On automated traffic citations, a bear on the loose, beautiful music, and an injury update (vol. xxviii, no. 5)

Dear Family,

I don’t know whether to feel amused or horrified by the fact that my simply typing the letters m and o in succession into Google Chrome is enough for the browser to (correctly) guess that I’m trying to get to “montgomerycountymd.gov/safespeedpay,” the website where I pay citations issued by our county’s robot army of traffic cameras.¹

As usual, the offending party this month was not I but somebody else currently residing here. With Sophie and Grace home for the summer, our modest house is once again home to five adults, four drivers and three cars. (Sophie’s car is lying fallow out in Utah.) Owing solely to a fluke of history (and for reasons having nothing to do with patriarchy — not directly, at least) all three of these cars are registered in my name. This means that all the camera citations come addressed to me, regardless of who was actually driving. (Even though, with the exception of Ari, who loves our beautiful planet Earth enough to eschew even having a driver’s license, no one living here spends less time behind the wheel than I do.)

The arrival of each new citation typically initiates a good-natured inquiry into who was driving the car in question at the time and place in question. But regardless of the inquiry’s outcome, it is inevitably I who winds up logging into montgomerycountymd.gov/safespeedpay, entering the citation number, being redirected to an entirely different page, having to enter the same citation number a second time (because the only thing more aggravating than sending money to the government is being compelled to navigate and interact with a poorly designed website in order to send money to the government), and paying the thing.

Being the patriarch is wildly overrated.

(I kid of course. Anyone who thinks patriarchy has any bearing on how the affairs of my household are governed obviously does not know us very well. The fact that I share “my” house with a dog and a cat (and their attendant smells) should be sufficient evidence that this particular patriarch wields very limited power and is subject to having his vetos overridden.)

Injury Updates

I briefly started using the Journal app on my iPhone this month. I used it for a few weeks and quit when I realized how useless it was. (Typing a journal entry with two thumbs is irritating, the entries are locked in my phone because the app only works on iOS — not on iPadOS or even macOS, so I can’t port them over to my other Apple devices. Honestly, what’s the point of being confined to Apple’s famous/infamous “walled garden” if I can’t even do that? I can’t believe anyone went to the trouble of designing something so stupidly limiting.)

But the few dozen entries I made in the past month or so have reminded me of some things and include the following little string (which I have no other option than to re-type manually, consarn it):

April 29th: “After this morning’s stronger-than-expected swim and easy bike ride to work, I am realizing that my body is feeling better than it has all year. Other than an occasionally stiff back, no significant pain to speak of. Feeling grateful for that.”

April 29th (i.e., later that day): “My lower back is REALLY bothering me when I try to do anything strenuous. Hoping against hope that I can run tomorrow morning.”

May 1st: “My back is feeling better today than yesterday but still not close to 100%. Hoping I can run tomorrow.”

May 4th: “Busy day. Started with with the first [Montgomery County Road Runners Club Experienced Marathon Program (XMP)] long run of the season. Went from there to my temple shift — I officiated an endowment session attended by Sophie and Luke, which made it special. They sat next to each other on the front row — where the witness couple used to sit back when that was a thing. They’re pretty cute together. Had to leave my shift early to get to Frederick for an evening 5K with Athletes Serving Athletes. The weather was rainy and cold and awful and half the athletes didn’t show up, including Ridge, whom I was supposed to push. So instead I was reassigned to push Sandra, which was lovely. We had a large pushing team (because so many of the pushees didn’t come) so it was a fun race in spite of the conditions.”

Two runs in one day turned out to be more than my ailing trunk was ready for. By the next morning I couldn’t walk without pain. The fact that the pain radiated from my back down around my glutes, hamstrings and quads made me wonder whether I (like Crystal a few months ago) had slipped a disc.

But my pain was more annoying than debilitating. It hurt to walk but I could still do it more or less normally. Crystal was hobbling all over like an old lady, her left foot flopping with every step. I definitely didn’t have those symptoms, so I decided to take a couple of weeks off running to see if it would fix itself.

I filled the void with more cycling and swimming, both of which I enjoy but not in the same way I do running.

It was during my two-week running hiatus that I joined a few of my triathlon buddies in the neighborhood for the “Maryland Freedom Swim,” a two-mile (give or take) swim across the Choptank River, alongside the U.S. Route 50 bridge just east of where the river empties into the Chesapeake Bay (they time the race to coincide with slack tide, so there isn’t much current to contend with) and finishing in historic Cambridge.

The swim went okay, I guess. I had no particular goal other than to finish in under an hour. I managed to just barely do that, coming out of the water in 59 minutes, 58.89 seconds — 19 1/2 minutes behind the winner and good enough for a 118th-place finish (out of 286). So, another typical, middle-of-the-pack, Average Joe’s finish for your hero. I’d like to blame it on my sore back, but that felt fine in the water. Truth is, I’m just a pretty average swimmer. I could probably get faster if I worked at it a little harder, but what are the odds of that?

Cambridge, Maryland (settled by English colonists in 1684, incorporated by newly minted Americans in 1793) is in Dorchester County, birthplace of Harriet Tubman. (If you don’t know who Harriet Tubman is, then shame on you and you need to stop reading this and type her name into the Google box right now.² It would be nice if they could hurry and get her on the $20 bill while anyone still uses cash and $20 can still buy something.)

