Four Minutes Revisited

By Dave Penswick

Twenty years ago, Turner was a track star with dreams of the NCAA and beyond. Then erstwhile best friend Lance stole his scholarship and parlayed it into a spectacular Manhattan-based investment banking career. Turner never escaped his small Ontario hometown, where he teaches and coaches, and is struggling to have a child with his girlfriend Kim.

As the Global Financial Crisis unfolds, Lance returns. Turner suspects his motives even before Lance solicits Kim's assistance with his latest venture. He decides the solution to this and the myriad of other problems facing him can only be found by a return to their earlier battlefield on the track. After a serious accident tests his resolve, Turner must decide on the life he wants.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: May 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9798887938462

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Four Minutes Revisited

Dave Penswick

Copyright © 2023 Dave Penswick

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2023

ISBN 979-8-88793-845-5 (pbk)

ISBN 979-8-88793-846-2 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

1—September 8

2—Fall

3—Winter

4—Spring

5—June 27

Epilogue

About the Author

1—September 8

1.

I used to love the first day of school. Really love it, and I'm not using the word lightly as there's not much I can truly say I've felt that about.

I fell for my first love hard, very hard. And then it was taken from me, now twenty years ago. At the time, I didn't know how I'd ever recover, but Kim helped. She showed me how that hadn't been real, not in the way it was with her. I once read the definition of love is wanting to do things for another and that's exactly how I feel. I want to do things for her, anything and everything in my power. Admittedly, the wanting only takes you so far, but I'm not going to think about that right now.

If I relax the criteria and cast my net further, there might also have been a friend I felt that way about when I'd been growing up. But then he stole from me, and I'm not going to think about that, either.

Much better to think about Rufus. Certainly, the wanting to do things for another had been a little like that with him. Just like it never was and still isn't, really, with the Patriots, Red Sox or Bruins: allocating a couple hours on Sunday afternoon to whatever game might be televised not at all the same as remembering to set the alarm a half hour early, each morning, to trudge about town with our little beastie and pick up his pooh.

Though my professed love of the Boston teams came not without its price. While never suffering a bloody nose, like in grade seven for favouring The Beatles over Abba, I was the schoolyard outcast; the cool kids called me unpatriotic. How could I not support Toronto? It was practically our hometown, barely an hour away in light traffic. I blame that on my parents, immigrants from the UK who couldn't afford airfare for vacations back home. For as long as we were all together, they settled for New England over old, lugging us off to Cape Cod every summer. Saturday night on the drive down was always spent near enough Sagamore Bridge that we could cross early the next morning before the queues became stupid. Some years we mixed things up by staying around Providence, Rhode Island. To me, that felt more like a suburb than a free-standing city, with chatter on the street still mainly about Grogan and Morgan, Evans and Rice, and the number of stitches in Cheevers' face mask. Back home, we never once journeyed that hour or so down the 401. It wasn't until I was out of the house for the last time, eighteen years old and on my way to university, that I saw Maple Leaf Gardens, the CN Tower, and what I still think of as the SkyDome in person.

We did have a decent school in town and that's where I'd been expected to go. As with most things, I had other ideas. One of my enduring childhood memories is the assortment of jobs I held to ensure those ideas became reality. For many years, there was a paper route that ended only when one of the cool girls on the track team started calling me Paper Boy. For reasons I still don't understand, McDonald's was considered much more acceptable, but Coach Krall's workouts soon interfered with their shift schedule. The bookstore might've taken me the rest of the way through high school had I not preferred consuming their offerings to assisting customers. The roster of $3.05 minimum wage positions was completed with a stint in the workshop at Brian's Cycles where, for a time, my enthusiasm sufficiently offset incompetence with anything mechanical. Then, that final summer after being paroled from high school, I gained admission to the Elysian Fields of public sector unionized labour and was paid five dollars an hour to hold the stop sign on a road construction crew.

Though, until the end, I thought of the RBC account into which those wages dribbled and that grew sufficient, barely, to fund my escape simply as insurance. I had a much bigger plan. In retrospect, I was fortunate that plan didn't work out. Otherwise, I would've attended a different school than Kim. After being unattainable in the way I'd desired all through high school, sometime between Christmas and Reading Week in first year she stopped referring to me as simply her best friend.

