Lost in three Memorial holiday worlds (05/28/08)

Sunday afternoon, I was in three places at the same time.

Let me explain, or try to.

It was race day at Indianapolis, an event usually described by sportswriters a "steeped in tradition."

That's true enough, but some of the traditions have been lost along the way.

I'm old enough to remember when Memorial Day was actually observed on what my mother used to call "Decoration Day." It didn't move around to guarantee a three-day weekend, and the race was never on Sunday.

These days, it's always on Sunday and the start has been moved back a couple of hours to draw a bigger TV audience on the West Coast.

So there I was on Sunday afternoon, listening to the race broadcast on the radio. Following family tradition, we'd each picked three racers to root for. Sally called from Bloomington to make sure her picks were recorded. And Connie and I had watched the nerve-wracking first two or three laps on Fort Wayne television.

But radio has always seemed the preferred electronic medium when it comes to the Indy 500. That's how we followed it when I was a kid, listening on the car radio or on a little transistor model at a family picnic. The race took longer then, and keeping track of all those cars and drivers in the mind's eye was a gymnastic feat for the imagination.

So I settled in, listening and imagining the scene. But as I listened, I picked up a book.

I've been reading "Wolf Totem," an amazing novel that's recently been translated into English from the Chinese. The translator is a professor at Notre Dame. It's set in the grasslands of Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960s.

While the dialogue reads more like speeches or lectures than real, human conversation, the descriptions of nomadic life on the grasslands are marvelous: Wolf pack attacks on a herd of horses in a blizzard, a new pasture land with wild peonies and a lake with swans, the harsh reality in which a foal killed by wolves is mourned only momentarily before being butchered for its meat, the fragility of life in a harsh environment.

I found myself immersed in a culture on the other side of the world.

And then the lead would change in the race in Indianapolis, and my mind would jump off its horse galloping across Mongolia and back to the fourth turn at the track as another driver got up too high and caught the wall. I'd listen for a few minutes.

Then a wolf would howl on the page of my book and I'd find myself lost in a long lecture from a Mongol herdsman about the importance of maintaining the balance between wolves, gazelles, marmots, horses, sheep, mosquitoes, field mice, man, and the grassland itself.

It's a wonder I didn't get whiplash.

Every ten or 15 minutes, I'd put the book down and just listen to the race. But even then I was in two places at once. The race was going on in my head, but in front of me a couple of young squirrels were chasing one another around an ash tree, finches were flocking to the birdfeeders, and I could hear a cardinal singing.

For years, science fiction writers have told tales of "teleportation" from one place to another, like the transporter device on "Star Trek."

But the truth is, that's no fantasy.

It already exists.

All it takes is a good book, a comfortable chair on the patio, and a little imagination.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to Inner Mongolia.[[In-content Ad]]