Crystal, Ari, Sophie and Grace met me at the finish line of the swim in Cambridge. We grabbed lunch at the Ocean Odyssey Crab House (was pretty decent; I’d go again) and then hit the little Harriet Tubman museum in town.

I tested my back and upper legs this morning with my longest run of the month — a 12-miler to Great Falls with the XMP crew (some of whom are pictured below). The Great Falls of the Potomac are a joy to behold and worth the back stiffness I felt throughout my ensuing temple shift and am still feeling now. But it’s not that bad and my glutes, hammies and quads feel fine so I’m calling today a win.

As for Crystal’s back issues, she continues to gradually recover following last month’s procedure to repair her herniated disc. The recovery is not coming along nearly as fast as she would like, but she’s back to swimming again (when she’s not doing yoga or riding the Peloton) so that’s something.

Neighborhood Bear

Scrolling through my Journal app, I came upon this entry (which I’d also forgotten about — maybe I should go back to using it):

May 8th: “A lot of people are concerned about a bear purportedly running free in the neighborhood.”

The entry is accompanied by a screenshot of the daily digest of the neighborhood email listserv.

It’s worth pointing out that some overlap exists between the neighbors concerned about the bear and the “concerned citizens” campaigning for 4-way stops at every intersection that I complained about last month. I did not actually see this bear (nor did I see any of the several bears that purportedly paraded through the neighborhood at various times during the pandemic). We aren’t exactly out in the boonies here (Silver Spring abuts D.C.) but we do have a lot of woods and apparently bears around here aren’t all that uncommon. Who knew? Keep an eye on those pets and small children, I guess.

Beautiful Music

Crystal, Ari, Grace, and I paid two (two!) visits to the Kennedy Center on consecutive weekends this month, courtesy of my friend Ira (with whom I occasionally run, but never for very long because he’s much faster than I am) who plays bass in the National Symphony Orchestra and hooked us up with complimentary tickets.

The first concert began with British virtuoso Benjamin Grosvenor playing Liszt’s first piano concerto (which was mesmerizing and made me cry, causing my children to make fun of me) and ended with the Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique, all of which is nice, but if you’re like me, the first four movements feel a little like queueing up for a ride at Disney World. The queue is entertaining enough, but you’re mostly just waiting for the ride to start with the Dies irae in the 5th movement. (You’d recognize the motif even if you don’t know what I’m talking about since it’s in about a million other things. Google it — it’s fun!)

The second concert featured the 27-year-old American prodigy Randall Goosby playing Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto (amazingly). That was followed by Elgar’s Enigma Variations. The drive home from the second concert was complicated by police activity that completely shut down Rock Creek Parkway and made the trip take twice as long as it should have. Ordinarily this would transform me into a Grade-A jackass (my baseline is closer to a Grade-C jackass) but I was so elated by the music that I was able to take it all in stride. Very uncharacteristic for me, but it actually happened. Ask Crystal, Ari or Grace — they’ll back me up.

Finally, if you like (free) music, then you’ll want to come hear the Washington DC Temple Choir perform next weekend. (Sat., June 1st, 7pm at the Visitors’ Center; Sun., June 2nd, 7pm in Ashburn.) Members of the Silver Spring Maryland Stake have a conflict with the Saturday evening session of stake conference on the 1st. I can’t in good conscience suggest that you to skip that to come hear us (even though the concert is likely to be more entertaining…and will certainly be shorter — I’m an endurance athlete, but I struggle to find the stamina for two-hour church meetings). The downside of this is that, if you’re a member of the Silver Spring Maryland Stake, you’ll need to go all the way out to Ashburn to catch our concert on Sunday night. The upside is that it’s worth it and the acoustics in Ashburn are much better than they are at the Visitors’ Center.

The concert is shaping up to be a lot of fun. We’re doing selections from Aaron Copland’s Old American Songs, medleys from The Music Man (during which I perform in a barbershop quartet!) and O Brother Where Art Thou, and rousing renditions of Down By the Riverside and Over in the Glory Land.

We have tentatively and unofficially given our barbershop group the name “Doctrinally Sound,” which a certain kind of person will find amusing. I enjoy singing barbershop, but it’s hard! I am the group’s baritone, which is the part that sings all those funky notes in the middle of the chord that give barbershop music its distinctive sound. There are a lot of intervals that I’m not accustomed to finding and they often sound wrong to me even when they’re right (and they’re not always right).

Anyway, I’ve got a week to figure it out. Hopefully you can come and hear whether I succeed.

May you find peace in remembering our forbears this Memorial Day.

Love,
Tim

1. Contrary to what you might think, I actually support this means of traffic enforcement (even though, as my browser history evidently indicates, our household racks up its fair share of tickets). I’m generally in favor of things that discourage driving by making it as expensive and annoying as possible. I hate driving, cars (including EVs) are the worst, and I feel a twinge of guilt every time I slide behind the wheel of one. Not entirely rational, perhaps, but that’s where I am these days.
2. I remember first learning about the Underground Railroad as a young elementary schooler. It was not until considerably later — possibly not until high school — that I learned that the Underground Railroad was not a subway — that it was neither an actual railroad nor did actually run under the ground.