Katie Kelly

We were riding around Paradise this morning (Paradise Drive in Tiburon), my last ride in my 30s, and my friend, relaying her entertaining moments in the sport of triathlon, said, without pausing to edit, “And then I had a ‘Katie Kelly’ moment.”

Whoa whoa, stop, wait. What the heck is a “Katie Kelly” moment?

What unfolded was a triathlete’s nightmare.

Only seconds before the start of the swim, the strap on her goggles snapped. Her friend and fellow competitor said she could borrow hers, but they were in the transition area. And so, panicked, my friend sprinted back to the transition area, crawled up a dirt hill, in her bare feet no less, dug through her friend’s belongings in the transition area ’til she found the goggles, and scrambled back to the start, missing it by minutes. She said she was the last one in the water, and even more last when she got out.

She said that she swam so slowly, breaststroke no less, that at least she wasn’t fatigued, she said.

She said that she was so late entering the transition area that only one volunteer remained.

We laughed at her foibles, with her, not at her, of course, until I jolted myself back to the underlying message: 

That was the “Katie Kelly” moment.

Tomorrow I’m turning 40 years old, and all I have to show for it are Katie Kelly Moments.

When I was a teenager, without talking too much about it, my mom handed me a short Sports Illustrated article she thought I’d like. It was about a swimmer who, in her late thirties, finally made it to the Olympic Trials. I don’t remember who it was, but I remember the last line of the article, which quoted the athlete. She said, “I guess I’m just a late bloomer.”

My mom was never a Swim Meet Mom. She had her own stuff to do (like race cars). She wasn’t one of those moms who went to all the meets and rooted for me on the sidelines, but she liked hearing about them. She never blinked when I told her that I had, again, finished last. She pointed out how much smaller I was compared to others my own age, that I was a late bloomer. She said my time would come.

Reflecting now on those conversations, I am recalling with relief that she never said there was a time limit on being a late bloomer.

And so, on the eve of my 40th birthday, I clink my glass to all the other late bloomers in the world, at any age. Let’s see what kind of (Insert Your Name Here) Moment we can experience next.

You know when you’re sitting at Peet’s Coffee somewhere, letting the caffeine filter into your bloodstream, as you slowly reach equilibrium and can begin your day, and then you are rudely shaken from this near perfect scenario because some bozo can’t turn off his car alarm, and his car alarm is right next to your outdoor table?

That’s nothing!

We just wanted to go swimming this morning, and then Chuck’s car battery died in the parking lot of the aquatic center (far away in the East Bay), with very little warning, and all we wanted after swimming was to go to Peet’s.

But we couldn’t go to Peet’s because we had to wait for the AAA Jump Start Guy, who arrived an hour later, and did his thing and drove away, without realizing that the operation had also jump started the after market alarm system, which was never going to stop, ever, because Chuck’s battery in his fob had died, and you can’t call AAA to jump start that, you have to drive around town until you can find a place that sells batteries.

If you’re in this particular town in the East Bay, you have to drive for several minutes at a time between traffic signals. Only at a red traffic signal are you safe, because the alarm stops functioning then, to give car thieves a break and to keep the fight fair. Only when the car is in motion does the alarm sound again.

When you drive with a car alarm sounding, you get the sense that you are irritating to other drivers, unless you a car thief. Probably then you don’t care. There is no way you can hide in these situations, even if you are high up in an SUV, because everyone else is in an SUV, too, so they are eye level with you, and they can look you straight in the eye and stare at you as if to say that they think you are a terrible person.

I thought the best thing to do was to sit in the passenger seat and pretend like I wasn’t noticing the disruption, maybe tap my fingers on the door to the beat, to give the appearance that this was enjoyable.

I thought this was funny in the beginning, especially when the lady in front of us jumped around in her seat and shoved her fist in the air at us to express discomfort. I wondered if she might call the police to alert them of this possibly stolen vehicle cruising down the avenues of this East Bay town, and then I wondered what we would say when stopped. Would the officer be able to stop the alarm? Probably not, I reasoned, because after several blocks of this, I realized that we might never get pulled over, because no human on this planet would be able to willingly withstand the volume, with the exception of car thieves, probably because by now they are all hard of hearing and don’t care anymore.

When we pulled into the Peet’s Coffee parking lot, I was conflicted with emotions. Would the coffee taste nearly as good with this pulsing beeping bouncing off of my ear drums? Would we even get service? Or, if we did, would the caffeine cause further harm to my slowly eroding brain neurons and synapses? Would I collapse into convulsions?

There would be no answer to this, as Chuck drove straight past Peet’s to the Home Depot at the other end of the parking lot, several miles long. I sat in the front seat of the car, to ward of potential thieves who might hear the alarm as a call of the wild, paralyzed from the sound, unable to think complete thoughts, wondering when this nightmare would end. 

