by Peter Sagal
Three months before the 2007 Boston Marathon, Jacob Seilheimer had a hard time climbing stairs. And yet he made it, enduring more than twice my time out in the wind and rain, suffering physical pain that would have stopped me cold, and doing it all for no medal, in front of no crowds—hell, he couldn’t even really brag about it. But he said he would do it, so he did it. As he put it during his finish, “Fuck yeah!”
And so, standing by the side of the same road both of us had traversed at very different paces seven years earlier, I downed my third cup of Gatorade and decided I was feeling much better. Maybe I had been wrong. Maybe this wasn’t the Cymbalta or withdrawal from it, maybe this was plain old dehydration—that causes dizziness, too. Dizziness that was now fading. My legs felt pretty good, fine even, especially considering I had just run fifteen miles. About four minutes had passed since I’d stopped running. I put down the fourth empty cup, thanked the volunteer, and took off. Could I catch them? Fuck yeah.
• • •
Erich was delighted at my return, certainly more for my sake than his. “I don’t know what happened,” I said, “but I’m fine now. Just needed some Gatorade, I guess.” Monte was relieved I had arrived; he wanted to go a bit faster than Erich could at that point, and my return to my assigned job allowed him to run the race he wanted. We said goodbye, and I again took hold of my end of the tether, and led Erich Manser toward the first of the Newton Hills.
But now, as I had a new birth of energy, Erich was fading. The heat was beating down on his head, bare amid the circular strap of his visor, and while his grin remained, it was becoming something more like a grimace with every step. I knew—even on short acquaintance—that he would never quit, so instead of suggesting dropping out or even a rest stop, I started doing the one thing I could do: I started talking. I told him about my running career, and how I started late in life and did things I couldn’t have imagined earlier on; I told him about Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!, about Paula Poundstone (yes, that’s what she’s like; no, I just pretend to get upset with her, I really love her), about Carl Kasell. I told him the story of one of my earliest meetings with Carl, back in the first few months when we did the show from remote studios and I hardly saw him. Carl and I were posing for publicity photos in an NPR performance studio, and as we stood there in our sport jackets I looked around for something more interesting to do. There was a grand piano in the corner. We pulled it out and Carl clambered on top of it while I sat down at the keyboard, a la Michelle Feiffer and Jeff Bridges in The Fabulous Baker Boys. Carl put his chin in his hands and blinked at me while I pretended to play. “I’ve always wanted to do this,” Carl said.
“Sweet,” said Erich.
“Got another hill coming up,” I said.
“Sweet,” said Erich.
We shuffled up the second and third hills, and finally the fourth, Heartbreak Hill, slowing down the whole time. By the time we reached Boston College, Erich was reacting to almost anything I said with the single word “sweet.” I thought about testing him. How does vinegar taste, Erich?
Then he said something else. “Every time we go under something, it goes pitch black,” he said. “Could you please warn me?”
Gone under something? What? I looked back—we had passed under a photography bridge, a temporary platform built over the course for official photographers to take souvenir race photos of participants. I had hardly noticed it. I don’t think I even looked up to smile. But even passing through that narrow, faint shadow—seven or eight feet wide at the most—had momentarily turned off the lights for Erich. “Gotcha, man,” I said. “Sorry I missed that one.”
“Sweet,” he said.
We were into the last five miles, through the streets of Brookline and Boston. With the increased urban density, there were more overpasses, more tall buildings next to the course, more shadows. I concentrated on calling out each one to Erich, while still firmly holding on to my end of the tether. I had returned to the feeling of focus I had the prior year with William; I couldn’t be bothered to think about how tired or hot I might have been; I was too busy doing my job. I was once again the watcher on the walls of men, the last best hope of Earth, the catcher in the rye.
We passed my uncle and aunt at the same spot we had seen them last year, but my parents were nowhere in sight. (It turns out that they were caught behind the new security fencing, and watched me from the other side of the road.) Erich managed a wave but continued to concentrate mostly on putting one foot in front of the other. He was slowing even more. At a number of points, I stopped running myself, slowing to a quick walk so as not to get too far ahead of him.
