My dad didn’t make it to Veteran’s Day this year.  As you’ll see from the context of my eulogy below, he passed away last week.  But Louis N. Cinquino left us all with something.  Something I explain in my remarks below. If you look closely in the picture of his Army Company N (or any photograph, for that matter), you’ll find him– and it.  If you can’t, then keep looking.

I have to say, that growing up I remember feeling a little bit like royalty. Like there was something special, something noble about our family.

I guess it never crossed my mind that royalty doesn’t live in a two-family wooden shingled house, the same one my parents moved into 67 years ago on the day they were married. Or that royalty doesn’t work as a tool-and-die maker and medical records librarian and take one vacation a year to your relatives’ house in New Jersey. Royalty doesn’t pack a brown paper bag lunch every day— and bring that same paper bag home every night to be used again tomorrow.

So why did I feel like royalty? Because I got to live with the king.

The king was a man who liked everyone he met and became a leader in every group or organization he was involved with. A man who did what was right and expected us to as well. A man who saw the good where others would overlook it, and appreciated the tiniest of blessings.

If he was a king, he was the King of the Little Things— the things that don’t get written about, except clumsily by adoring sons. The king of showing up for your kids’ sporting events. The king of volunteering to visit Veterans in the hospital on Christmas morning while your little prince and princess are impatiently waiting to open their haul of presents. The king of endless stories about Italy, the king of the tomatoes, the basil, the garlic. The king of waking up early to make breakfast and play with his grandchildren. The king of playing cards. The king of picking beans for a penny a pound. The king of cardoon.

In recent years, he became the king of waking up every day and dressing himself. The king of doing his exercises. The king of rubbing his wife’s back. The king of not complaining.

The king still had the warm handshake and his enormous machinist’s hands. The king still had the big smile. The king still could make you feel important whenever you were with him.

The puzzling thing I feel today is trying to understand how the King of The Little Things bequeathed to us such Big Things. And I’m not just talking about a garage full broken hand tools, bottles, ladders and scrap lumber. (Which we do have available at a good price.) What I’m talking about is how all of us— not just his family— are left with a huge piece of his immense heart, a massive dose of his good nature, his straight up goodness.

You don’t have to be his son or daughter to inherit his legacy. Just by being here today, you’ve already proven your birthright to the treasures he left behind —and keep in mind he didn’t just leave them TO us, he leaves them WITH us, IN us.

The greatest of these was love. And yet for my dad it was more than love— for he didn’t just love us abstractly, he cared for us. He didn’t just imagine his love, he lived it. He was a great man in all the little ways we remember — his gentle sweetness, his willingness to serve, his optimism and perseverance.

That’s what he’s given us— and what we ask of him to keep giving us now that he has moved into his new address.

In the past few days, I can’t help thinking there must be a lot of people in heaven right now getting the full Louie treatment— you know. He pulls up a chair with someone new that he meets, smiles, listens and asks questions, tells a few stories and listens some more until he finds what he is looking for— that connection, that love.

My cousin told me the other day that my Dad gave her some of the best advice she’d ever received. Something he told her years ago that she always remembered, something she still thinks of whenever she meets someone new. Something I want to leave with you today, something he left with us to carry forward.

Something that kept him going from his early days on the South Side of Batavia to World War II in the South Pacific, from the south block of Myrtle St to the southern shore of the Oatka Creek at the Village Green. Something he found in appreciation of all the people who cared for him when he was no longer able to care for us. Something that he sought and found everywhere, every day and embraced as the truest sign of God’s love— at home, at work, at church, at meetings, with his dearest friends and people he just met.

That something is that We ALL have something in common. It’s our job to find it.

Today, we don’t have to look far to find what we have in common: We love the king.

On behalf of my mom, Rita, my brothers Michael and Anthony and my sister Liz, we thank you beyond these humble words for being here today and for being a part of my Dad’s life. He will continue to live on in us whenever we are at our best.

The King is dead. Long live the King.

At many points over the past three years, my mind has felt like an episode of Hoarders. Thoughts, goals, fears, intentions, ideas, laments all piled up in great debilitating piles of rubbish, blocking the doorway to a peaceful, creative life.  Throughout, two things in particular helped me sort out the mess: physically demanding exercise and writing sh*t down.

