Brooklyn Mood: Another dreary Thursday, a woman exits the subway as I’m entering, she still with the forehead-smudge of Ash Wednesday.
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I’m reading “Classics and Commercials,” a collection of essays and reviews by Edmund Wilson writing about “A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake,” by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, which shoots me to the “J” literary section, where books by James Joyce include a sample of “Finnegans.” The wonder of “Finnegans” is its pun upon pun upon pun, and I think to tell M that in the vein of Padgett Powell’s “The Interrogative Mood,” M, an inveterate word player, should start a file for a creative novel, “The Punster Mood,” as we wait for our Wisconsin cab driver, Starvin’ Marvin, who we reached by doing detective work at the taxi waiting zone; M had left her bag with her journal notes from India, laptop and Kindle in Marvin’s cab, but we were able to reach him and he’ll be back soon with the bag, too early for me because I was a little sad that I wasn’t going to have more time to browse in the best airport bookstore in the country, Renaissance Books, at the Mitchell Airport in Milwaukee.
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Word of warning: Saturday night (March 12) M and I went to a Wisconsin multiplex, and saw “The Adjustment Bureau or Free Will Hunting” . . . Dogmatic, turgidly written claptrap that fails beyond the comic book caricature of third-rate art, the only redeeming bit being that the day before, en route to Mitchell Airport from LaGuardia, while M and I were queuing up at some ungodly hour, I whispered into her ear that the guy ahead of us looked like John Slattery (Roger from “Mad Men”) after a bender, and lo and behold it WAS John Slattery, who, surprise!, was one of the Adjustment Bureau fedora-heads in that abominable stinker.
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“I’m just going to go.”
“Go already.”
M has shut down the car in Brown Deer Park. When we turned in to the park entrance, I was a little nervous given the February-like snow cover that the parking lots would be closed and that we wouldn’t be able to exercise. It’s a long time before the busy period, only the hardcore out, even on this blue-sky beauty (March 11) so I was glad to see the clear lot, “There’s parking up ahead,” I say, not what M wants to hear, Milwaukee is her town, she’s in charge and that was a takeaway in her eyes, and one that sours our moods as I lope away, unstretched, for my daily run because until the week before Boston (April 18), I need to get some miles in, a minimum forty miler this week and shooting for sixty next, the big one, I think, as I trot out for my planned, two-loop four-miler of Brown Deer Park, a bird paradise of soccer fields and lakes, a golf course and enough picnic areas to keep the Sierra Club-types of this northern Milwaukee suburb in egg salad and cheese dip heaven. Go Packers! M not giving me a little wave as we cross paths, me on the road and she in the parking lot, getting her walking gear together, comings and goings so important to us, but this going, not so good.
The truth is many times are like this. In running, I mean. My body protests. Do you, it is saying, always need to run? I mean, really? Stop and talk this out. Tomorrow, you can chalk up an hour on the hotel treadmill, more than seven miles, a plus-1,000-calorie burner. That will suit, no? but I’m out, the first hundred yards, the muscles near-locked, the hammy twinging. Four miles and I won’t even break a sweat, pavement’s uneven, just what you need in this indifferent mood, take your mind off what you’re doing and you’re over on a weak ankle, sprained with the big miles coming up, on Sunday or Monday, a run with Thurb, K’s dog who’s back for a brief visit.
A snow field and a still-up volleyball net. In the slanting afternoon sun looking like a lake in a Nordic myth – Odin, that’s one of the names they’re thinking will suit my great-nephew to come. Finally, not jog-shuffling but running, more liquid than solid.
I’m once around and starting the second loop. No M. Maybe she walked toward the river and lake, got off the park road. At the end of one entrance-exit is The Thirsty Fox, and I make a mental note to come back, but not during Packers! season, or March Madness. I could run beyond the level railway crossing, a forlorn-looking place that if M got a look at it, she’d be gone.
I hear it first. Not a cardinal cheep, then a blue flash. Near a low branch, something I first think is a pine cone. But I slow and see that it’s a bird, and the sun catches its breast and shines golden, and round head and back feathers of blue. American bluebird. I’d seen them here before, but it’s still winter, I never thought I’d see one today. I run in spot for a beat and she flies off and so do I, up on my toes, around two bends, as warm as I’ve been since this morning, and I see M ahead, highlights in her hair, and blue-sky fleece, feigns not hearing my approach, as I touch her gently on the back, she turns with a smile, and I say, “I just saw your kindred spirit, dear.”
Running for Your Life: Week Five
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