“When did it turn?” I’m talking to my friend D at the annual memorial barbecue for the great and underappreciated cartoonist/filmmaker and my very great friend, Mickey Siporin http://bit.ly/qG4Fp4, now in his early 70s, he knew Mick when they were art student freshman college roommates in Carbondale, Ill. D grew up in The Village, in the heyday of The Cedar Tavern, Frank O’Hara’s “Second Avenue,” Jackson Pollack, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg. If aspiring novelist Gil Pender (Midnight in Paris) saw Paris in the Twenties as his ideal place and time for artistic imagination, then The Village in the Fifties and early Sixties works for me. D was in his twenties then.
So I ask him, “When did it turn?”
“When I saw my first bottle of economy-size Coke,” D says.
“Wow!” I say, ‘that’s –”
“You’re a writer. Feel free to use that.”
*
Today, it’s August. Six weeks from Boston registration day. Then I’m on the clock. The slow climb toward the marathon.
Funny, this blog began with many surfaces: as a lifestyle diary, a writerly echo of the purely physical, a twice-weekly recitation of the inner life of a runner, a reader and a writer. In part, what Haruki Murakami did in “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running,” which of course is a nod to Ray Carver’s “What I Talk About When I Talk About Love.” How in my case there is but a thin membrane’s difference between the three practices. And for the past many months, riding. Because that is when I do the writing on this blog. On the subway, on my way to work. Because in the morning, I write other things. To see exactly what, please check out http://bit.ly/p60UFV.
Favorite Dog Day Runs:
1. Sauble Beach, 2 miler: I joined with K – she of the Pittsburgh Marathon touch on the right panel – for a run along the hard-pack sands of my home and native land (See Run4YrLife: Canada!). We didn’t have much time and both of us were as keen for a jump in the refreshing, shallow waters of the multi-sandbar, perennial best beach in the province of Ontario, K, usually not one to race into the surf and dive in does so upon my dare after our two-miler, while I watch as she swims as hard as she was running, this time toward her mother who is swimming on Sandbar Four, barely visible on the horizon.
2. Fire Island, NY, 6 miler-plus: To The Lighthouse and beyond. From Sandpaper Lane in Dunewood, in August, this wide sidewalk to Fair Harbor is chock-a-block with children in bikes, men pulling red wagons laden with beer and barbecue fixings, Enfamil; tweenie girls flirting with boys, thinking Justin Bieber; clusters of oldsters, talking. But a half-mile along and past the long straightaway en route to Kismet, the crowds thin, a stray cyclist pushing a fat-tire relic through hot, blazing sand, the footing is tough on the ankles, but ahead is The Lighthouse, and even in the heat, under the searing sun, The Lighthouse beckons and beyond to the dune walkway where seagulls wheel and so graze the deer, seen as pests out here, beware the ticks, lock up your garbage for they are everywhere but nowhere running as I do, along the pathways at the state beach, named after Robert Moses, who is at least responsible for a small but elegant green space with public fountain, Joseph Mayrose Park (1.34 acres), with an entrance off Sixth Avenue in Brooklyn, taking shape above the Prospect Expressway, which made it possible for people living in close quarters in the sweltering city to consider buying further out on Long Island, and commuting to the city, instantly revving up the noise factor, which I don’t think about in the quiet of Fire Island. I go for a mile or more along the Atlantic shore before I turn around and head for home, out an hour-plus, then a jump in the ocean before beer and barbecue.
3. Millbrook, NY, 6 miler: Timothy Leary’s band of merry folk holed up here, a place of gentle rolling hills, a Saturday’s farmers market, no country for ocean swimmers, or lake swimmers, for that matter, rather for porch swings and old Victorian houses, and a run along a river gorge into woodlands, aka gunshot alley during hunting season, a backroad that says Woodstock (or maybe it was Kingston, two places along the Hudson Valley that I frequently confuse.)
4. Rensselaerville, NY, 2 miler: Now that’s a mouthful. From the historic Willow Glen, all the roads are uphill, am thinking Tarahumara Indians and the book, “Born to Run,” as I scale them and wish to God that I was in better shape, these Catskill hills will test you. So better to start at the town pond, off Pond Hill Road, where a trail around the swimming hole is alive with the trill of birds and, in this part of the world, scampering deer, on this run (July 29) I can see the white of its tail bobbing ahead of me, as I put on my final kick toward the grass of a bathers’ slope, just as the rain begins to fall.
Next: Running for Your Life: Summer Reading, Part II
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