It’s winter and we have to take out the air-conditioners in our windows. M’s office window is broken – and since the summer the top sash has been propped up with a man-hungry-size BBQ fork that we bought at a brownstone block auction a decade ago, but now, with the A-C out, it needs a little help, so I saw up a sturdy piece of cardboard packing and stick the fork side in the cardboard, which pretty much works to keep the heavy sash up and relatively secure, and the cold air outside, that is it does when the cardboard is resting on my hardback copy of “Annals of an Abiding Liberal” by John Kenneth Galbraith.
“There,” I tell M. “We just needed John Kenneth Galbraith to prop up our economy.”
When I received my Boston Marathon acceptance confirmation in the mail, my daughter Kate was with me, and I leapt around the room like a jack-in-the-box, probably annoying her sense of hip-cool ennui, I don’t know (Kate is almost twenty-four; there’s only so much you can ask of a daughter, or any loved one around a peculiar passion, and surely planning a race in which you don’t stop regardless of the pain for 26.2 miles (no, this is not the Marathon des Sables; see Running for Your Life: Marathon des Sables) qualifies as a peculiar passion. Suffice to say, though, she seemed happy for me, and watched as I planted ballpoint exclamation marks around my official time and personal stats in which my name is spelled Oconnor because I couldn’t find the “ ’ ” on the French keyboard at the Continental Hotel in Tangier, where I did my online application, and the shift key had a mind of its own.)
In Boston, they put it this way: “It’s Patriot’s Day Monday. And the saps are running.” D’oh! (Another gem: When returning home from Watertown, NY, from my homeboy weekend earlier this month on NYC Marathon Sunday, only five days after the midterms, a radio jock opines: “Anytime now, Bibi Quash, the afternoon gal, will be here. Bibi’s late. Bibi, she’s a firm believer in the two-party system. Party all night and party all day.) Silly me, to prepare for driving into the city that Sunday, I downloaded the road-closure information for the NYC Marathon.* Ha! I’ve got to get to work in Midtown, and find in Brooklyn the traffic is backed up to streets that bear zero relation to the printed record I’m holding in my hand. Miraculously, though, I find a parking spot, and come up to Fourth Avenue where every year except for this one I’ve been at the corner of First Street to see the lead runners come through; it’s about eight miles in, and it’s a marvel to see these world-class athletes zip along, literally blink and you’ve missed them, blam! of raw power, what I remember from high school track, the best of the best streaming around the oval, the 100 meters, 440, and before that, in grade school, and sure I was a contender, at least in short bursts, the 50-yard dash, but here on Fourth and First, with eighteen miles to go and these amazing men go all out, at 4:50 per mile or so, an inspiration, as close to runner-religion as you can get, but on this Sunday, the homeboy weekend at 1 p.m., HOURS into the race at the eight-mile mark and here are the marathoners at the other end, race bibs and fancy shoes, high-tech shorts and tops to boot mostly walking, some the lightest of jogs, if they finish it’s eight-nine hours from the starting line, but they’re out here, hardly a soul watching, only cops counting their triple OT for Sundays and a “Smoke On the Water” garage band, occasional Steve Miller Band numbers too, giving it up at the bialy baker at Union Street and Fourth, and I wonder on my way home because now I’m more than a little exhausted, motor marathon from 6 a.m., thank God that the clocks fell back that morning, saved my life, my shift at The Post, how I can be so sure about anything. We are the “saps” running, aren’t we? Yes, that may be true. But the inside joke is that we don’t mind. We don’t mind at all.
Next: Running for Your Life: The Tao of Rewards
* If, for whatever reason, you may wonder why it is I have now completed three marathons and raced in five and have never yet run in my hometown event, the NYC Marathon, there is a story behind this. For another post. Or not.
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