In the late 1990s I shared a stage with writers, including Joyce Carol Oates, who, the program dictated, would read immediately before me at a book event that had drawn hundreds of listeners. Being relatively new to reading my work in front of a big crowd, I was nervously re-reading my essay in “A Few Thousand Words About Love,” http://amzn.to/kKnnmc, the anthology we were promoting. Next to me, though, Joyce was writing. I swear, it seemed to me at the time, that Joyce had written a few thousand words while we snaked through the alphabet of authors to the O’s. She read what she called her fiction-memoir flawlessly, and then as I rose shakily to do my bit, she gave me a little smile of support, just the jolt I needed to not only get through the reading, but to do it with a touch of confidence. When I returned to my seat Joyce was still at it, working to finish her scene, or note, or whatever it was because that's what writers do, they answer the call when it comes.
Today (Cinco de Mayo) Mexican Saint Paddy’s and on the subway platform, thank God, there are no drunks tagged with Irish buttons and tall felt hats, primed with vulgar stories of sexual exploits, a tin whistle or a fiddle as likely as a rat on its hind legs playing “Danny Boy,” no tourists on Cinco de Mayo either, because finally the Europeans have left New York for home after Semana Santa, but Cinco de Mayo is for Mexicans and they are in the city’s restaurant kitchens and deli basements, the two guys in our vegetable and fruit market smile when M speaks her nuanced Mexican Spanish, wishes them well, saying she’ll mix margaritas and bring them over later, but they shake their heads, tell us that they have to work, and so do I; do all the drunks on St. Paddy’s Day – not all Irish, puh-lease – have the day off, yeah, ill by alcohol, but the Mexicans don’t. They’re working. Maybe in a hundred years, when they’re as rooted in the city as the St. Paddy’s partiers, the transit platforms on Cinco de Mayo will be lousy with witless revelers. Somehow, though, I don’t think so.
A tortuous day, when fives are wild, there’s a synchronicity to 5-5, 1-1, a bit of a double hour, my birth date (Yes, I have the certificate, Canadian, I can never run for president, would never want to run for president) is 10-5-55, or 5+5-5-55, and I believe in judgment days (lower case, that is) – did you know that May 21, 2011, is a prophetic day when a global conflagration is to coming that will unsettle all life http://huff.to/hUm0Le with The End of The World coming on October 21. Before the Boston Marathon 2012. Which, I suppose, given my luck with training for the Boston Marathon 2011 might be a good thing.
If I can say anything to those who are still running, at any age, what comes to mind when I sit down to write, that these sentences may not speak to every reader, far from it, but they are not without foundation of practice and passion, and at times all writers aren’t feeling it, but as Conrad Knickerbocker, a fiction writer who left us too soon, once said, Apply ass to chair, and write. Every day. First memories, then ideas, stories, work is shaped and how is it that running and cardio exercise is any different, a practice that yields results only in a calculation of how much work you put in.
Shit happens, life is about percentages. You may not run a sub-three-hour marathon at thirty, a sub-3:30 at fifty-five. But do the right thing and you’ll be in the ring. Trading punches. Going for it. Because if you give your all you’ve nothing to be ashamed of. It’s a base that you grow from. Toward your own judgment day.
*
It’s Friday (May 6)* and M and I are on a writers’ picnic, a bite and the newspaper, a journal, a couple of pens, tasseled blanket, all stuffed in an oversized bag, off to Prospect Park, where eventually we settle in the grass, half-sun, half-shade, what is it about this season and this week, splendid day after splendid day, the two times in the calendar year around M and my birthdays, hers in May, mine in October, (Rapture and World’s End months, hmmmm) when the day is sunny with a touch of cloud and cool breeze and at night cold enough to easily slip into sleep, depression during days like this after the bitter freeze of this past winter, the wicked wet and damp of early spring a special torment, the splendidness has even gotten into the ducks at the north corner of The Boathouse Lake .¤.¤. Not our usual Mallards, the comely pair on Marathon Sunday (See RRYL: Setting Goals), but larger brown ones, what M learns when she goes to the Audubon Center that they are the result of Mallards breeding with White Domestic Ducks (Aflac!), thus the milky coffee color, and it’s a raft of them, not in feeding frenzy but in the first few minutes of watching, all it takes with wildlife is just to take the time and observe, and sure enough they soon become comfortable with us only a few feet away from the bank, M, of course, doing her, “Quack! Quack! Quack,” and yeah, give her an audience like that and she’s at it quacking, just can’t seem to help herself, but these ducks don’t pay her any mind because they’ve got sex on their minds, or at least the boys do, in the water and on the land, in the drakes’ POV it doesn’t seem to matter, but the conquest, the duck, that’s another matter, in water there is nothing pleasant, or seemingly so, about being bitten and held behind the neck so that your beak and head are held forcibly underwater while the drake mounts you as best he can, the times we see more successfully on the water (UNDER! for her, for one-two-three-four- .¤.¤. ten counts; She can’t even be seen!) than on land where perhaps because she is freer to move, the drake tumbles off before he finishes, a pratfall like Laurel & Hardy or Chaplin, and we’re laughing even as the drake does his victory laps, once, twice, circling his dazed conquest and that too reflects better on him in water where he’s more Speedboat Charlie than the Harpo Marx he is on land.
* So you want to live in Park Slope Dept., the defense heard from: Later on Friday, an off-off-off-off Broadway troupe delivered a absolutely winning rendition of Moliere’s “A Doctor in Spite of Himself,”steps away from The Boathouse Lake at the Prospect Park music pagoda, where a generation ago even hardened criminals dared to go. Check out this company; http://bit.ly/mj5oID you won’t be sorry.
Next: Running for Your Life: Summer Reading List
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