Rules for the Southern Rule Breaker Read online

  Still, when my friend Sally asked me to sign up for a duathlon with her, I quickly said no, then asked what a duathlon was.

  “You run three miles, bike ten miles, then run another three,” she explained.

  “Well, then, hell no. You know I can barely run three miles, much less bike ten more and run again after the first three.”

  “Oh, come on,” she said. “Don’t you want to push yourself?”

  “If I wanted to push myself, I wouldn’t have begged for an epidural when I was thirty-seven weeks pregnant and my doctor said the baby might come within a week or two.”

  “Listen, we’ll run the first three, then take a leisurely bike ride on a completely flat Florida road, then we can walk the last three. Come on, you’ll be fine.”

  “This is ridiculous, but okay, if you promise, pinky swear, to walk the last three with me without even suggesting we run.”

  She put out her pinky, we sealed the deal, and as simply as that I became a duathlete in training.

  I somehow had yet another overachieving friend, Helen, who loved to bike and ran marathons but had enough redeeming qualities that I couldn’t hate her. She became my training coach, and we biked three times a week on the Pinellas Trail until I could manage eight miles without resting.

  “Those last two will come easy on the day of the race,” Helen assured me. “You’ll be able to smell the pizza at the finish line.”

  “No, after I bike ten, I’ll still have three miles after that before I get to the finish line.”

  “Oh, yeah. I cannot believe you signed up for this thing. What the hell are you thinking?”

  Two days before the big event, I walked our basset hound, Delbert, past Sally’s house and noticed kayaks on top of her minivan as she loaded a duffel bag in the back seat.

  “Are y’all going somewhere, Sally?”

  “Oh, yeah. I was about to call you, Katherine. The boys don’t have school Monday, so we are going up to the river house for the weekend.”

  “What about the duathlon, Sally? The one you begged me to do with you.”

  “Well, I knew you didn’t really want to do it, so I didn’t think you’d care if we bagged it.”

  “Are you kidding me? I’ve trained. I’m ready. I’m in the best shape of my life. I can taste victory.”

  At that instant I knew how Carl Lewis felt when President Carter boycotted the Moscow Olympics in 1980. Lewis went on to win lots of gold in ’84, but I knew I would only go downhill fast once my opportunity to shine passed.

  “I’m still going to do it,” I told Sally.

  “Good for you. You’ll have fun.”

  The annual Chilly Willy Duathlon at Fort De Soto Beach was the antithesis of fun. As I parked my three-gear bike in the transition area, a voice over a loudspeaker reminded any competitors who weren’t members of the USA Triathlon Association to hustle on over to Tent B and sign an insurance waiver. I was one of three people out of about 200 competitors hustling to Tent B.

  “I am going to kill Sally,” I said to the other pitiful novices signing waivers with me.

  One minute after a gun fired to start the race, I was at the back of the pack with a little boy and a man with an artificial leg. My mind flashed back to instructional swim at Camp Seafarer when I was fourteen. While my cabinmates were taking diving and water ballet, I was learning basic strokes along with Sarah, the last born of triplets who had learning disabilities, and Kumi from Japan, who didn’t know how to swim or speak English.

  As a duathlete, I should have reserved every bit of energy I could but decided if I started talking to the young boy next to me, he wouldn’t pass me like the one-legged man did.

  I found out Jason was ten years old but had been competing in races since he was five because his mom trains triathletes. His younger brother was named Race, because she ran a marathon while she was pregnant with him. My youngest son is named Wade after my grandfather, but also because I waded in the ocean a lot when I was pregnant with him.

  The Chilly Willy was Jason’s first duathlon, but he’d been in several triathlons because swimming was his best sport. Unknowing spectators along the race route gave me adoring looks and knowing smiles because I was the Best Mom Ever bringing up the rear with my son whom I was introducing to the great world of long-distance competition.

  As we reached the transition area to mount our bikes, the first wave of competitors were already done with the bike sequence and heading to the beach to run the last three miles.

