Don't ask me how I got on Facebook, because I don't know.
And it was a surprise!!

Correction: 28 years of coaching. His '04 team wants the all-weather, outdoor track named for him. Should be.

My memories of running are jumbled because my collegiate experience covers the same geographic territory, more or less. Especially the early years before we moved up in divisions.

I think I started running for him when I was in 8^th grade, a year after he started. I played tennis that spring but never again. I didn't run my junior year at all.

My younger brother attended the retirement party also. I didn't know he would. He's training for his first-ever marathon this fall. The party could have almost been a family reunion. Goldstein mistook him for his older brother. Only five years separate us, but Greg may as well have run at a different school. He introduced me to a former teammate of his at our table and I barely knew the name. Much less the recent grads who organized this event. But I'm glad they did!

His family's table sat next to ours, with his twenty-something daughters. I remember them as preschoolers, potty-training. As he came around to our table, I hugged him and gave him my first name. He professed to remember me. I had Chris with me, and told him, "Doesn't he look like Jeff?" I gave him a small gift I'd picked up at a Judaica store in Manalapan. It was a last minute purchase and, I think now, something of an amulet.

I looked for other gray-haired folks like myself and found only a couple from my time. The old man at our table was the father of a senior who attended the dinner with the expectation of receiving an award. The event ended without an award being presented to him. He told us that the runners wear GPS watches but can only run their practice on school property. On occasion, they'll drive to a local park for practice. From time to time, someone gets left behind.

If those are the constraints that Goldstein has to operate within, I don't blame him for retiring. There was such a team culture of certain running routes: Fox Road, Fisher Road, quad, triangle, Bliss Hill. I think we did Duck Pond Road once. I remember running "a train" with the boys (?) out Route 63 once. But in general we avoided the highway.

After dinner, there was a slideshow of pictures, mostly recent. As Greg said, since the advent of digital photography. The party organizers solicited pictures but I haven't any. When you're at an important race, the last thing on your mind is, "What shall I show at coach's retirement party?!" Teens just don't have that perspective, at least I didn't.

There were two olde time pictures at the head of the slideshow from period yearbooks. The five of us in the room, including Goldstein, who knew the folks in the pictures had a fun time putting names to faces. Greg knew quite a few of them. Goldie said, "This is going to take a long time if you have more of these pictures," but they had only a couple.

The coach at SUNY Geneseo spoke about how he noticed Coach's runners, that they were decent and hard-working. So he began recruiting them. The health teacher who also coaches - Greg knew him and I did not - also talked about working with Goldstein.

Much was said about Goldstein's cheering during races, his pet expressions, like, "You gotta want it." I might have learned to cheer loud because of him. And much was said about his tendency to chew out his runners when he caught them doing something wrong. I think us girls were spared the more cruder comments. He consoled one runner who'd turned in a poor performance by telling him, "Well, Tim, you've got no balls." My assumption during my time on his teams was that, deep down, he had a good heart and soul despite his gruffness. But, now I'm willing to consider the possibility that I was mistaken.

He told us that he had planned an all-time, cross-country reunion for Columbus Day weekend. I'd like to get the whole family up there then. And see a better turnout from my time. And, yeah, he coached track, too, but everyone knows that cross-country is better.