John’s Legs

I love
John’s legs,
Pumping pedals up and down.
Strong, sculpted, serviceable
Like David.
As perfectly proportioned
As the Vitruvius Man.
No mere hamstrings these
Sinuous forms moving under taught skin and lycra.
Semitendinosus, semimembranosus,
Vastus lateralis, biceps of the thigh.
The gastrocnemius flexes to display
A great inverted heart
And from the back of calves
Delivers a continual visual valentine.
When rarely I pass, I receive
A full display where quad meets knee of
Rectus femorus, vastus medialius
And vastus lateralis power.
I cannot see the action where hip meets thigh,
My heart flutters,
I can only imagine.

About two days before the Etape, John changed. The gregarious, relaxed guy I usually live with disappeared, replaced by a pensive, brooding, pacing, sometimes growling tiger. My space, like Piscene Patel’s (Pi in “The Life of Pi”) was inhabited by a “Richard Parker.”

Fortunately I’ve seen this beast before. The two serious “athletes” in the family — John and Marion — undergo this metamorphosis before every big event, physical or mental. They turn inward, grow silent, scowl and snarl if pulled into the trivialities of every-day life. They are focused on the event, the challenge, the competition and their goals. They are readying for the fight.

I find the process interesting. It isn’t that I’m uncompetitive, anyone who knows me can attest to that. But I am not in John’s — or Marion’s for that matter — league. They have a physical need to “win” and more often than not, they do. What I have learned over the years, though, is that every Richard Parker needs a Pi to perform at his or her best.

John and Tim intensely studying the route.

John putting his race number on the bike.

In the fall of 1965, Lise Hansen rescued me. I was a large, freakishly tall, pubescent 12-year old American enrolled in a public school in Virum, Denmark; a suburb of Copenhagen. My classmates were all petit — a head shorter than I, their growth spurts yet to come — Danish pre-teens whose English consisted of parroted lyrics from The Beatles and Herman’s Hermits and Level 1 ” Learn to Speak English” textbooks. I was a circus side-show thrust into their midst and the boys, in particular, found taunting me rather amusing. Needless to say, I was not a happy camper; miserable enough that, unbeknownst to me, my parents were considering the extreme and expensive option of putting me in a private American school.

Old friends Anne and Lise.

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Anne in front of Hammershus

For the past four days we have been biking on the Danish island of Bornholm: a tear-dropped shaped land mass in the Baltic, south of Sweden and smack in the middle of the main shipping lanes in and out of Stockholm, Helsinki, Gdansk and Saint Petersburg. Its rugged coast is unusual for pancake-flat Denmark with cliffs, craggy outcroppings and stone beaches of tide-ground rocks ranging in size from marbles to melons. Smoked herring and granite quarries were once the island’s main industries, but the fish have moved and granite is cheaper elsewhere. Barnholm is now a garden of beautifully tended farms, rolling hills, quaint villages, thousand year-old round churches and Hammershus, the ruins of a medieval castle. Tourists have replaced fishermen and the smokeries (used for smoking herring) have been converted to restaurants, gift shops and art galleries.
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