We're just trying to get ready. For all the practices and the meets, we're just trying to get better each week and be ready when the districts start.

He just has a textbook style. He's exceptional from the blocks; he's so smooth and just a fluid runner.

I had to do that to redeem myself. I was trying to push too hard, the rear came round and it caught me out big time. Instead of settling for safe points, I wanted more, so I'm cursing myself.

Usually a good part of the people trying it end up not making it.

I want people to see an honesty within me. I'm not trying to be the next Sam Cooke or Otis Redding.

A successful song comes to sing itself inside the listener. It is cellular and seismic, a wave coalescing in the mind and in the flesh. There is a message outside and a message inside, and those messages are the same, like the pat and thud of two heartbeats, one within you, one surrounding. The message of the lullaby is that it’s okay to dim the eyes for a time, to lose sight of yourself as you sleep and as you grow: if you drift, it says, you’ll drift ashore: if you fall, you will fall into place.