Sign in Hepworth, Ont., ten minutes drive from my parents’ year-round home at Sauble Beach, often voted as the province’s best beach, seven miles of brown sugar-pack sand, its texture ideal in summer for sculpture, our favorites on Friday, July 22, is Ella’s Mermaid with sea turtle neighbor and a smooth-skinned nude sand goddess torso done by a blond-haired, blue-eyed male sculptor in his early thirties, even feathered the ribs under her perky breasts, head slightly turned away, looking toward the entrance, a flirt, thinking a brown sexpot, say Brad SandPit, will arrive anytime now, and yes, it reminds of Winterbourne, a blonde beauty herself, but oh so real, and oh so long ago, who has chosen me, a boy three years her elder, the privilege of putting tanning lotion on her back and thighs, my homeboys watching as I slather the lotion on my hands then press them down on Winterbourne’s shapely back, moving up and around when suddenly she shrieks and darts out of my grasp like a fish, shouting, “L! What are you doing? That really hurts! . . . Let me see your hands.” Well, yes, they were full of sand, and her back where I’d massaged her is beet red from the coarse rub she’d suffered from the boy she’d no longer have anything to do with; our friend the sculptor, though, is much older than I was then, and by the looks of him, keen to reel in some lovin’ of his own, perhaps one of the Winterbourne-like girls who are standing around, chatting him up, struck by the sly wonder of the sand goddess, maybe, one asks, Will you do a sculpture of me? Yes, he says, I will. But please, first, come to my place, I’ll need to make a cast. That is what I did to make this one. It won’t take but a minute . . . “Save Our Jails,” the hand-written sign says. “Save Our Jails.”
Running for Your Life: A Summer Run With Thurb
So you want to live in Park Slope Dept.
The other day M and I, while writing and reading on a knoll in Prospect Park, are interrupted by some movement in a stand of trees. Whatever it is has caught the attention of a gaggle of people in ear buds with iPods, standing on a trail, the group of them wearing what looks like marathon bibs with No. 262 on them. A close look and I can see an athletic-looking woman is running this way and that in the bit of woodland, striking angular poses, at times like a bird at others almost simian, until she bolts away, and down the knoll past us, sprinting. After an awkward pause, the group carries on after her, doing their level best to keep up. *
The other day M and I, while writing and reading on a knoll in Prospect Park, are interrupted by some movement in a stand of trees. Whatever it is has caught the attention of a gaggle of people in ear buds with iPods, standing on a trail, the group of them wearing what looks like marathon bibs with No. 262 on them. A close look and I can see an athletic-looking woman is running this way and that in the bit of woodland, striking angular poses, at times like a bird at others almost simian, until she bolts away, and down the knoll past us, sprinting. After an awkward pause, the group carries on after her, doing their level best to keep up. *
Running for Your Life: My People, Part Two
A woman (summer visitor?) in Windsor Terrace, a stone’s throw from the borough-famous Farrell’s Bar (and critical supporter of the original urban field of dreams, Holy Name ballfield) says to me as I run past, forty-five minutes into my Green-Wood Cemetery-plus training run:
“You look like you are ready for a marathon.”
Speechless, I smile in response.
“You look like you are ready for a marathon.”
Speechless, I smile in response.
Running for Your Life: My People, Part One
So You Want to Live in Park Slope Dept.
Blackboard sign at our go-to patisserie:
“Do you like granola? Then you’ll love our new granola scone!”
In early June (six weeks ago), on the first day of our staycation (R4YrLife: Finding the Groove), M and I go to Dixon’s Bicycle Shop. I can’t say for sure, but Dixon’s has the look of a place that hasn’t changed too much since it opened (vintage signage: Est. 1966). M and I are planning to go on a bike ride sometime during our staycay, so we stop in to buy one for me. The last one – purchased a decade ago at Dixon’s – had been stolen in the past year. A rental outfit wanted a third of the price for a new one for a single day, so Dixon’s it is. M says she has an errand or two of her own and says she will meet me later.
