So you want to live in Park Slope, Exhibit D:
“Don’t you wish you had started doing yoga when you were twelve?”
– (Approx. language of a) message advertising a ground-floor business in a brownstone, Center Slope
I’m getting ahead of myself; I’ve yet to see both my medical specialists on Wednesday (later April 27) and tomorrow, so it’s hard to set running goals just yet. Look for that post next Tuesday. Now, I’m en route to a new hospital, this one for Vanya, my Volvo 850, the star of two posts (See, R4YL: Keeping a Journal and R4YL: A Congressional Run) with hopes that I can begin to set new goals with Vanya, not in the crazy-car owner way but summer’s coming and after a year of living with a zippy sedan that will suddenly, inexplicably die in what I have to feel I’m testing the outer limits at this point, like I’m on a Park Slope suicide mission, the car F-F-F-ing out on a shoulderless stretch of the Hutchinson Parkway, say, boxed in by small nation-sized SUVs hurtling at light speed, fear like that month-old feeling, killer spasm in my right leg, and yeah I’m upset and frustrated, a hard PT session yesterday (April 26), more strengthening than light stretches and now I get it, a particle of what Sid Crosby must've been feeling before the Pens were eliminated last night (April 28). I can walk around like a normal person but can’t yet do what is Beshert – meant to be – get up in the morning, throw on my running clothes, and go out the door, but no I’m standing on this subway platform, making my way to V, getting ahead of myself, literally this time, taking the Coney Island express N for two stops too far and now I’m waiting with the Fort Hamilton Parkway locals, at least it’s an outdoor space . . . inside the train now and late for what I’ve got to do, scrub away at that V fear, my new best friend, N, at Bay Ridge Volvo, saying he’s isolated the flaw: the fuel pump relay that he says doesn’t show any telltale breaks but they’ve ruled out everything else and the FPR is original equipment, been around since we bought our house in 1992, so just exactly what do we use for almost twenty years that’s mechanically essential, not the TV, don’t tell me, because outside of Stanley Cup hockey season and Mad Men, The Good Wife and The Killing (sorta), a TV is as essential as a water vac in the Gobi, and now, soon because thank God I found my way to the R Train, the one that will soon plant me in the general vicinity of the new and improved V, N saying BRV guarantees its work so if wily old V chooses to M-FUCK me on the way home, he’ll be right back in the shop – and lo and behold, loyalty’s a wonderful thing but stupidity’s a nasty burr – and I will post his sorry ass (V’s, that is) on Craigslist and let him be someone else’s problem.
So you want to live in Park Slope, Exhibit E
11 am. Wednesday (April 27)
“VAULT BOOK”
– A three-sided label-sign before two petite women working at a conference table near the floor-to-ceiling glass window of a bank that has a reputation for being the most frequently robbed bank in the 11215 ZIP.
I can’t recommend more highly a memoir by my friend, Ben Ryder Howe. “My Korean Deli,” http://nyti.ms/eNrUq3, it’s called. Ben, who is descended from the Plymouth Rock European Americans, goes leagues beyond the droll sense of humor that typically characterize the “parachute trooper” genre in which writer-observers of privilege touch down into foreign territory and proceed, some more successfully than others, to detail to other members of the privilege class what curiosities they have found. Here, in “My Korean Deli,” my pal Ben, who an original Vanya fuel pump relay ago worked for me as a Hell’s Kitchen intern reporter for a Manhattan-based newsweekly, was someone then – as he is now – who gave off none of those airs. Rather, it was as though he were campaigning in a VW bus, a sign on the back: Richly Documented Histories of Esteemed Ancestors Don’t Tell the Whole Story. Inquire Within. Imagine a place as common as a corner deli seen as Schopenhauer wrote, a liberation of knowlege that “lifts us as wholly and completely above (our everyday miseries) as do sleep and dreams.” Read “My Korean Deli”; you’ll be amused and impressed, and feel not only that you too know my friend Ben, but trust me you’ll be wondering why more writers don’t seem to be capable of constructing a world on the page that is even remotely as self-effacingly aware as Ben’s.
If I were to start a second blog I would call it, “Getting to Know Water.” More later on my appointment with Dr. O, my rehab specialist, but yesterday (April 27) she convinced me that we all came from water and this moving-erect-through-air business, particularly when injured (me, thirty-five years ago and again last month), is a dismal second to moving in water. The premise of the blog would be that rather than fear water as I, a non-swimmer, do, I would finally commit myself to getting to know it because Dr. O tells me there is no better exercise for the total body than to run in the element that we came from, what should not be feared if you are to live the fullest life. WATER, Read: WE RAT. Swim, yes. But learn to run in water too.
Received from the Boston Athletic Association, with 44-cent post mark, April 22, 2011:
For Larry W. Oconnor
Overall Place 0 of 0
Gender Place 0 of 0
Age Group Place 0 of 0
Next: Running for Your Life: Setting goals
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