J, a friend of M’s came to the door the other night. With M in India last month, J hadn’t had the opportunity to say Happy New Year, so she did, almost two months and an untold number of snowstorms since Jan. 1, 2011. Or 1-1-11.
It strikes me that in these weeks I haven’t made any new year’s resolutions. That days go by and although I like to think of myself as thoughtful and prone to self-evaluation, but often as not I’m feeling pulled along by routine, three hundred days a year I leave home about the same time, stand on a spot on the subway platform
adjacent to a nasty stain on a pillar at the rear, R Train, Union Station, Manhattan-bound, a dozen years ago I’ve pretty much got the platform to myself, but not now, Park Slope, a national story, restaurants, coffee bars, wine shops, writers, journalists, artists, home of their now-nationally famous Food Co-Op. The other night M and I get tickets to a movie at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, part of the Susan Sarandon Film Festival, “The Front Page,” with Jack Lemon, Walter Matthau, Sarandon, the love interest, playing piano for singalong in the 1920s, Balaban and Katz! on the marquee, M, born-and-bred Chicago, sweet-smiles, and the cops, not Keystone, rather bought and paid for, talking a little too much for our neighbors, “Would you please stop talking!”, we’re hushed, admonished and before it’s burgers and beer and a browse in Greenlight, a Fort Greene bookstore, unexpected paper-smell heaven, books now and “The Front Page,” the newspaper love letter later on Valentine’s weekend; we are usually in too much of a hurry, no time for a stroll like this, and a browse in Greenlight http://abookstoreinbrooklyn.blogspot.com/ not even two years old, and such buyers! multiple copies of “The Professor and Other Writings” by essayist Terry Castle and Saramago, “The Notebook,” if money were no object I’d snap them up because I’m short of good reading material, having put down the gimmick-book, “The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet,” and, of course, “Freedom,” enough said about that, not been moved to say that was a masterful read since David Mitchell’s “Black Swan Green,” “A Heart So White” by Javier Marias, “Wrong Blood” by Manuel de Lope, “Death With Interruptions” by Saramago and “Wise Blood” by Flannery O’Connor, I suppose I could try again (but odds are I won’t) with Franzen, or the current rave, Karen Russell’s “Swamplandia!” and the newspaper book satire, “The Imperfectionists,” but I fear it apes an elite callous disregard that I found in “Netherland,” by Joseph O’Neill, everyone in America falling over themselves in praise but I don’t get it, and for the most part that’s true of the Schulmpitudes: Gary Shteyngart and the Jonathans (Franzen, Safran Foer and Letham), and I did try Joshua Ferris’ “Then We Came to the End,” the office novel, but I’m left wondering where’s the heart, the blood, which my list would seem to indicate is my wont, and this is my resolution: To slow down, even as I meditate on the nasty stain in the subway, and save my shekels so that I can support good people like the buyers at Greeenlight.
*
Biker, overheard in the park:
“A jogger yelled at me while I was biking with my kids to school. Can you believe that? . . . Sure, I was going the wrong way, but it was my first time.”
Civic curmudgeon thought:
Create divisions on pedestrian pavement: two-thirds, “sidewalk;” one-third, “sidestand.”
Cellphone conversation overheard in the park:
“That would only capitivate them for ten minutes.”
*
It’s two months till Boston and I’ve a sore hamstring. I leveled with M, who’s some experience with muscle stiffness and nagging pain, and today (Feb. 22), we looked in my “Running Anatomy http://www.runningwarehouse.com/descpage-HKRA.html and it fits: the hamstring, more the tendons than the thigh muscles themselves, are strained, the worst of it felt during that cold snap (See Running for Your Life: Doppelgangers) on Feb. 3, pushing myself, so soon after the ten-miler, and body unstretched and cold, a block of ice, and me, what M calls The Tree, indestructible, is felled , or at least notched, marked, weakened, and for two-plus weeks, I’ve been in denial, no way could this Tree be any less than it has always been, strong and growing, but no, not now, for the first time I can remember, outside of a recurrent blood clot in 2001, we’re talking thirty-five years give or take, I’m going to have to take a break from my alternate-day running life .¤.¤. and for how long, I don’t know, and sure it’s a fright, imagine doing something you love for thirty-five years and now you accept that you have to stop, say, you’re a smoker and you have to stop, or better yet, every other day for thirty-five years you have a date with a friend, sometimes you laugh your heads off, other times you ask yourself why you bother, then next, you see there’s nothing quite like her, that’s what’s being asked of me, why it is that it has taken almost three weeks to finally stop, this muscle IS sore when I run, and it just makes no sense to keep pushing, Motrin or no, because in some things Nietzsche, “What does not destroy me, makes my stronger,” is dead-wrong, finally here, a moment of clarity, and for this I thank M, I’m not going to run for a few days. I’ll cross-train at M’s gym, try the elliptical machine, something that isn’t about pounding, a mile in on a run and if I’m true to myself, my hamstring is feeling tight. Even now as I sit here I’m aware of it. I stretch and I feel the pain. Not killing, but just not right. It’s funny how something like this, what seems so small, can throw you life upside down.
Next: Running for Your Life: Pain Inc.
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