“Three miles to go, Erich.”
“Sweet.”
We passed the mile-24 marker. At this point last year, William had been falling apart, stopping to walk every three hundred yards or so. Erich showed no sign of doing that, just a steady, gradual slowing as the heat beat down . . . except now he was speeding up again. He looked ahead, peering into the distance with his failing eyes. He said the first words other than “sweet” for at least four miles.
“My family,” he said.
There they were, his wife, Lisa, and their two young daughters, Ellie and Grace Margaret, on the other side of the temporary metal fencing. The girls shrieked with delight: “Daddy! Daddy!” Erich ran up to them and said “I need kisses!” and embraced them, getting his kisses, one by one, and then all at once. He quickly introduced me: his oldest daughter has the same name as my middle daughter. I looked at how Erich, nearly blind, looked at his daughters. He handed me his phone and asked me to take his picture. I looked on the screen at how his daughters looked at him. I took the picture. I handed him back his phone.
I stood apart and waited. I could have waited all day, and watched.
Erich told me later that he wanted to stay there, too. “I remember sinking into that embrace, and not wanting to leave it,” he said. “I had to force myself.”
I led him away with the tether. He turned and waved once and moved on.
“You’re a lucky man,” I said.
“Don’t I know it,” he said.
“Sweet,” I said.
• • •
There was nothing left in Erich’s tank, or mine, so the right turn onto Hereford, the left onto Boylston, was done at the same slogging pace we had kept up since leaving Erich’s family. Boylston Street, the site of the bombing, was packed with spectators, even this late into the day, all of whom had defied recent history and endured rings of security and metal detectors to show that Boston was not only Strong but Stubborn. And loud. They shouted and cheered. The finish line appeared ahead, and as it always does, seemed to take its damn sweet time getting to us. We crossed the line and embraced.
We walked forward and in a moment were at the spot of pavement where I had been standing when the bombs went off. I turned around and looked back, again, at the finish line superstructure, the backs of TV cameras, the cops—so many cops—the people crowding the course on both sides vanishing into the distance back to the second bombing site and beyond. Nothing happened. Other than the cheers, and the PA announcer and the runners shouting with joy and relief as they finished the Boston Marathon, defying their own limitations and the two sons of bitches who had tried to kill it, other than that happy cacophony, there was silence.
“C’mon,” said Erich. “I want to go meet my family.”
So did I.
“Of course,” I said. And then, like war heroes, like Olympic champions, like Luke and Han (but not Chewie), we received medals draped over our necks. “That was tough,” Erich said.
“Yeah but . . . we made it.”
* * *
I. Erich did his Ironman in 2015—swimming and running tethered to a guide, riding the rear seat in a tandem bike—and finished in 11:10:28, setting the world record for disabled athletes in the event.
II. Allowing for a very loose definition of “celebrity,” I am actually one of the faster celebrity marathoners. My 3:09 in P
hiladelphia in 2011 put me far ahead of the likes of Billy Baldwin (3:24) and Pamela Anderson (5:41). One of the few faster than me is Dana Carvey, of all people, who ran a 3:04 in 1972. Who knew?
III. Chris was one of two runners who died that day on the course. The other was Jeffrey Lee, a twenty-one-year-old University of Pennsylvania student, who collapsed right after finishing the half-marathon. The cause of death, as with Chris Gleason’s, remains unknown.
Postscript
These days, I don’t run as far or as fast as I used to, but I still run every day. The dogs demand it.
