Freedom in a Can: Adventures with Hamlet

Over the last weekend in September my Kenyon College Swimming and Diving teammates from the past 40 years or so gathered together to celebrate the career of the man who guided the program for most of those years.  Jim Steen amassed a record of national titles that no other coach in any sport in any division has even come close to duplicating.  Along the way there were other accolades, national records, NCAA post-graduate scholarships, titles, All-Americans, the list goes on and on.  I had the chance to give the "big man" a little trash talk at his celebration / roast.  Hope you enjoy.   My name is Dave Hutchison and I’ve had the privilege of swimming for Coachman from 1989 – 1993.    Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been trying to capture my feelings and thoughts about the big guy we’re honoring tonight.   Assuming that someone has written it better than I could, I found this from Maya Angelou.   She writes, “I’ve learned that people forget what you said,

Put this in the crock pot a few months back, kept stewing over it... Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends.   You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it. – Cesare Pavese As we rolled into Orchard Pond Organic Farm in Tallahassee, with our kayak heavy truck and bikes hanging off the back of our camper, Thom (one of the farmers) asked, “are y’all trying out for the Survivor show?”   After a brief introduction and tour of the place Thom gave an impromptu talk about the history of the farm and its place in the local ecosystem, a truly interdisciplinary mind he wove together a verbal tapestry of anthropology, ecology, biology, history, and folklore.   Like any good lecturer whose mind moves faster than his mouth and who knows way too much about his subject,