Running for Your Life: The Road North

My New York Post colleague is attending a post-marathon party and I’m at work with my pal, Mike. (In New York, there is ONE and only ONE, marathon.)
In an e-mail explaining further, she says it is a marathon/engagement party.
“Sounds like a surprise,” I say in an e-mail reply.
“Yes, he popped the question at the sixteen-mile mark.”
“Ha!” Mike says. “Now the real marathon begins.”

*

If a marriage is a conversation that ends too soon, as Andre Malraux says, then like every good conversation, a pause refreshes. That was what I was thinking recently while I was motoring north and west from Brooklyn to near the Canadian border, some 370 miles.

I’ve known B, a TV anchor in Watertown, New York, since grade school, and we’d longtime plans to spend a weekend with a mutual friend, G, an actor and writer from Toronto. M had plans for a conference in Iowa, and to see her mom, a year shy of a century next month, when we’d all be trooping to Milwaukee to see her.

There are times like this that I write in my journal that time stands still. On many previous visits to Watertown, I’ve run the roads. At the end of B’s street and up is the entrance to mild-slope hilltop Olmsted-and-Vaux Thompson Park, with stone walls built by WPA crews sprouting in the green grass and from a secluded lookout, on a day not so unlike the Saturday I’ve visiting, bright and sunny with the Titian sky, a photographer, Willabel Cole Mitchell, took “Entre Nous,” that vintage poster-shot of three girls on
one of those walls, scudding clouds, and B will tell you that two of the trio are relations, his wife’s mom and sister; and across the way, a golf course.

It’s not because I’m getting older, that life is passing me by; in truth, I’ve always found wonder in them: cemeteries. (G slapping the bronze-colored side of the howitzer to American War of 1812 hero Brigadier General Zebulon Pike, killed in the US invasion of York (Toronto), in a memorial resting place in Sackets Harbor, the ping-pinging sound.) Watertown’s appears upon a hilly expanse with no small resemblance to Green-Wood in Brooklyn, the ones I know in Canada more akin to the military variety, row upon row of headstones in the bygone manner of classrooms, Cathy’s pigtails too tempting to resist, is that an inkwell?, and it pays to live with a puppy now as I recall my feelings through childhood and adolescence because it all comes back, that boyishness, what makes a rascal, not a scoundrel, just a boy full of piss and vinegar, nothing to challenge but raw life, everything’s different and new, and why we should stay close with those from our earliest memories because they take us back to when we were carefree, what the French call, un canaille, a scamp, and in their company we can touch childlikedness, or at least tease yourself that you can, so that a visit to the Watertown cemetery with its obelisks and little-house crypts, one in which through the gauzy window you can see a bust of a man who lived in these parts at the dawn of the last century, runs fertile in the mind.

I wish we would’ve gotten out of B’s car to walk, although I wonder if we would have seen in quite the same way the flock of hundreds of Canada geese take off as one into the winter sky, freezing, frost on the pumpkin that morning, so we’re in the car when we see them, more geese in Watertown Center than people and that’s what you get in a place where Sully didn’t save a planeload of people by gliding the jet under his command into the frigid waters of the East River in January, because that’s what these climate-changed geese do now, not fly south for the winter, instead are attracted to the warmth of airborne engines, or just better to be in the air and not on the board-frozen ground, but it’s moot for me anyway because I don’t see them anymore on my runs in Prospect Park, Brooklyn; the authorities having round them up and killed them. GASSED GEESE? GOOD! (NY Post, July 18, 2010)

The day before we went to Kingston, Ontario, to pick up G. Here we bought tickets to watch the Kingston Frontenacs play the Barrie Colts. 5-1, Barrie. Ex-Leaf Dougie Gilmour’s Frontenacs get the benefit of the penalties, after the first period Barrie even out-chanced Kingston when playing four skaters against five. Thoughts of getting an autograph for my Post pal Mike dashed when I see Gilmour’s downcast face as he ice-walked his way across the surface of the K-Rock Centre after the game.

(Idea: Film and rank current NHL coaches’ cross-rink walks under the following headings: Mincing; Girlish; Macho-slider, Bad Shoes, Bowmanesque; 5 for extreme, 1 for mild.)

Three years ago I played some pick-up hockey with men, most of whom were half my age. One young Turk called me Peter McNab, after the gritty pro center a generation ago, I think because I was wearing his number “8” during his 70s heyday, the Bruin colours (yes! I’m Canadian), and in tube skates, wielding a wooden stick that is bottom-worn from road hockey, a survivor thrown into the back of a moving van in the late 1980s, when I left North Bay, Ontario, behind for a prewar building in Brooklyn, into its three-person elevator and urine-scented floor I carried my stick and hockey gear from the early Seventies, up and into that apartment, and then to the basement of the brownstone we bought four years later, and I’ll never forget those games when I managed more or less to keep pace with the youngsters, and on the first night even put in a couple of goals, a bit of where-did-that-come-from, bang-bang timing just inside the short-side post, the other a tip-in through the goalie’s wickets, earning a ‘MCNAB!” shout-out, because he wasn’t a fluid skater but he could muck it out in the corners and score more than his share of clutch goals so that you could recall his name a generation later on a simple pickup game in Brooklyn.

Because that’s it, isn’t it? We want to make some kind of mark. With our family, our friends, sure. But better with perfect strangers. What in adolescence sticks with me: that line from the movie that G and B and I could say has stayed with us as well as any, when Butch Cassidy (Paul Newman) says in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid:”

“Who are those guys?”

Next: Running for Your Life: Food for Thought