You Can Find It On YouTube
I do love YouTube and how you can look up whatever it was you were seeking and then scroll down that right side to see whatever else might be there that’s interesting. I’d like to be at a dinner with friends and have each person read a list of what they recently linked to and why. I think we’d learn a lot about each other.
I’m not sure we could all even say why we looked up what we did.
Annie Dillard asked, “Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? …There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain.”
Who can say why?
Why did I look up and listen to the theme song from Gilligan’s Island the other night? Then, I linked to the intro to Rawhide.
Sometimes, though, when I know I want to get myself going and get all caffeinated and motivated, I look for the footage of Billy Mills winning the 10,000 meter race in Tokyo at the ’64 Summer Olympics. You can still hear the commentator saying “Billy Mills is in there, a man no one expects to win this particular event.”
He turns it on in the bell lap, kicks by Clark (the world record holder) and Gammoudi and breaks the tape, still the only American to have won that race in all the years of the Olympics. I was eleven when I watched. “Look at Mills, look at Mills…” the announcer screams in the grainy black-and-white version, like when we all saw it on TVs of that era
It’s still the most exciting finish I’ve ever seen in an athletic competition. More so than the hockey team winning the gold medal in 1980. The miracle on ice.
More exciting than the Red Sox coming back in ’04 after being down three zip to the Yankees and more exciting than the Patriots coming from behind 28–3 to beat Atlanta in Super Bowl LI, even though I’m a long-time fan and a New Englander.
All I had were dim memories, until the advent of YouTube. One day, I realized I could watch it. Then watch it again… and again… and again… I could pull that little red dot back to the left just a hair and just watch the last ten seconds, over and over.
I can be on the treadmill downstairs, like I was yesterday, or speeding up between two utility poles, when running on the road, and imagine that kick at the end. It still gets me going. At sixty seven, I still have that same eleven year old’s sense of awe and admiration.
You can also link to articles about Billy Mills and how he contemplated suicide several times, so discouraged was he about the systemic racism that surrounded him even as an athletic hero in our country. He strikes one as shaman-like, all these years later, in his late eighties.
In one interview, Billy used the term “Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ” a phrase from the Lakota Language that roughly translates in English as “all my relatives,” “we are all related,” or “all my relations.” It is a prayer of oneness and harmony with all forms of life: other people, animals, birds, insects, trees and plants, and even rocks, rivers, mountains and valleys.
This may be cultural misappropriation, on my part. I know nothing about the language and perhaps have no right to even use the word here, but in any human tongue, that is a meditation.