At times, the exercise involved as much basketball as I could find.  I believe I peaked at 6 days in row of intense pickup games (in addition to a handful of 3 mile runs and chasing my little one around the playground). On over 50 legs, that’s the equivalent of LeBron playing back-to-back triple overtime games then chasing a cat up the stairs at the Empire State Building).

At one point, I sent away for the P90X exercise program and did the weight exercises in my basement fairly religiously, 4 or 5 days a week. I then moved on to exercise classes at the gym– TRX, dumbells, butts and guts, even the occasional Zumba class.   Anything that I could put on my calendar and make it a point to attend and have an instructor shout at me to work harder.

I think you can see how a regimen like that would help clear the mind, basically by wearing out the body.   It also helped me lose 19 pounds, which I have put back on, taken off and put back, taken off and put on again, leaving me basically where I started.

Yet even though my weight has cycled as my exercise imperatives wax and wane depending on whether I’m currently signed up for a specific race, the other mind-clearer of mine has continued to progress in a more progressively linear growth.

The gentler, more refined method I used to keep my mind clear, I still practice regularly– writing.  It doesn’t burn any calories or trim my love handles, but enables me to give voice to all the fears, doubts and challenges of the day.  Writing is something I can do in solitude while resting, where I can be emotionally naked and just let it flow out as way to flush my system of all the toxins that had built up. Basically like taking an emotional crap and crying helvetica tears.

I was never one to keep a running log or food diary.  To coin a phrase, I just did it. Why waste time writing about training, when I could just be training.  I could care less to know later what I did or didn’t do. My body will tell me that. The scale will tell me that.  My fat pants and skinny jeans would fight it out and tell each other to go to hell as they vied for my belt.

Yet when I intensified my training for the big races, I found that I was learning so much about my body so quickly that my head was spinning constantly– and I needed to write to sort out the trinkets from the treasure.  In trying to cut seconds off my fastest mile time, or to run my first cross country race in 35 years (look for the story in the September Issue of Runners World), I realized I could leave nothing to chance.

What I found was counter-intuitive to me.  The more I wrote, the more I ran.  The writing didn’t take away the time from running– it freed up the mental energy that I needed to keep going when the training got more difficult.

By writing stuff down, I could let go of the thoughts and doubts and pain and not carry it around with on my runs any more.  Plus my writing gave me a magnifying glass to look at the little details of my life and a telescope to see the big picture— to gradually become aware of what was really going on inside me, as I recorded my thoughts when I got back from runs.   I even sometimes use a dictation app to capture the thoughts as I stand, dripping sweat on my patio– too much of a human sprinkler to walk in my house and leak all over my computer.

One way or the other, whether through exhaustion or exposition, and when my life is working best, both, it helps me to clean out my closet of emotions and lighten the load that can weigh me down.

So I can go faster when I need to, and slower when I want to.

[basketball photo credit: Thom Hogan]

In the Disney movie McFarland, USA: Championship Run, the story of a Latino high school cross country is told through the eyes of the coach, played by Kevin Costner, who the boys dub “Blanco” because of his name, Mr. White.

In true Disney fashion, Blanco does it all in the movie, from rising out or his own checkered past to getting the most out of every kid on the team and inspiring the community to support them on their road to the state meet. This is the first weekend that the film is available on DVD.  It’s worth renting, as I reported in my previous post, Rent–and Run!.

Did you ever have a Blanco in your life? A coach who made a difference to you and helped shape you into the athlete you were then and the person you are now?

What I define as great coach is one who gets more than more.  By that I mean,  a  good coach gets more from you than you could get by yourself.   But a great coach gets even more– more than others ever expected of you and sometimes more than you even knew was there.

Here’s 3 traits that I’ve found in the great coaches that I’ve worked with in a variety of sports.

1.  Establish the Framework for Practice –  This is sometimes thought of as instilling discipline.  But to me, it’s so much more than that.  A good coach can try to keep discipline with a firm hand, cracking down on behaviors destructive to the team. But a great coach pragmatically builds your tolerance for practice by giving you a self-building path.  She isn’t forcing you to behave or work, she is showing you how to build a pyramid, by laying before you the blocks of useful training that you put on top of each other to lift yourself up to the pinnacle.

It’s not about discipline, it’s about establishing work habits that result in a better you.