I was doubly fortunate because that school's program had the highest placement rate in the province. The old man had called me a fool wanting to be a teacher; declining birth rates meant graduates would never get a job. He'd taught me square roots at the age of two and ever after was on at me to become an engineer, like he'd dreamt of. I once tried explaining that engineering could only ever be a job while teaching was a vocation. His blank stare of a response saved me the bother of ever trying again. Still, conviction alone does not pay the rent or feed you, and the noise in my head from his prognosis started September of senior year. That noise made it difficult to study for exams in December and my resulting performance only amplified the volume when I returned in January. Then I received the offer.

On my first pass, I didn't get much further than the part about a full-time position in the math department. Only on the third or fourth re-reading did I realize it was addressed from Galt Tech, the cross-town rivals of Galt Collegiate Institute where a couple plaques engraved with my name to this day remain on the record board. Not that they were rivals back then; the techies bashed each other on the football field while we had run track and cross-country. That was partly the reason for their offer—they'd noted my past accomplishments and wanted me to build a provincial class running program. I lingered over the word accomplishments, a little surprised how it made me feel.

Kim liked that word as well. She'd been a gymnast until tearing her Achilles, the recovery from which spurred her interest in kinesiology. She was sifting through a stack of offers by the time mine arrived. Multiple were from Galt, and she decided on the same physiotherapy shop I'd tried, suggesting Maybe we'll get you on the track again.

For a long time, I had zero interest in that. Though interest may not be the correct word; maybe I didn't have the need. Years earlier, when justifying my choice of teaching as a vocation, to some extent it had only been a word. I'd really had no idea how all consuming it could be. The best thing was I'd been given the freshmen grade nines; students coming from middle school were not yet fully baked so still receptive, not entirely closed to the idea of how exciting, ubiquitous and utterly necessary the precision of math really was. It was the same with coaching; a new crop to be fired up with stories then broken down with the stopwatch and ultimately winnowed into a team of athletes. I used to spend all of Labour Day reviewing the profiles of the incoming class then lie awake that night conceptualizing new lessons and training plans tailored to their backgrounds.

I don't know when the change started. I do remember by the time the old principal, the decent one who'd hired me, asked that I switch to science that I was finished the reviews by lunchtime. Years later, when a new principal unceremoniously forced me out of the classroom and into the gym, it was mid-morning. Then she dumped English on me. Convinced it was her strategy for getting me to leave, I gave up altogether. Long before I'd ceased lying awake all night and first day was just another in the school year; one day out of 186, or 187 on a leap year. I also don't recall exactly when I started running again, other than it was the same time that Kim quit physiotherapy to be a real estate agent.

At the time she decided on the career change, it seemed a really good idea. Then, when she was fully qualified and had her picture on a bus shelter around the corner from the miserable townhouse where we lived, it was downgraded to an OK idea. A few years later, the same year I was sentenced to English, the Canadian markets were walloped by some infectious four-letter acronym and people started thinking twice before buying or selling a house. Last year, the infection morphed and spread globally. After a couple of the big banks south of the border blew up, the only real estate activity was foreclosures.

Now tomorrow was the first day of school. In one respect, I'd come full circle in that I was back to lying awake. Only this wasn't the overachiever, excited version of insomnia where I plotted new directions for the coming year. This was the cleft palette variety, and I was looking backwards to uncover where it had all started coming apart.

2.

Hey!

Her voice didn't wake me so much as pull me back from somewhere far away. I lay paralyzed, struggling to recall where I'd been. I couldn't and, as the present tense slowly crystallized like pre-sunrise mist forming on a lake, I became aware of Kim beside me. Her shirt was sliding off at the shoulder and she was smiling. So?

Sorry?

It's not like you to sleep in. Does that mean I'm in luck?

Luck?

Does this mean you've changed your mind?

If anything, the mist was thickening. About what?

Running in the morning.

I was confused. Why go running now? Afterwards would be a day of nothing that could only go downhill.

Well? Kim was smiling.

Twenty years of waking up together and I still had no insight as to why she was always so upbeat about it. Though I hadn't forgotten what I'd learned in our sessions a few years back and remembered to think first. I like you in that shirt.

You keep telling me. It might be nicer if you showed me.

The mist continued swirling. Occasionally, I do, I said, moving against her.

Occasionally, she allowed. Then, as she slowly shrugged off the shirt, it was as if the sun had suddenly come up and burned everything off. Bloody hell, it's first day. She said nothing, holding me. I'm sorry, this is the only time I can go.

Would it really kill you to skip a day? I gave her a look, but she wasn't giving up. Because now is the right time.

