My good friend Curtis Imrie and Harrison shared a special relationship. Harrison called him “Uncle Curtis,” and truly Curtis was sort of like an older brother to me, as well as my mentor in pack-burro racing. He seemed to understand Harrison better than most people. He once said, “Harrison makes no false moves.” Curtis passed in 2017 and left a gaping void. Now on my trips back and forth to Leadville I was repeatedly driving past the base of Mount Harvard where Curtis had lived for decades, thinking about him often, and wondering just what he meant by “false moves.”
I came to realize it meant Harrison was never going to fake his way through life. What you get is Harrison’s brutally honest self. His actions are never conceived with bad intent and often are not within his control. Harrison was going to do whatever he was going to do, obliging others to understand, accept and adjust. There would always be people who got this, and those who didn’t.
With three weeks of classes left in the semester, Harrison’s focus was on major presentations he needed to complete in Psychology and Multicultural Education. Harrison enjoyed making slideshow presentations but there were a couple of twists to both assignments.
The Psychology presentation was moving along just fine with his tutor Christie coaching him. They had identified five topics — “The Big Five Personality Traits” — to match the rubric with his theme from the movie “Frozen.” A couple of extra talking points made the presentation even more interesting. However we’d also discovered that Harrison needed to write a paper to go along with the presentation.
Time was winding down quickly. With track practice and another track meet coming up, along with his regular weekly classes and other smaller assignments, I could see few windows of time for Harrison to write a several-page paper. Additionally, having to travel home on weekends was eating up several hours weekly he could be doing school work. The silver lining was he could use the text from the slide show as notes, and rewrite them into paragraph form.
In Multicultural Education, Prof. Carson had urged the students to go out into local schools and find subjects for their presentation. Clearly this was not going to work with Harrison’s learning differences and also his schedule. After discussing with Brooke, she allowed him the accommodation to do his presentation on his high-school teammate Micah, whose life story touched upon many of the topics in the class. The only hitch to this was Micah was spending a lot of time on a Coast Guard patrol boat off the coast of Alaska, and difficult to reach. Micah was not allowed to have his phone on the ship but did have access to a computer and internet. So Harrison had to write out his questions and email them. He was sort of at the mercy of Micah’s schedule for him to find time to answer these questions. However one day Harrison received an email from Micah with very well thought-out answers to his questions.
We set about looking through photos I had taken and also requested some from Micah and his family. One weekend I was in my office sorting through pictures on my computer and and Airdropped one to Harrison as a possibility. Immediately I heard Harrison laughing in the living room. I stuck my head out and asked what was so funny. He said,” Nate is in this picture!”
I looked again at the photo, which was of Micah waiting in the exchange zone of a relay race. I clearly remembered taking this picture at the Canon City Blossom Invitational the year Micah graduated from high school. Sure enough, in the next lane behind Micah was Nate, then a junior, also waiting for his exchange. What were the chances? The coincidence seemed more like serendipity. Harrison was using that picture for sure.
Harrison makes no false moves. I knew he was still having social and behavioral issues on a regular basis, but I also knew there were kind and understanding people helping him work through these, from teammates and classmates to his coach and professors, and even the cafeteria crew and maintenance staff. I was at once grateful and anxious. My gut feeling was he had his first year in of college in the bag but only the next few weeks would tell.
Notes from The Blur
The week after the track meet in Golden, Darren scheduled an “Anaerobic Death” workout on Tuesday. Of course, the word “death” was hyperbole because you wouldn’t really die — you’d just feel really tired afterwards. What made this workout day special was that we got to dress up in costumes, but very light ones as we would still have to run hard. Also, we put on face paint.
We first warmed up as a team to prepare for the workout, which was in the CMC parking lot. By then, the paved lot itself was completely free of snow, although there was still snow everywhere else. First, we ran a hard 800 meters and then took a short rest. Then, we followed up by running a fast 400 meters.
It definitely felt hard running those, but at the same time I felt like it went by fast unlike past workouts. After that it was time to cool down. When we got back, we took a team picture and then we were dismissed to the dorms.
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“No false moves,”… love that… 🙏🏽