The day before The Rapture (May 21) M dreams about being taken. She is invited into a church and she wakes before making up her mind about whether to go or stick around in hell with me.
It’s Sunday (May 22) and M is still with me. We survived The Rapture, although I’m not entirely convinced. Seems to me it’s like the end of hockey season. It’s not that hockey doesn’t exist, it’s just that there are no games. In other words, maybe we weren’t paying attention. And in Brooklyn and Manhattan, where I’ve been now pretty much 24-7 since Morocco in October, the chances of people who I regularly socialize and work with being candidates for The Rapture are pretty slim. I can’t miss the End of the World, if that happens. On Friday, October 21. A hockey night!
We’re at Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, milling about mobile food trucks. There are hundreds of people who come and we are hungry after buying our farmers’ market food, funny how now with two marathons behind me since early last year, and in that time I’ve changed, what food and drink I crave, no simple thing really but for thirty-plus years I was a recreational runner who had attempted three marathons in my late twenties and early thirties, finished one, at a post four-hour time, a drinker, on non-workdays multiple beers a day, always a beer reward after a run, hamburgers, French fries, fast food of all types – Wendy’s, Taco Bell, Subway, McDonald’s and Burger King. Now I will eat the occasional Wendy’s burger and like their French roast coffee, but in the past year my taste buds pop for what we select in the farmers’ market; today (May 22) apple cider, hand-rolled pasta, fettucine and orzo, sweets made by a Brooklyn chocolate maker, tuna and skate off boats in Long Island, kale and strawberries, boxes of them, there is nothing as heavenly as strawberries in season, is there?, a three-set of organic nuts, asparagus too because in May in New York City the farmers’ markets roll with swords of asparagus that M prepares just so with a mustard-lemon sauce, and with strawberries for dessert is earthbound Rapture, so if are going to start our descent to the End of the World (Oct. 21, don’t forget!) let it be with the third week May taste of yellow-sauce asparagus, Primavera-inflected orzo with skate in a puttanesca, Provence rose, not overly chilled, with a chunk of baguette.
Why, if the faithful calibrated wrongly and the world will not end in October, sixteen days after my fifty-sixth birthday, then I seriously think that the way I eat and drink now, not overdrinking, even Diet Cokes I’ve given them up, now I mix seltzer with my apple cider. I’m stumped as to why, except to say that I guess I listen to my body, this body that since last winter I’ve taken on a different route, an athlete’s path, if you will. And now, especially after my hamstring muscle tear in March that forced me out of the Boston Marathon, the athlete mind has taken over. I need to run, yes, but I also need to train, to build up my strength and endurance so that I can run not just once around Prospect Park, but twice, three times and the muscles are stretched and strengthened so even that March tear isn’t bothering me. With my hamstring fully healed, I want to keep it that way. But I don’t work at it exactly. It just is. My life, the new normal in running for my life, for the next thirty-five years, which begins this year, my fifty-sixth.
I’m certain, feel that there is no reason that failing being run over by a bus, or losing my job and thus am not able to afford this healthy eating and drinking lifestyle then I will be still running, out there legging it out, not at a 8:30 pace as I do now, but I’m thinking 10, or even 10:30, that would be okay, to be in my ninety-first year and running, still seeing in mid-May the gorgeous blooms in the park: this year because of the plentiful rain, absolutely otherworldly, the flowers of the dogwoods, the blooming chestnuts in the grove were we placed the ashes of my beloved father-in-law Sol, who lived until he was one hundred and two and was a tower of strength until the very end.
“Stand clear of the closing doors . . .”
Memo to self: How do you bring the death-edge spirit of the nineteenth-century whaleman to the everyday pension-tuned life of the MTV subway conductor survivor?
If adventure = quality of life, how does the conductor do it? If our work is our life, what we bring home every day, how does that fill the contours of our dreams, the empty, flat sound of that announcement, “Stand clear of the closing doors.”
It’s not the recorded one, the man’s voice, lively, friendly, when he gets to the “please” of his “Stand clear of the closing doors, please,” it lifts us passengers a wee bit, or perhaps more important doesn’t deepen our frowns, which is something, Mr. Conductor, not a walk on a whale’s back, a harpoon slung into a leviathan the size of a small skyscraper with a prodigious memory, so best to make that harpoon count, or consider the middle ground, say, the ten-passenger ferry with captain in Basque Country, across the ancient harbor of Pasai San Pedro, Spain, a two-minute trip for locals and visitors alike, sixty cents one-way, or maybe it’s seventy now, it’s been a couple years since I’ve been on that little boat. Can we see adventure in the uniqueness of our vision .¤.¤.? The way we bring it, even in the announcement, “Stand clear of the closing doors, please?”
Next: Running for Your Life: Finding the groove
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