C I P R I A N I

Congratulations to the United States Women’s Gymnastic Team!

I’m not sure what it is with the Olympics.  Specifically these Olympics.  It’s always a spectacle, but not only was I particularly enthralled by the fantastic opening ceremonies in London this year, I’m genuinely more excited to watch the Games than I have been in awhile.  And though the coverage seems constant, I haven’t watched every single minute, but enjoyed every minute I’ve watched.  When Missy Franklin won her swimming Gold, I actually got a little misty eyed. And while my interest in The Games is higher than it’s been in quite some time, the pinnacle of my personal investment in the outcome of an Olympic event goes back pretty far and unless my son winds up competing someday down the road, I doubt it’ll ever be surpassed.

With all due respect to Kerry Strug (and she deserves all the respect in the world), I can’t watch the Olympics and not first think of Mary Lou Retton at the 1984 games in Los Angeles.  Born in West Virginia, Fairmont, West Virginia, Mary Lou lived on the same street as my Aunt Angeline.  Or at least I think she did.  They changed the name of the street my Aunt Ang lived on to “Mary Lou Retton Drive”, so I figure if it wasn’t the same exact street, it was in the general vicinity.

Now, my earliest Olympic memory is being sick on a couch in Fairmont, West Virginia watching the hockey team in 1980.  “Do you believe in miracles…” I did.  I had the flu, but I did.  That team, Eruzione, and Rold Gold Pretzels are a very close second to what I first think of when I think of the Olympics.  Mary Lou Retton will always be number one.

In 1984, when I was ten years old, the Olympics in Los Angeles seemed to be a lifetime away from that moment watching the “Miracle on Ice”.  Indeed, it was nearly half a lifetime.  And now, over a quarter of a century later, the distance between those two events still seem further apart than the past sixteen years.

In some ways.

In others, all those memories are part of a shifting fabric.  Time seems to bend and blend as I bump along a path that is nowhere near as focused and precise as that vault landing that earned Mary Lou the gold.  God knows she accomplished quite a lot in her scant few weeks in Los Angeles.  I’ve been here for nearly sixteen years and have yet to achieve anything resembling being the first woman from the United States to win a Gold Medal in Gymnastics.

Of course, I never set out to quite do that.  But I suspect some of the seeds of leaving the general vicinity of what’s now called “Mary Lou Retton Drive” were sown when Mary Lou nailed that perfect ten.

At ten years old I literally did not know what cynicism was.  Looking back, I probably knew quite a few cynics, but I myself, while perhaps not quite believing “anything was possible”, at least wasn’t yet aware that not all things were.

To me, growing up in West Virginia was wonderful, but around age ten, I would hear the stories of how some folks elsewhere in the country didn’t realize that West Virginia was its own state, as if a large part of the populace was unaware of the Civil War and that this was somehow a reflection of how backward West Virginia was.  This made little sense to me, as did later barbs about us all being related.  This isn’t true at all.  As I’ve said, Mary Lou Retton simply lived on my aunt’s street, Jennifer Garner was in my cousin’s math class, and Don Knotts was in my fraternity.  But these single degrees of separation hardly make us blood relatives (though Joyce DeWitt is apparently a distant relation, but the way my grandmother explained it, it would seem that Ms. DeWitt is in fact somehow related to everyone in Wellsburg, West Virginia, while not everyone in the entire state).

The point is, I have a lot of pride in being from West Virginia and if you’ve ever been there, you understand why.  It’s beautiful.  And the people there are extraordinary.  Even the ones I’m not related to.  I imagine a lot folks feel the same way about their Home and when someone from there accomplishes something, but hell, when I see a West Virginia license plate on the 405 I get a little excited. So being ten years old in a living room in West Virginia with my family, watching a little girl from the same town I was born nail a perfect 10 when the chips were down, well that’s clearly going to stick with me forever.