He soon returned with a battery for his key fob. I do like that word, “fob.” Where the heck does that come from.

With a press of the button, we were enveloped in silence, and I haven’t heard much of anything since. Did you say something?

When I last wrote, I was one terrible night’s sleep away from escaping el Hotel Peninsular, right off of La Rambla, in Barcelona. Well, the next morning, Chuck and I took the fast train to Zaragoza, to visit with my cousins María Jesús and María Asunsión Visauta. María Jesús met us at the train station that afternoon to take us to her place, and then after a filling lunch and a nap, we had dinner at María Asun’s and her husband José Luís’ place. I know my Spanish is improving, because I understood their jokes so much better than I did five years ago.

But now the rest of the trip is becoming a blur, because I’ve already been on one run already around Phoenix Lake, back in Marin County. We’ve been back to Peet’s, a Bay Area chain mecca.

Just the other night, Chuck and I were sitting at the Chocolatería San Ginés, eating some chocolate con churros in outside seating in a small alley way, wondering out loud about what could only be either drama club members or groupies of some sort (there is always such a fine line). They were an animated group, in sparkling clothes. Some in cowboy hats.

Feeling brave, I asked them (in Spanish, of course) what was going on.

They were waiting to meet the band Los Tigres del Norte, a “Tex Mex” band from upstate México, who had been playing in the theater next door. They sing about sneaking narcotics across the border, said our new friend, the one person who took the time to answer questions for our interview.

Let’s roll Contrabando y Traición now.

I’ll need more time to decide if this music is my cup of tea. But where was I? Right. That’s my problem. I don’t remember where I was.

A day ago, I was crying that we were leaving Spain so soon. María Jesús gave Chuck and me a tour of La Basílica de Nuestra Señora del Pilar and El Catedral de la Seo, and I do recall feeling, for at least while I was in both of these buildings, that I understood God’s message. Since then, the message has faded. Dammit. I was so close. I even for a minute here tried to relay the message, and it’s slipped from my fingers. I can’t stand it when this happens, because every once in awhile, not just this time, I come up with it, and I get very excited, because it’s the type of thing that would make most people say, “Oh. Duh.”

Well, sorry about that, I don’t know the message, so you’ll just have to carry on.

The only problem with leaving María Jesús’s place on Thursday, particularly after a day of seeing these beautiful, ornate buildings, is that it meant that Chuck and I didn’t think that much about getting a train ticket in advance to Madrid, to make our 10am flight. Nor did we think much about getting a hotel room.

No, wait, scratch that. I believe that we both had individually thought about it, but never thought to voice the belief that we should probably do something about it, and this is how we ended up on a 3.5 hour regional train ride back to Madrid, when, had we only thought about it maybe the day before, we could have been on the bullet train.

Being the optimists as we are, we opted to view this elongated ride home as an opportunity to see the Spanish country side.

The only drawback to being this type of optimist is when you neglect to even thumb through the guidebook on the train to find a hotel in Madrid, preferably something near the airport, to minimize the pain in the morning, as our regular waking hour the past two weeks had been 9am, and now we had a 10am flight.

So after maybe an hour of walking back and forth around the Chamartin train station in Madrid, not sure what we should do next, Chuck and I thought it would make the most sense to just to back to the hotel where we had stayed the first time, the Hotel Plaza Mayor, and then only freak out if it might happen to be that there was no vacancy.

There was no vacancy at the Hotel Plaza Mayor at 10pm that night.

And so that is basically when we had our first official freak out of the trip, but heavily modulated, because we are professionals.

Oh, where to go with this story. Should I tell you what we did next? I need to sleep on this, not because it’s a good story, but because I am still so under the influence of jet lag, I have lost my train of thought.

I am typing in the hotel lobby of the Hotel Peninsular on Carrer Sant Pau or something like that, off of La Rambla, in Barcelona. It used to be a monastery. Now prostitutes meander outside the front door. I do not want to be here, but Chuck and I have made the best of the last two days, visiting with my friend Indi Young, who is here for some conference in Barcelona with really smart people.

None of these smart people are in this hotel, but some of them are waiting to use this computer, so I cannot type much more.

We did see the Parque Guell (sp?). Worth it. And the exterior of the Iglesia de la Familia Sagrada. Worth it.

Dealing with waiters who insist on speaking English when Spanish would be so much easier. So not worth it. Get me out of here.

Tomorrow morning, as soon as we can, we catch a train to Zaragoza. Maria Jesus will be waiting for us at the station. I do not know if I will be able to update this blog before we fly home on Friday, but  I hope to.

I apologize for the lack of information.I wanted to tell you about our bike ride that took us to the Pyrenees, that made me cry tears of happiness when it was over. I did not want to board the train to Barcelona yesterday. Girona was starting to feel like home.

On to Zaragoza. Thank God. Barcelona with drunk tourists is a very nasty place.