Oh. I recovered quickly. Maybe tonight?

She thought for a moment. That'll still work. But you're always so tired at night.

I don't think it's always me. She gave me a look then began pulling her shirt back on. I'll make sure to save something in the tank.

Promise?"

Will you wear that shirt again?

Don't I every night?

3.

I stretched on the driveway before setting off and didn't bother with a stopwatch. Sadly, those days were in the rear-view mirror. My initial pace was barely faster than a walk though not because I enjoyed taking in our neighbourhood; quite the opposite. Rather, I'd become a true believer in the importance of starting out slowly, of easing into things. I hadn't always been that way.

In my competitive days, I'd believed that every morning we started with a finite supply of energy. Any consumed warming up would simply not be available on the back straight of the bell lap. Too bad I'd learned how wrong that thinking was the hard way—life might be considerably different otherwise.

Which is not to say there was anything too, too wrong with how things unfolded. Granted, it would've been nice being able to replace the TV when it first started pixelating in June instead of waiting for this month's paycheque, especially since the Red Sox were heating up to make a run for the pennant. It would also be nice to afford Starbucks more often than the occasional Sunday. But those, and all the other niggly things like them, were details. The big stuff was all good. Well, mostly good.

I believed enough of what I was telling myself to get through the sea of identical aluminium and vinyl clad dwellings crouching behind garages that protruded almost to the road that was our neighbourhood. Good thing I was numeric because heaven help you finding your home without the address. They'd all been built in the seventies in what had until then been productive farmland, next to the car plant. I made a sharp right to avoid its skeletal remains then was dropping down through the escarpment and onto the bridge. During the 1800s, the river below had powered a mill. The mill stopped turning over a century ago. Much more recently, the English Tudor style building housing it had been converted to a boutique hotel that, for reasons beyond me, was now a destination. After the plant shut, tourism was the much wobblier of the two remaining legs supporting our local economy.

The centerfold of the town's brochure was a picture of the Mill Inn taken from the bridge. That view, like almost everything else, no longer existed: City Council the year before spent close to a million dollars we didn't have erecting a barricade to prevent people jumping. The barricade didn't prevent suicides, but rather relocated them—earlier in the year, the father of someone I'd once taught stepped in front of a commuter train. Things hadn't gone well for him but still we were surprised. Maybe he'd been driven over the edge by the mess of rusting mesh that now obscured our signature view.

Past the bridge, the road wound back out of the gorge, rising steeply enough that I could imagine it qualifying as a second or maybe even first category climb were it on the Tour de France. The track at Galt Tech could've only been designed by an English teacher or, worse, an administrator, so last spring that climb had been the focal point of preparations for Donovan's assault on the mile. I intended to make use of the murderous climb again this year though, likely thanks to Donovan's near-record, other training venues were now available.

After the road flattened came the downtown core. Its location on the nicer side of the river had still not prevented the slow, gangrenous death triggered by Council permitting a strip mall on the outskirts, adjacent the exit for Toronto. A diminishing number of live businesses remained amongst the inexorably advancing blackened flesh: a couple dollar stores and a pawn shop, an old-style barber with the striped pole, a men's store that'd had the same double-breasted blazer and striped tie on display for as long as I'd been teaching, a No Frills for groceries, a fast food pizza outlet, a burger joint, and our single proper restaurant—this was called ‘Fine Dining Out' and had lost the ‘e' from its sign a couple years back. Further along, past the boarded-up cinema and bookstore plastered with signs advertising ‘For Sale by Owner', a Beer Store and Tim Hortons stood kitty-corner at the main intersection; a two chambered heart pumping an ever-thinning stream of customers through the fading patient. As recently as a year ago, the heart still had four chambers. Then, like dominoes, the independent wine store closed, and Starbucks relocated to the mall. With their flight, two banks removed ATMs from downtown and the sole remaining financial institution with live tellers was a payday lender.

The one healthy business was Mortimer's, the funeral home. So healthy that they'd been able to bail out the city by purchasing several properties, including the London Roads athletic facility. The debate and subsequent referendum over allowing the sale of town property to a private company had been the highlight of the summer just passed. I'd voted with the minority against the transaction, partly worried about what they might do with the track. I also thought if Galt did go bankrupt, we might lose the current cabal and instal a new team of councillors not quite so intent on destroying our town. At least I'd been wrong about Mortimer's—London Roads was not dug up and converted to a cemetery. Dead wrong, in fact; a week after the sale closed, the padlock that Council had kept on the gate for 363 days of the year disappeared.

