Running for Your Life: Week Eight

At the main entrance to Green-Wood Cemetery at 25th Street and Fifth Avenue, you can hardly hear yourself think for the sound of the parrots. In the late 1960s, the urban legend goes, a crate of Argentinian long-tailed green parrots, known as Quaker Parrots, cracks open like an egg and the birds escape, eventually to make their way to the 1861 monumental brownstone arch built by Richard Upjohn, the builder of lower Manhattan’s Trinity Church.

Here, at the leeward side, because even on the warmest days there is a New York Harbor breeze, and in winter, Arctic at times, the parrots have made their nest out of the wind. In recent years, during renovation, the nests were destroyed and for a season they made do elsewhere before moving back, in exactly the same place they’ve been for decades, out of the wind.

I confess to a touch of Schadenfraude when, during the racket of the birds at 10 a.m. Saturday, the last day of Week Eight, the security guard waves M and I through to join the Sketch Walking Tour. I can’t be sure if he is the same guy who stopped me (See Running for Your Life: Week Four) on my first trip to the entrance. Now, though, I see that there might be a reason for him to be a bit grouchy (if not trigger happy). There must be dozens of birds up there, squawking like there’s no tomorrow.

And, of course, for many at Green-Wood, there isn’t. While traveling to the South Pacific in my late twenties, I dabbled with sketching, and occasionally since, I’ve scratched out doodles in my journals. But I’d never taken an actually sketch class, and when I stumbled on this one, advertised at the main entrance, while running, I thought it would be fun. M often posts her water colors on her blog at www.thewriterandwander.blogspot.com, so she was game.

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I took to books after my near-death experience and the loss of my best friend, but that would be a half-truth. School is a helluva thing to do to books, at least for the guy I was in my late teens and twenties. There was no eureka moment, a book that captured my imagination, like the “Count of Monte Cristo,” “Robinson Crusoe,” “The Heart of Darkness.”

Rather, I came to books like everything else in my life. Slowly. And, in this case, with reading, on nights.

For a time during the summer of my junior year, I worked as a midnight-to-8 security guard at an apartment building in Edmonton, with views over the North Saskatchewan River. Here, I read Malamud’s “The Assistant” and “The Natural,” “Notes from the Underground” and “Crime and Punishment” by Dostoyevsky.

Other journalism school classmates of mine snagged summer jobs at the Edmonton Journal, but I was bucking that idea. Rather, I wanted to take my time, sort out what it was that I wanted to do next. The year after D’s death, I took time away from my studies. Summer at Chateau Lake Louise, and fall back at home in Ontario, where I worked a series of jobs: apple picking, working at a print run of Home Hardware catalogs, drywall construction, before I took a job running a drug department in suburban mall. I ran but I didn’t read. The idea, in fact, of a hotshot reporter career seemed too final, a single path, not a life’s journey.

I had a lot to think about. So, in a night watchman’s room on the ground floor of an apartment tower in Edmonton, I took my first steps as a reader, after running during the day, and soon, to write .¤.¤.

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My running in Week Eight is sustaining: seven- to eight-milers every day for six days. Just as I’d hoped, my left forefoot is no longer getting inflamed, or at least not in a way that was causing that alarming numbness. “Tapering,” runners call it. I’m still thinking that in Week Nine, about 10 days before the race, I will do a long run, what I’m planning to call Running to Harlem, but for now I’ll taper.

On Friday, before the Green-wood sketch class, M, K and I drove to Pottstown, Pa., and picked up a new family member: a bloodhound mix soon dubbed James Thurber O’Connor Morris. Thurber for short. I’m tired from the drive back, and I suit up for a run at dusk.

Along Sixth Avenue, three massive trees, one leaving a gaping lunar-like hole, between 12th and 14th streets, destroyed by last week’s tornado have already been carted away. Dusk light exposes the facades of row houses like never before, tree shadows a memory.

Down 24th Street at Sixth Avenue, I see them for the first time. Flashing green, coming back to their nests, and I stop, half-way to Fifth Avenue, and wonder why it is that I have never seen them before. The Quaker Parrots. From the sound of them, there must be hundreds in the nests of the Con Edison substation. But that is not the only Con condo. At the corner of Fifth Avenue and 24th Street is another one, a stone’s throw from a great view of the Statue of Liberty. At first, I wonder at how Green-Wood’s landscape architect chose such a spot, where you can see clear to the harbor. Later, though, I see that Liberty wasn’t unveiled until 48 years after the cemetery. So maybe it was the Liberty maker who wanted this view, who wanted her to be seen by the people who flocked here long before the parrots arrived, who before Olmsted and Vaux’s Central Park opened in 1873, made it the state’s second most popular destination spot behind only Niagara Falls.

But it’s the parrots that fascinate me. I pause on my run, watching parrots at dusk, all sizes coming home to roost, squawking and flying and clambering over nests that look so big and sturdy, as if they’ve been there long before the yuppies came. Soon, I'm racing home to tell M, to see if she’d like to see them just like this in the dying light.

Next: Running for Your Life: Week Nine