Reinforcements Arrive

by Crazy Ivan

There was a time when I was invincible.  I was impervious to injury, tireless in my efforts and resilient to any malady.  I shrugged off illness, I laughed off pain and I tackled every passion with an almost singular focus.  There was a time when I was, in a word, indefatigable.

That time was called "young", and it is a seemingly distant memory.  Don't get me wrong, I was young pretty recently.  I'm even now just learning that I'm no longer young.  As Gallagher once said, "we spend half of our lives learning to do stuff and the other half realizing we can do that stuff anymore."

My recent trip to Dollywood has been rapidly showing me just how many things are falling into that latter category.  I did this exact same assignment with a much smaller and less experienced team when I was, myself, far less experienced.  I worked open to close and didn't take a single day off in 57 days.  I took a half day once when Myachi Man was here and I hiked up a two mile, 1800 foot trail in the Smokie Mountains.

And that was when I was young.

Now I'm a mere 10 days into this stint and the 13 hour days are starting to take a toll on me.  I'm actually going to be taking a day off tomorrow, a scant 130 hours of labor from the start.  My body is sore, my brain hurts and anybody who follows the trick of the day videos knows that my voice has all but given out on me.  I still managed to massage my old guy pride with the fact that I outlasted the younger guys when it came to needing a day off, but I didn't come close to my goal of making it all the way through the summer like I used to.

Since I'd overestimated my youthful invincibility, this realization also comes with the side effect that we don't have enough help to cover Dollywood.  If my oldness is going to have me doing crazy things like "days off" (whatever that means), we realized that we were going to need more help at the Wood.

The first thing we did was stuck Rush on a plane.  I'm not sure exactly why Myachi Man chose Rush, but perhaps he got a deal on passenger per pound and simply chose the lightest guy.  But that wasn't quite going to do the trick.  We needed a genuine Myachi Master to replace a Myachi Master, and while I have faith that Rush will one day earn his way into the fourth generation of Myachi Masters, he's not there yet.  He still has much to learn and being at Dollywood will certainly speed up the rate of his progress, but it wasn't enough.

This put us in an awkward position because Animal, Monk, Maverick and Noodles are needed in New York.  Not only do we have the two biggest toy stores in the country to worry about, but we also have a few summer camps we're doing this year, a bunch of special events and the typical Myachi amount of birthday parties, Mitzvahs, graduation parties, etc.  We couldn't afford to deplete our resources there.  And it's not like there are any Myachi Masters just lying around.

Or perhaps there was...

In addition to Rush, we also welcomed Kore back to the ranks today.  He'd been in Florida for the last few months and had been all but cut off from the Myachi world, but when he saw the Myachi symbol in the sky and heard the Myachi communicator crackle to life, he answered the call.  He knew that a Myachi Master was needed, so he came to the rescue as one would expect from any legitimate superhero.

So the team at the Wood grew, I get to rest my voice for a day (as well as this ridiculously old ankle of mine), we have Kore's sense of humor at the Cabin of Skills and we have Rush's youthful enthusiasm to young up the crowd and fire up the rest of the team.  What was looking like a great summer keeps getting all kinds of better.