely their eyes set upon numerous twenty-year-old hands juggling cigarette/beer bottle/chocolate chip cookie. Gulp. Chocolate chip cookie! My boys must have known at that moment it was dive in, or risk losing out on the booty.

This is my forensic deduction, because when they returned to the front of the boat, faces smeared with runny brown matter, fingers smeared in the same, I had only one question. “Max,” I said, “How many cookies did you eat?”

He looked at me in a strange stupor. Did I mention the size of the cookies? Diameter much wider than my palm, and I’m not petite. I also added fifty percent more chips, a trick I learned from my mom. It’s essential. Also, I’d let my kids have a cookie before we left our house, so they weren’t starting from zero.

I cocked my head, waiting for his answer. He stared back.

“Max?”

“What?”

“I said, How many cookies did you eat?”

“Oh,” he said, “Five.”

I squinted at him. Chocolate gives me a migraine. I didn’t touch those cookies as big as their reputation grew that day. Looking my son up and down I could see that if I licked him off like a mother cat it would give me a doozey. He was covered. Five my ass. How about five at least?

It would be a lie of omission not to mention that the bay looked like it would have made a nice big bath right about then.