Finally, temps are in the 70s. Payback for those punishing August runs. The first day, Sunday, before my shift at the New York Post, I shoot for an hour, five minutes: 1:05. My lucky number, and a seven interval up and down the stone step stairway to the overlook of the manmade lake in Prospect Park. When I catch my second wind, halfway through the staircase interval, I’m Cameron’s Avatar, on Labor Day weekend 2010, and I feel my leg like it was before my blood clot. Like a 20-year-old, with a memory of one.
*
The bellmen had the best jobs and the hearts of the prettiest maids. Front line with the tips, big-forehead handsome and beefy. Career hotel keepers held the manager posts at Chateau Lake Louise, an historic Canadian Pacific Railroad hotel, a mansion on a glacial blue lake, during the summer of 1976, but college students flocked there to fill the menial ones.