  “We need to get moving,” Jason said as he jumped on a lime green bike made of titanium, feathers, and marshmallows. I mounted my blue three-speed constructed of old railroad ties and rusty anvils. He left me in his dust, and I resigned myself to coming in last. There were plenty worse things, I told myself as I pedaled along the cracked asphalt road at Fort De Soto State Park. I was an able-bodied woman who could run and bike. I just couldn’t do it quickly.

  About this time, in the midst of my one-on-one therapy session with myself, I heard a car driving very slowly behind me as I reached the four-mile marker. I motioned for it to pass me, but it stayed on my tail. What a bush-league race. They couldn’t even keep cars from driving on the course. The USA Triathlon Association ain’t so great after all. I swung my right arm out wide again and motioned for the car to just pass me, but it refused. Finally, I turned around and saw a police car with lights flashing.

  “Oh, God, please no,” I said aloud, talking to myself, for the second time that day. The safety car was on my ass, making sure I didn’t topple over or pass out in the heat. Helen would later try to make the best of it.

  “At least he didn’t have the siren blaring,” she offered, “and be glad you hadn’t been drinking.”

  For the next six miles, my personal escort followed more closely than the L.A. cops tailed O.J.’s white Bronco. I tried to salvage a shred of self-respect and come up with some nugget of wisdom I’d garner from coming in last in the Chilly Willy Duathlon.

  “Never listen to Sally again” would have been a good lesson learned, but that was a moot point because I was going to drive up to her cabin and crush her with my bike later that night. So, I decided I had a lesson for my kids about coming in last and holding my head up high. I’d just seen a girl about eight years old a few days earlier wearing a shirt that said “Always First Pick” and wanted to tell her mom, who had most certainly bought the shirt, she was contributing to the delinquency of a nightmare. What has happened to decorum? I agree kids don’t need a trophy just for showing up at practice, but do we really want to raise a generation of blatant braggers?

  I decided to ride with pride as the policeman followed me and willed myself to stop thinking about what he would tell his hot girlfriend when she asked what he did all day at work. Finally, thankfully, I finished the ride and just had an easy three-mile run on the beach between me and the finish line. I could see Jason and the one-legged man way ahead in the distance, but there was no hope of catching up with them. I walked and ran in the slippery sand until I finally crossed the finish line as race organizers were throwing away the pizza boxes and packing up equipment.

  A few days later I told a friend I’d come in last, but he had a hard time grasping the concept of “last.”

  “But you weren’t dead last?”

  “Dead last,” I assured him.

  “Just last for your age group, you mean?”

  “Last for any age group. Last of the females, last of the males. Last of the humans. Last of the mammals. I saw a little squirrel skirt across that finish line just ahead of me.”

  “I would have paid good money to see that. Like real cash. There’s got to be a video somewhere,” a longtime childhood friend said when I recounted the story at my twentieth high school reunion.

  “They should have left you a pizza to take home,” my cousin laughed when I shared my tale with her at the annual Snow Reunion.

  “Will you please tell the story about when you finished that race in last place?”
a friend asked me at a Girls Night Out not too long ago.

  Turns out, if you don’t come in first, you might as well be last. It beats being in the middle of the pack.

  4. Don’t Major in Journalism

  My lucky number has been twenty-three since the moment in 1982 when Michael Jordan took the winning shot in New Orleans that won Carolina the NCAA championship against Georgetown. The freshman from Wilmington, N.C. wore the number twenty-three and it’s served him and me pretty well ever since. Jordan went on to win six NBA championships, amass a net worth of $1.9 billion, and become a leading philanthropist and a living legend.

  As for me, I almost always come closest to the number someone is hiding behind their back when I guess twenty-three. I’ve also never had my debit card, Weight Watchers membership, or Netflix account hacked with the number twenty-three as part of my password.

  The day after the Heels won it all, my parents let me miss a day of eighth grade and go to Chapel Hill for the welcome home celebration at Kenan Stadium. It was the most productive school day to date, because that’s when I decided to work as hard as I could to get into Carolina.

