I don’t think of space in the same way as I used to. As children, we need to be constantly watched. In the city, a child will bound into traffic, in the country, toward a precipice in a flash. Thurber, the puppy, will race up the side of blizzard snowbanks, only to plunge a long leg in a soft spot, and, a second later, do the same thing again, as if he has learned the sum total of zero, his life force taking over, the landscape, treacherous or not, a non-consideration, all is subservient to play, in service of adventure, dependent on those who steer him away from the barreling down SUV, the cliff edge, but our purchase on landscape is no superior to his. We must only keep him safe, embracing him as he is.
As a runner my landscapes have changed over time. On Christmas Eve, for example, while driving to a party of the Upper East Side, I look toward the waterside park along the FDR and think about running, about being on that path in the deadly summer heat last year, on a long training run after leaving a doctor’s appointment. (See RFYL: Week Five ), and now it is Friday, Dec. 24, two days from The Blizzard, when landscape becomes purely mental, heaps of smothering white, time washes away, and there is no escape, what I said in my memoir, Tip of the Iceberg. Interiors. We are about interiors.
I see the gentle slope of Park Avenue ahead, a clock shop, second floor, which has been there as long as we’ve been coming to this party. More than twenty years. What is in the comfort of things that do not change? There are far fewer pubs in England, but still one that has a hanging bundle of blackened hot-cross buns, during Good Friday a single one goes in, the collection grows. One hundred and fifty now.
He’s far, far shorter when you see him in person. Mayor Bloomberg, plutocrat, the world’s richest politician. No, I’m not running for president, he says, why should I when money controls everything? (I know I shouldn’t go there, I try not to, but how can you not, when he walks past me at the party on Christmas Eve, I swear he’s barely one hundred pounds, lean and athletic-looking for a guy who’s maybe five-foot-four, so no wonder he sides with the cyclists against the taxi drivers, and hats off to the Daily News editorial of him, published during The Blizzard, showing our purposeful, someone-else-is-going-to-drive-me-around-in-a-limousine,-so-what-me-worry? expression on his face as he snow-blows a trail through the deep-drifted snow, a long line of cyclists behind him, while cars and Sanitation trucks lie embedded in the impassable snow.)
No one sees a landscape the same way. At a New Year’s Day party last year a poet friend made the simple observation that you can never know how you appear to another person. Look in the mirror. Take a mental picture, close your eyes, and try to describe yourself. Now show a side view. Repeat. Your mind’s eye suggests a version of you that is truly your own, but not others’ views of you. We see ourselves ONLY through the eyes of those around us, what comes down to our family, our loved ones, our best friends, all part of a system in which our changes are typically so slow and thus undetectable that it takes instead someone who has known us intimately long ago to see and assess these changes, and not just in looks, but in manner, in voice, in dress, in all the ways we change but that go unnoticed because those we love in our daily life have interiorized – cannot see as we ourselves cannot see – our changes, only to realize that our friend who was a dear friend in childhood, or when we were young adults, is not to be trusted either when they say, as she indubitably will, “You know, you haven’t changed a bit,” and you think to challenge her, to articulate just what she means but you don’t because it’s only an impression, and certainly as false, if not more so, then your own memories of yourself, or of her for that matter, so it’s better not even trying, just getting more comfortable in your body and mind and spirit that is your own but not your own. Because nowhere is there sufficient proof.
The Week in Review (in The Times, always behind The Times, see link at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/nyregion/07farley.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=%22running%20for%20your%20life%22&st=cse , even notice the font!) in their Jan. 2 edition writes about the importance of cognitive health. (If BMI is our standard of bodily well-being, what is the index measure of mental health, and like BMI, doesn’t it change over time and shouldn’t we be monitoring it as closely as we do BMI?)
We must, of course, exercise our brain. Boomers, let’s make a list: crossword puzzles, bridge, learn a foreign language, read David Foster Wallace’s Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (pluus the footnotes, and try to puzzle out the equations). M and K tell me my mental landscape, like my running one, is linear. Theirs are modular, more emotion-based, they say. I will sit down and read and write, and run for that matter, for hours at a time without interruption. They, on the other hand, will solve a series of problems, say, how to bring a sophisticated dinner with wine to the table, manage a dispute with a medical office, in K’s case, burrow in on eBay and outfit herself and hers and J’s new apartment in exquisite style, minimum cost and maximum comfort, and set aside an hour of “Criminal Minds.” I’m in awe. While I set aside an article by Terry Castle, one of my favorite essayists, her latest in the LRB, a piece on Sarah Bernhardt, thousands of words that literally excite me in its voice and take-no-prisoners attitude, a rocket-trip of fun and unexpected pleasures, on the kitchen table for M and K to read and it is still there weeks later, even though I keep digging it out and putting it on top of the magazines – The Economist, Miller-McCune, The Atlantic – with a dimming but nonetheless still present notion that they will pick up the essay and read. And they will, I’m sure. Or at least a page or two, before the next module comes along.
Next: Running for Your Life: Boston Beckons!
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