A spark of energy

Sometimes, you feel it when you're least expecting it

As you can see — especially if you follow me on Instagram — our family has a new member! Say hello to Oreo, an almost 14-week-old Great Pyrenees-Labrador mix puppy, who’s probably chewing the end of a rug in our house right now as you read this.

I should add that Oreo isn’t actually ours to keep; she belongs to my mother- and father-in-law, who are taking an overseas trip right now, so she’ll be spending the next ten days or so with us. Which means that, for now at least, we’re her “parents” until they get back.

Still, it’s interesting, after all this time, to have a baby in the house again, even if she’s a canine one. My son will be 11 years old in a few months, and already is starting to have his own life, in a way. He still wants, needs and loves mom and dad, of course, but he’s begun to enter the boyhood phase, when he spends as much — sometimes, actually much more — time with his friends as with us.

My daughter is home from college, but she’s also grown now, juggling two summer jobs until she goes back for her sophomore year in the fall. Our older dog, the golden retriever you see pictured above, has until now really been enjoying her life in semi-retirement, lounging lazily and contentedly for hours upon hours a day.

Even though there’s lots of busy-ness in our lives, everyone had kind of settled into a stable cruising altitude. We were, more or less, set and moving forward on our current paths, or so we thought.

And into that comes… ten pounds of anarchy 🤣

The first few nights we’ve kept her, my son asked if Oreo could sleep in his room. (Remember what having a puppy was like when you were ten?) So, we said yes, and because she’s been so little she sleeps a lot, and would go right to sleep when he did.

But, if you remember from having a baby (human or animal) of your own, babies don’t sleep for all that long. Which meant that every night, she woke up around 11:30, with a yelp and a cry, wanting to get up… to play again.

Most nights, I’ve gotten the call. I’ve always been a light sleeper anyway — if an ant scurries across the tile bathroom floor, it’ll wake me up — so I’ve taken the baton, carrying Oreo in my arms like a baby outside so she can relieve herself, before we come back inside, play a bit, and then I try to coax her back to sleep. (Emphasis on try!)

Afterwards, groggily, I trundle back to bed and try to get in a few hours of sleep before she wakes up again, typically by 6 a.m. You’d think I’d be annoyed by all of this; and at first, I was. But after her first few days’ stay with us, she went back to my in-laws.

How was the house — where I work from home three days each week — while she was gone? I’ll tell you: it was quiet. (“Too quiet,” to quote that famous line we’ve all heard at one point or another.)

Not too long ago, I happened to catch Radical Wolfe, a Netflix documentary on Tom Wolfe, the famous writer of the seventies, eighties and nineties who wrote books like The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full (which also has been turned into a Netflix series now).

I actually got to meet Wolfe once, when he came to Atlanta to sign copies of A Man in Full; I was one of more than 2,000 people who showed up to wait in line at what was then a Borders bookstore. I was just in my mid-twenties and he was a hero of mine, as I was then a reporter working for a small newspaper here, just getting started in journalism.

What came rushing back as I watched the documentary — especially the parts that focus on how he wrote his early magazine stories, like “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby,” which, if you read the story, you’ll understand what I mean — is the energy of his words, the vitality of his language, the enthusiasm with which he approached his work.

Wolfe threw himself into writing in a way no one really ever had before, with a voice and a verve I’d never encountered. His words jumped off the page, lighting up my neurons in a way I’m not sure any other writer’s has, before or since.

You might be wondering about now, why am I going on about Tom Wolfe? What, exactly, does that have to do with what this newsletter is about?

For me, the answer is that in this day and age, we’re of course living through a technological revolution (that we’re all well aware of). Our phones track us, our smartwatches track us, and it’s all too easy to get caught up in a performance on social media that we’re scarcely even aware of.

So much is quantified in the world we live in today — and, of course, there are plenty of positive outcomes from that, don’t get me wrong. But I find it’s all too easy to get lost in all that quantification, whether it’s of my running — watching my stats on Strava, for example — or my writing.

When what really drew me to this in the first place was that spark I recognized really early on in my own life: the vitality, the energy in Wolfe, and in the life Oreo has brought to our house, so unexpectedly.

I realize what a weight the quantification of our lives can be, and sometimes I just want to shrug it off and push it far, far away.

When I watch the puppy play (which she’s doing right now, as I write this) she coils up like a spring before she runs across the grass to — BAM! — slam into the side of our golden retriever. The energy in her builds up, builds up, builds up, and then she springs it on the world.

That’s what we want to feel, isn’t it? That excitement, that energy, losing yourself in something? I think so, but it’s so easy to forget that, isn’t it?

I hope your day has been fantastic and that you’ve gotten a great run in — it’s Global Running Day, in case you didn’t know.

As always, keep in touch and let me know how your running/life is going.

Your friend,

— Terrell