  Four years later, I got in early decision, which not only took the pressure off my senior year, but also determined my freshman roommate who I didn’t know very well at the time but would become a lifelong friend. Since Beth and I both got in early, we applied to live together in Spencer and thought we had a good shot at a coveted room in the 1924 brick dorm with dormer windows right on Franklin Street. Turns out I got in no problem. Problem was, my roommate was someone I’d never heard of named Katie Turner.

  Beth’s housing application got lost in the mail, a.k.a. the kitchen counter. At the time, I couldn’t understand how in the world her mother could miss such a crucial step in our lives. Thirty-two years later, when I took my own daughter to the accepted students’ weekend at the University of Vermont a day late because I was looking at the school’s online calendar of events for the previous year, I understood exactly how these things happen.

  Beth ended up in Winston dorm in the middle of campus with a twenty-eight-year-old study abroad student from Germany named Lutzia. She came to Chapel Hill with four changes of clothes, one towel, and an intense desire to get a top-rate education. She was perfectly nice, but wasn’t interested in matching comforters from Bed, Bath & Beyond, splitting the cost of a mini-fridge, or accompanying Beth to the Get Lei’d party in Winston’s lounge.

  My roommate Katie was nice girl with long blond hair and an easy laugh, but she spent most days and nights at her boyfriend’s house, and I could go a week without seeing her. I was never lonely, however, because Bunny, the rabbit Katie gave her boyfriend for his birthday, lived in our room at Spencer. The boyfriend was scared his dog might kill it, so I was stuck with Bunny, and her smelly cage. At least the boyfriend seemed to appreciate me taking the hit and introduced me to several of his good-looking friends who became counterparts throughout Carolina.

  One morning when I was taking Bunny’s soiled newspapers to the garbage, I heard about an empty single room on the fourth floor of Spencer. Beth applied for a housing transfer and got it. I helped her move out of Winston dorm and witnessed the awkward farewell to her roommate. Beth removed Lutzia’s food from the mini-fridge she was taking with her and placed it on a desk. She unplugged the fan she was taking with her and the temperature soared ten degrees on the hot September day. She took down the Claude Monet Water Lilies print (requisite of all freshmen girls in 1986) and left behind cold, bare walls.

  “Well, I think that’s it,” Beth said. “Lutzia, call me if you need anything.”

  “I can’t,” she replied. “You are taking the telephone with you.”

  We were navigating roommates, classes, boys, budgets, and beer, so I’m glad we didn’t have to decide our career path at age eighteen as well. Unlike today’s students, who seem to start taking classes in their major before they pop their first middle-school pimple, I didn’t declare my major until I was a junior.

  Michael Jordan convinced me to go to Carolina. Darrin Stephens convinced me to major in advertising. Andrew Young, Eudora Welty, and Jim Shumaker turned me into a journalist.

  Even before I decided I longed to go to UNC, Darrin Stephens, the bewitched husband of Samantha, got me interested in the world of advertising. It was creative and involved words, art, thinking on your feet, and entertaining clients. Three decades before Mad Men’s Don Draper added power, sex, and money to the equation, I was intrigued.

  So, when it came time to declare my major, I went with advertising, which was part of the School of Journalism at UNC. I started my junior year walking the same halls my father walked forty years earlier as a returning solider from World War II. He was glad I was following his path but not walking directly in his footsteps.

  “Katherine, just don’t major in journalism. You’ll never make any real money. Advertising pays much better,” said the man who grew up with very little, became editor at one of the South’s leading newspapers, published four books of columns, and still worried about his retirement years.

  I heeded his warning and settled happily into my advertising curriculum, spending hours creating romantic storyboards for a commercial about a young couple engaging in a snowball fight that quickly soils the heroine’s white, wool sweater. But no fear, they tromp hand-in-hand to a cabin in the woods where Woolite and the gentle cycle save the day.