Blackboard sign at our go-to patisserie:
“Do you like granola? Then you’ll love our new granola scone!”
In early June (six weeks ago), on the first day of our staycation (R4YrLife: Finding the Groove), M and I go to Dixon’s Bicycle Shop. I can’t say for sure, but Dixon’s has the look of a place that hasn’t changed too much since it opened (vintage signage: Est. 1966). M and I are planning to go on a bike ride sometime during our staycay, so we stop in to buy one for me. The last one – purchased a decade ago at Dixon’s – had been stolen in the past year. A rental outfit wanted a third of the price for a new one for a single day, so Dixon’s it is. M says she has an errand or two of her own and says she will meet me later.
Running for Your Life: Smoking Over Rules
So you want to live in Park Slope Dept.:
Late one weekday morning a woman in the front yard of her near-abandoned house is struggling to keep her balance as she picks berry-like fruit from a junk tree (stink weed?) that obscures her neglected brownstone, and eats them whole one after the other.
It is hard to think of anything good that comes of tobacco. The smoking of it, that is. What seems a hundred years ago, the highest-paying summer job in my neck of the woods was tobacco-picking. Fields and fields of it, in southern Ontario, http://bit.ly/lz9jy4, the heart of the elephant, Delhi and Tillsonburg, and it was hard work, big burly farm kids preferred at the hiring halls, my tiny frame, at eighteen I’m five-eight, one-thirty, reedy as a cornstalk so I didn’t even try, but still, as a young man couldn’t imagine a life without the tobacco fields, the sail-shape leaves waving in the summer breeze, acres and acres of them.
Late one weekday morning a woman in the front yard of her near-abandoned house is struggling to keep her balance as she picks berry-like fruit from a junk tree (stink weed?) that obscures her neglected brownstone, and eats them whole one after the other.
It is hard to think of anything good that comes of tobacco. The smoking of it, that is. What seems a hundred years ago, the highest-paying summer job in my neck of the woods was tobacco-picking. Fields and fields of it, in southern Ontario, http://bit.ly/lz9jy4, the heart of the elephant, Delhi and Tillsonburg, and it was hard work, big burly farm kids preferred at the hiring halls, my tiny frame, at eighteen I’m five-eight, one-thirty, reedy as a cornstalk so I didn’t even try, but still, as a young man couldn’t imagine a life without the tobacco fields, the sail-shape leaves waving in the summer breeze, acres and acres of them.
Running for Your Life: Holidays and Hamstrings
From my perch at the gym, the manager’s lookout when this place was a bank, I can see the lobby television which today (July 5) is playing a video loop of baseball highlights. With hockey over, a part of my brain, like metal filings slowing shaping around a magnetic gnat, attaches to my distant second sport, baseball, and in July the lobby TV favors ESPN and baseball highlights.
I’d far prefer vignettes of games, say, the play-by-play of the Chicago Cubs and the Chicago White Sox, an interleague game, like I watched while training an hour-plus on the Brown Deer Holiday Express treadmill while M and I were in Wisconsin during the holiday(s) weekend (Canada Day & Independence Day) to see Mom and Baby Leon, our new great nephew, two teams mired in the middle of the standings with little at stake but following muscle memory, playing the game they have since childhood been better than anyone else in the neighborhood, and now, all of them, champions of the sport.
I’d far prefer vignettes of games, say, the play-by-play of the Chicago Cubs and the Chicago White Sox, an interleague game, like I watched while training an hour-plus on the Brown Deer Holiday Express treadmill while M and I were in Wisconsin during the holiday(s) weekend (Canada Day & Independence Day) to see Mom and Baby Leon, our new great nephew, two teams mired in the middle of the standings with little at stake but following muscle memory, playing the game they have since childhood been better than anyone else in the neighborhood, and now, all of them, champions of the sport.
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