I could never have a dog while married; my ex-wife was deathly allergic to them. Now there are two. Dee Dee is a whippet mix and therefore was born, or at least bred, to run. She flattens her ears to her aerodynamic skull and zips along so smoothly I could rest a coffee cup on her back. Dutchie, though, is a German shepherd and pit bull mix, and seemingly had no natural inclination to run when we first adopted her. But after watching and imitating Dee Dee on a few short expeditions, she’s become a lunatic for it. She tugs at the leash as her legs flail, panting and pulling, her tongue so far out she could taste the sidewalk if she lowered her head a tad. She’s not skinny, not fast, just stubborn and absolutely determined to run as fast as she can until she collapses. She reminds me of myself, once upon a time.
They’ve learned to wait while I have my coffee and get my juices—and other things—flowing, but after thirty minutes they get antsy and excited and start jumping up in my lap as I sit at the kitchen table in my new house, and they run to the door and back, and when I finally get up and pick up their collars, they go from excited to berserk, leaping up to throw their heads through the collars in midair and thereby saving a second of preparation. Collars on, they run to the front foyer, paw at the running belt and leashes, and whine at the door until it’s open. Outside, finally, they pull me down the street like Ben-Hur’s chariot horses. Sometimes, I will confess, it’s a pain in the ass, as well as the lower back, and I’m sure one of these days I’m going to trip just as they see a squirrel across a busy street and I will depart this earth, leaving behind the kind of hilarious obituary I’ve always wanted.
Sometimes, Dee Dee, Dutchie, and I run the half mile or so to that old Victorian house that I had planned on being the last home I ever owned. My kids still spend most of their time there, along with their mother and stepfather. I haven’t been in it, or even stood on the porch, in about two years, since the time we finalized our divorce, which itself was three years after my moving out. I don’t miss it; while there are many happy memories there, they are buried in the past under more recent, less pleasant ones. The dogs and I keep going.
We rarely, if ever, make it all the way to the town house I sold soon after the divorce was final. It never felt, even with the walls covered with kid photos and memorabilia of my disrupted life, like a home. It felt like a way station, a waiting room between my former life and my next, and I was tired of waiting. Now I live in a smallish bungalow, built in 1923 and renovated a hundred times since then, sometimes (judging from the screws popping out of the moldings, for example) quite poorly. I didn’t like the town house because it was so new, so sterile; it had no character. Now I live in a home with character literally falling off the ceiling, requiring a minimum expenditure of $500 to glue it back on. But: it’s close to where my daughters live, it’s got a yard for the dogs, and Mara really likes it.
Dee Dee had come into my life with Mara, a package deal. Like me, Mara had come to a moment in her life when human relationships seemed impenetrably difficult and profoundly unsatisfying, so she visited an animal shelter near where she was living in Oregon, where, she says, she saw a little trembling creature in the back who seemed to have the same opinion about people as she did. She introduced herself, they got along, and now Mara and Dee Dee are as inseparable a pair as Lyra and her daemon in Philip Pullman’s novels. I realize, and accept, that whatever happens between myself and Mara, I will always be, at best, a close second to Dee Dee in her affections. She demurs, saying we’re tied for first, and I’m ready to believe it, but I will be careful to avoid situations in which she would have to choose between us. If we all end up on a cruise together, for example, I’m going to make sure the lifeboats, or floating doors, are capacious.
Back in late 2014, almost two years after my marriage ended in fact if not in law, I was still accepting almost any invitation that came my way, even though there was no one else living in my town house whom I needed to avoid. One came from The Second City, inviting me to be a special guest—Andy Williams Christmas Show–style—in a parody of A Christmas Carol called Twist Your Dickens. I was given the name of the stage manager and told to arrange with her my arrival on the night of the performance. That stage manager, a strikingly beautiful woman with an exceptionally professional mien, was a tad wary of me, as it turned out, from dealing with various amateur special guest stars with inflated senses of their own importance. The special guest the prior night had wandered around the sacrosanct backstage area, talking loudly, playing with the props, and putting on wigs. So the stage manager carefully and clearly told me what to do and where to stand before I did it, a good five feet from anything I could break.
I waited quietly, with my hands safely in my pockets, for the show to begin. “Five minutes, Mr. Sagal,” said the stage manager.