  For an assignment on Jaguar, I turned in a sketch of Mick Jagger standing in front of the beautiful sports car and the slogan: “Mick Jagger wouldn’t sing ‘I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,’ if he drove a Jaguar.” I got a D because the budget I was allowed for the fictious campaign didn’t come close to affording Mick Jagger.

  Around the time that I was getting no satisfaction from my advertising classes, I became more committed to the journalism class I was taking. Because the J-school offered advertising, public relations, and journalism, students were required to take one class in the two sequences that were not their major. Jim Shumaker, the inspiration for the Shoe comic featuring a cranky bird as a newspaper editor, taught, or rather terrorized the entry level students.

  He locked the door the second the class started at 7:00 p.m. on Tuesday and Thursday nights. There was no need to knock or offer a pleading look through the narrow, vertical window in the door. If you were a mere ten seconds late, there was no entry and you received a zero for the class.

  Mr. Shumaker was tall, with white eyebrows accenting his thick mustache of the same color, and had an almost bald head with a healthy tan from weekends at Topsail Island. His tough demeanor was lessened by his humor just enough to make students laugh, but not enough to make anyone feel safe.

  Shu (as the cool kids called him) quickly distinguished the true journalism majors from the students taking his class because it was required by asking Daily Tar Heel staffers to raise their hands. Mr. Shumaker (as I called him) was tough on the journalism majors to make them better, he was tough on the rest of us just for sport.

  A couple months into the semester, there was a Thursday night cocktail party that several classmates and I planned to attend. The other girls were just going to skip and take a zero, but I tried to get an excused absence.

  “Mr. Shumaker, there’s this cocktail party that’s kind of a networking event Thursday night, and I was hoping to be allowed to miss class,” I said to him as calmly as I could as we were leaving the Tuesday night session. He stared at me with a quizzical look but didn’t unlock his fierce eyes from my face, which meant I was to continue.

  “My date is actually working for a newspaper, his family owns several in North Carolina, so I might get tips for snagging an internship this summer,” I stammered.

  “Miss Snow. You had a B in my class and you now have a C for trying to garner favor with social connections. You have broken a cardinal rule of journalism,” he said. “If you miss my class Thursday you will have a D.” I went to class that Thursday night.

  Shu held us to t
he highest of journalism standards for the stories we turned in to him each week. We were assigned breaking news, features, meeting coverage, and had to cover one ongoing issue throughout the semester. Somehow, I homed in on a debate within a Chapel Hill neighborhood where there were plans for six AIDS patients to move into a split-level house. This was 1989, five years before Tom Hanks would star in the groundbreaking movie “Philadelphia,” which just started to chip away at homophobia and the sheer terror many Americans felt about AIDS. So even in a liberal college town like Chapel Hill, residents were wary of a respite for AIDS patients.

  I interviewed the homeowners who didn’t want a house full of people with a deadly illness they didn’t understand, parents of twenty-something sons who were ill and couldn’t get the care they needed at home, and the patients themselves. I wrote fair and probably overly emotional stories that nobody read but Shu.

  His curriculum also dictated we cover two public speakers. I first wrote a story on civil rights icon Andrew Young, who was mayor of Atlanta at the time, when he addressed a packed house at UNC’s Memorial Hall. Hearing him talk about death threats he received in the 1950s for organizing voter registration drives, made racism more real than anything I’d read in books.

  Eudora Welty took the stage at Memorial Hall a few weeks later. The revered author, who won a Pulitzer Prize for The Optimist’s Daughter in 1972, was very funny and very human.

  The same week, my team in an advanced advertising class had to develop a campaign for another luxury car. We came up with “Saab. Why not?” The next day I switched my major from advertising to journalism and applied for a job at The Daily Tar Heel.

  My first front page story broke the news that the speed limit was about to change on a major road from campus to many apartment complexes where students lived. The headline read: “Slow your speed on Airport Road,” and I was teased for a week for being so bossy. I learned two things: people love to criticize reporters, and reporters shape conversations.