Had I not turned back then but continued past Mortimer's, I would've passed through a neighborhood of older and nicer houses before coming to CGI. It was only after moving away from my childhood neighbourhood that I realized we hadn't been able to afford it, the consequences of which I was paying for now. Continuing past the high school, at some point I would've seen the yards become larger and the houses older. It wasn't a sudden step change but a gradual progression that continued steadily with larger and larger yards and older and older houses until the largest and oldest of them all. Fittingly, it'd had a ‘For Sale' sign on the yard for as long as I could remember.

Next door to that was where the university started.

4.

It was a nice surprise to find Kim waiting on the driveway. Better still, she'd changed into her one suit that was better even than the T-shirt. Good, you're back, she said. How's the knee?

Maybe she'd always been asking about it, but I only started noticing after our sessions. Still, it was nice. Holding up. I'm so glad I didn't have the operation— I could see she wasn't listening.

You need to get a phone.

I have one. I retrieved the Nokia from my pocket as evidence. She'd insisted on one after I cycled into a pothole a few years earlier. When my elbow impacted the road, it imitated the former Yugoslavia with separate Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, and Bosnian entities splintering off. Fortunately, the driver witnessing it had been an off-duty policeman who called the paramedics.

A proper phone with a screen so people can text or email you. No one wants to actually call, because then they'd have to talk.

I call you all the time.

You do, she smiled. Sometimes I even put up with it.

Sometimes?

She nodded. But that's OK. I've long since accepted that you live all alone on Planet Turner. It's only the rest of us unfortunate inhabitants confined to the earth that've switched to a Blackberry or iPhone.

This back and forth was fun so I didn't ruin it by pointing out our combined earnings could in no way cover a second iPhone. The few hours sleep I'd somehow managed had also been an unexpected treat and refilled my tank sufficiently that not only had I kept my thoughts on the run to mainly the good stuff, but I'd even been able to open up at the end so that I made the last turn on to our street three driveways ahead of Marlo, our letter carrier.

All these good signs were daring me to contemplate that today may not be the complete and absolute horror I'd been dreading since the first week of August. Then she obliterated it with: Principal Owen copied me on an email. She needs you to come in early.

Oy! Not again!

I'm sure it's fine— she started to say.

Two years ago, I reminded her. That morning, I'd returned from my run almost excited at the prospect of returning to science after my exile in the gym. Almost. But if the excitement had been ersatz, the confidence wasn't—at least I'd be standing at the chalkboard armed with a stress-tested lesson plan and a relative abundance of subject matter expertise. And a real subject to teach, one where the material was definitive. Then the same urgent request from the principal. An hour later, I was scouring the teachers' lounge, hoping to find Steinbeck for Dummies.

I sometimes wish you'd change that half-empty outlook.

After the last two years, my glass is totally drained. It's a wonder I've not become a raging alcoholic.

Kim wouldn't give up. Which only means that if she does ask you to move—

There's no asking with Principal Owen.

OK then. If she does move you, it would have to be an improvement, no? Can't things only get better?

Not in my life. Things can always get worse—there's a province-wide shortage of French teachers. This due to the unexpected popularity of the French Immersion program, parents having convinced themselves that instruction in a language their children couldn't understand would somehow give them a head start.

And why would they do that?

I made the mistake of adding it to my CV. Even though the last person I'd spoken a word in that language to had been my mother. But French wasn't my true fear; worse options existed. However, I didn't want to voice them in the fear that might somehow cause them to come true. And because she hates me.

I know for a fact she doesn't, Kim said.

You know nothing. She'd never had to sit through a full Talk Sandwich, only ever getting that initial slice of Yummy Bread.

Talk Sandwiches and Yummy Bread, Kim repeated, shaking her head. Remind me again your age? I thought it was forty, but maybe I have the digits reversed.

For a moment, I wondered if she'd made me a year older for her joke, or if she really didn't know. But it didn't matter; she was chuckling. Then she pointed out, Two years ago, Bob Phelps really did have a heart attack.

He was also way past retirement age. He'd been fifty-five and teaching for thirty-four years. Added together that put him well over the magic number of eighty-five which was necessary for a full pension. They should've been prepared.

How do you prepare for the head of the English department being medevacked to Toronto six hours before the bell on first day?

That's supposed to be why we have administrators, to plan contingencies for that sort of thing.