2. Inspire You to Keep Going – Any sporting activity provides a few opportunities for success, and a huge assortment of places to quit or fall short of applying yourself.   Teams and players that win big usually display winning habits all the way through their training– not just in some fairytale clutch ending.  In McFarland USA, whatever success the team gets isn’t because it gets lucky, or because all of a sudden they believe in themselves and decide to run harder.  Their championship run builds day-by-day as they grow into their own power as athletes.  This happens, in part, because of their own work habits, and in part, because Blanco has an unwavering belief in them and a willingness to share that vision in grand terms.  That vision carries them when doubts and fatigue and circumstance threaten to have them settle for less.

It’s not just believing in yourself — that’s merely self esteem, which is necessary but not sufficient.  It’s believing in the work that will transform you into a champion. Then doing it.

3. Teach You Something You Don’t Know – An athlete who works hard in a structured, motivated way has a great advantage over the competitors that don’t work as hard.  But that’s hardly enough.  Most athletes work very, very, hard.  Competitions involve great tests of skill and strategy– and if you are only in better shape, but can’t execute the maneuvers of your sport, you can only go so far. This often plays itself out in youth athletics when a player grows up faster than his peers and physically dominates them along the way.  But tide turns when the peers catch up, because they have played for years as scrappy underdogs, learning the little ways to get better when they are at a physical disadvantage.  The late-blooming athlete then can coordinate his new physical self and apply this skill with tremendous success, where the early-bloomer finds it too late to build those skills that are suddenly necessary.     A great coach teaches the skills and strategy of the game at every opportunity, whether they are needed at that moment or not.

A good coach helps you practice. But keep in mind, practice does NOT make perfect.  Practice makes permanent.  If what you are practicing is fundamentally flawed, it’s not really helping you.  A great coach makes sure that what you are making permanent are the skills you need for winning.

Who’s your Blanco? What did they do that helped you get more than more?

Perhaps it’s nothing more than the rituals of life that propel us and give us the will to keep going.

The mechanics of ‘now I do this’ and ‘then I will do that’ determine what actually gets done. It certainly is true when crisis or depression hit as we are reduced to our most basic patterns.  It is also what breaks down in those cases of high anxiety and which leaves us trapped in a suspended state of animation, when we can’t even resume those rituals and carry on.

Rituals are at the core of high performance preparation—a plan, a to do list and set of goals to accomplish, to reach for. It may not seem so lofty when the goal is ‘now I put on my underwear’ and ‘now I floss’ but rituals are the ladder we’ve built our existence upon– and linking them to bigger tasks can move us surreptitiously toward achievements that have been out of our grasp.

Is a regularly scheduled track workout a ritual? Is it a ritual that my mom put the coffee into the coffee pot before she goes to bed rather than in the am before she’s about to pour the water into the machine?  I think it’s probably something deeper about who are at this time in our lives– and what we want to be propelled toward.

What I see with my parents now is it literally is that ritual is what keeps them going. It’s what was missing for my mom when my dad was first in the nursing home. “Now what do I do?,” she would say. You could see she was drifting, with nothing to replace the tasks and organizational needs that were in place when they were both home—the home of everyone of their 65 years of marriage—the home where they spent about 358 days of each of those 65 years. The rituals became more than habits, they became instinctual survival techniques. Is it a ritual that a robin go out looking for worms each day? Call it what you want—it’s what keeps them alive.

Rituals are not permanent like habits or addictions can be- but they are lasting. They don’t define us entirely but they do put a cover on our book and show the world what we spend our time doing. Yet we also have our internal rituals, that the world does not see yet what perhaps are even more defining who we are every day. Where we keep our anxiety—how we hold our stress—where our minds go when we are sad, shaken, in doubt, fearful.

Yet there is a paradox. The rituals that sustain us can also appear to be traps of boredom and lifeless, mindless exchanges that sap life of its newness. For isn’t creativity the antithesis of ritual?  Yes but. Yes but some of us need to first be bored to create. Some of us need the calming waters of ritual to clear our minds to build, to recharge for change. The repetitive ritual is the steady, flat foundation on which we build. That foundation is where the rituals end and the creativity starts that set the course for how we assault the world. A cup of coffee on the couch before the day starts may be the last act of boredom as well as the first act of creative expression that day offers.

What are the rituals that you, intentionally or not, work your way through during your day?  Do they support what you want to accomplish today? Do they also lead you toward the larger endeavors that you aspire to?  Can you attach to them something tiny and easy that can slowly build into a better version of you?