Time to play in the ❄️

Let's do a little "wintering"

Back when I first started writing for a newspaper when I was 22 years old, David Halberstam was one of my all-time heroes. The author of big, era-defining door-stoppers like The Best and the Brightest and The Children, he also wrote shorter, more intimate books like Summer of ‘49 and October 1964, each of which tells the story of a single baseball season.

I heard him in an interview once say why he approached pacing his work this way — that doing big book after big book after big book was too much. “You have to stretch yourself, then you catch your breath,” he said. “Stretch yourself again, and then catch your breath again, with something with a smaller focus, lower stakes.”

Not that I’m comparing myself to him (!) but I like to take that approach too. Sometimes I write big, sprawling essays, the kind with a point I feel like I need to make with a big exclamation point at the end, and other times… I just wanna play in the dandelions, you know?

So this is one of those smaller, less focused pieces that I think (hope!) captures what a lot of us might be feeling right now, especially as a big winter storm bears down on us here in Georgia — can you believe it? We’re actually going to get some real winter weather here for the first time in seven years.

And that feeling is… I just wanna play.

The snow is coming, winter is finally here, we’re about to get somewhere between two and four inches of the powdery white stuff, and there’s really nothing I want to do more than just goof off with my family, go outside until we get so cold that our toes are about to freeze off, then come back inside for a while and warm up, and do that in-and-out, back-and-forth about five or six times before we decide we’re done for the day.

Make some chili, watch a movie or two we’ve already seen before, have a fire and then call it a day, not least because snowy days like these don’t come along that often in this part of the world. (And, because it feels like we can extend the holidays, even if it’s just for one more day.)

Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve watched the new Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which I hadn’t seen in eons but now makes me want to get on a plane to New York right away so I can go stand by the window at Tiffany’s, wearing pearls while I eat a croissant.

Watching these movies back-to-back has been a revelation for me, a reminder that there’s a world beyond the one that’s so close to our faces today, staring at us from our phones. Obviously, I know — from reading about it, of course, as I wasn’t born yet — how tumultuous the early sixties actually was. (Not unlike the moment we’re living in now.)

But I felt something watching both these movies — there was a sense of freedom, of boundaries falling away, a new world being born. In the trailblazing independence of Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly, living life (or at least trying to) on her own terms.

And in Timothée Chalamet’s Dylan, trying to break out from the straight jacket of traditional folk music, picking up the whizzer whistle from a Greenwich Village street vendor and bringing it into the Columbia Records studio, where he blows it for the first time in the intro to “Highway 61 Revisited” — I thought to myself, there’s something about that little act of rebellion, you know?

Dylan’s trippy, kaleidoscopic lyrics were in my head for all six miles of the 10K I ran here in Atlanta last weekend, keeping my mind off the fact that temperatures were in the mid-twenties. If you’ve ever met me in person — which quite a few of you have now, at our races in Richmond and Athens — you know I’m the last person who would ever appear to be the slightest bit rebellious.

But I’m drawn to the spark Dylan caught back then too, and I think we all want to throw off the constraints we live in sometimes, you know? Not to mention, it’s nice every now and then to take a break from our present reality and travel in time back to the sixties — “just put some bleachers out in the sun and have it on Highway 61,” you know?

If you’re in the path of this week’s winter storm, I hope you both stay safe and get to have some fun out in it — as always, keep me posted on how your running/life is going.

Your friend,

— Terrell