“Thank you, five,” I responded, as theater tradition dictated. She raised an eyebrow, and nodded in approval.
It may well be that I owe my present and future happiness to the fact that the “celebrity” who had preceded me the night before was a complete asshole.
The stage manager and I talked for an hour after the show that night, as the cast finished their drinks and deserted us one by one, and again two nights later when I came back to visit her in her booth from which she looked down on the production like Hera on Olympus, ready to cast thunderbolts if her gentle instructions were ignored. Then another evening still, and we found ourselves once again in a bar with the cast and this time they all left with a little more purpose, as if clearing the stage, smiling back at her as they went.
It was time for The Conversation, one I felt obligated to start. I explained to the stage manager that I was going through the Divorce From Hell, that three teenage girls were involved, that I was in no position to offer anyone anything like a serious or lasting relationship, but that I liked her and thought it would be fun to spend time together. I didn’t expect her to throw her drink in my face—stage managers prefer to leave theatrics to actors—but I did expect her to look at her watch and bring down the curtain.
Instead, she told me that she felt exactly the same way. She had recently gotten out of a bad relationship that left her with even less appetite for such things and was in fact relieved that I wouldn’t ask her to be serious or committed or even around much, if she didn’t feel like it. It felt like a fortunate meeting of like-minded individuals. We might have shaken hands on it.
The next night, her night off, I invited her over for dinner.
“Can I bring my dog?” asked Mara.
“Of course,” I said.
She’s told me more than once in the years since then that if I had said no, that would have been the end of it. One of the odd things about homes: you don’t realize you have one until one day you’re in it. Sometimes it comes with a dog. Sometimes it invites you to bring your dog.
• • •
Once Mara and Dee Dee moved in to the little house—or is it Dee Dee and Mara?—we realized we couldn’t deny Dee Dee the pleasure we enjoyed from having a dog to play with, so we started looking around for a second dog. Dutchie—named by her rescuers, who thought, incorrectly, she was a Dutch shepherd—was found in the January cold on the west side of Chicago, her teats filled with milk, desperately mewling and scratching at a door of an apartment building, where no one admitted to knowing anything about her. The shelter volunteers who spent two days trying to catch her assumed that she had been bred for a litter a
nd then tossed into the street to die; certainly, whatever had happened to her had completely soured her on the concept of human kindness. Unable to get close enough to the skittish dog to catch her, the volunteers put an old couch in the alley near where she hid so she’d at least have a place to rest. They checked the next day, and somebody had stolen the couch. Maybe Dutchie was right about humans.
Eventually, they lured her in with food and brought her to the vet for medical treatment. She healed up, learned slowly to trust again, and started revealing a surprising enthusiasm for everyone she met—humans, dogs, cats, basically everything but squirrels. Her inner doggish faith in goodness overwhelms the evidence of her own experience, and sometimes I envy her.
So one last refugee from a broken family joined our home, completing—for now—our new one.
Mara is not a runner, although sometimes she enjoys riding her bike alongside us as the dogs drag me down the street like an Inuit sled. She grew up a figure skater and a dancer, so her view on exercise is that it has to have some aesthetic point to it. But she tolerates my insatiable need to run around outside for an hour or so every day because she knows the person who returns from these sojourns, as sweaty and smelly as he may be, is happier than the person who left.
Mara, unlike my ex-wife, is Jewish, so we recently celebrated our first Hanukkah in the new/old house, and so for the first time in many years we sang the prayers—odd how we can still remember them from Hebrew school decades before—and I helped light the menorah, and we let it light up the window, a small riposte to the thousands of Christmas lights and the inflatable Santa in the yard next door. During our first Christmas season in the house I would sometimes go for a run in the afternoon and come back in the darkness, looking for the small menorah candles amid the greater glow of our goyische neighbors, a quiet sign that, as the letters on the dreidel indicate, Nes Gadol Hayah Sham, a great miracle happened here.