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

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