Cruelest month

I like to read and I like to write, but I’m not a poetry guy. So please bear with me as I cite the oft-quoted lines from T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Waste Land.”

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

OK! What’s Eliot talking about here? Beats me! I’m not a student of poetry and literature. “April is the cruelest month” is the most oft-cited line, and almost always referring to the weather. Like some weather guy cackling, “Yeah, well, T.S. Eliot said April is the cruelest month, and you’ll see what he meant by that out there today. Bring your umbrellas!” For us, the juxtaposition of Tuesday into Wednesday does the trick. Yesterday was a beautiful day. Sunny, breezy, eventually into the lower 60s. Great day for multiple track workouts for our team. Great day to be out there holding a stopwatch. Made even greater by the fact that the bathrooms adjacent to the Vassar track are no longer winterized, so an all-day coffee swilling schmoe like me can no longer worry about my caffeinated fluid intake before and during multiple practice sessions. That was yesterday. Today? It’s dank, damp, rainy and just plain bleh. A languishing sort of day. That’s April weather. One day, awesome; the next day, meh. Some would say? Cruel. Was that what T.S. Eliot was referring to? My guess = no. The Waste Land is a long, epic poem with multiple parts. This is a short, shallow blog post about the weather. Well, about April, and the weather. We’re outside in the weather A LOT in April. It’s arguably our busiest month of the calendar year, in the world of track and cross country. At the risk of sounding repetitive? We’re grateful for this busy April! It’s our first busy April of track practices, meets, admission open houses, wrapping up recruiting, etc., since 2019. Nothing cruel about this, even on a rainy Wednesday like this. Busy couple of days and weeks ahead. Here’s a quick peek:

Friday, we’ll be at Vassar for their April Invitational, the first time we’ll have athletes racing at our “home away from home” track in years. Starts at 5p. Should be fun. Saturday, we’ll bring a small contingent of men down to NYC for the Metropolitan Championships at Icahn Stadium. Next week? Coach Chuck Williams will be bringing a small group of women and men out the California for the Bryan Clay Invitational at Azusa Pacific in the Los Angeles area. The rest of the team will be at Bucknell for the Bison Outdoor Classic on Friday and Saturday. The week after that, Saturday, April 23, we’ll be at Rider for a scored team meet, a two-weeks-out preview of sorts for the MAAC Championships, which will also be held at Rider on the first full weekend of May. In between, we’ll be at Penn Relays and at Yale … and, of course, at Vassar’s track for practice – in the sun, wind and rain of April. Cruelest month? I think not!