My brother T and my sister-in-law L are visiting from Canada (Sept. 29-Oct. 2). It’s been awhile since they’ve been in Brooklyn. Certainly more than a decade, but for busy-ness, this period of time has few parallels in life. Now, though, all our kids are grown, and needing us in different ways, so during our visit to Canada in the summer (See Running for Your Life: Canada!, posted July 28) T asked what weekend would work best for them to come visit in the fall, which turned out to be the one in brackets above, a week before my birthday (Oct. 5) when the tourist buzz at Brooklyn’s TKTS is down to a dull roar so that reasonably priced seats can be had for even high demand shows like “Billy Elliot” and “Anything Goes,” L is fine to go along with whatever during the weekend, enjoying everything in equal measure but she’s the one who picks Billy Elliot, so on Saturday morning T and I do the hunting and gathering, snagging a couple pair in the mezzanine, which for a dance extravaganza like BE was just the ticket, because it was an amazing show.
T and L left early Sunday afternoon (Oct. 2) before I had to get ready for work at the newspaper, each of us saying that we would make a plan to see each other again soon because we all had such a fabulous time, and that it wasn’t right to wait another twelve or so years.
Earlier that day, the four of us are walking through Prospect Park. M and L are ahead, and my brother and I are trailing on a path, the first time all weekend we are among more trees than people. I’m telling Ted that running on these trails is essential to my well-being, that, as well he knows, I am a country kid in the city and that without these woodland paths I wouldn’t be right. Especially during my birthday month, in fall, when the air cools and I begin to feel like a kid again.
“Yeah, like the Martins’ tree,” T says.
I look at T. We spent some time together as kids, of course. But our age difference, four years, in boyhood may as well been twenty. (At 56 and 52, not so much.) I think of him, and always will, as my little brother.
“The Martins’ tree? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“ Sure, you remember. Up through the end of our dead-end block . . .”
Suddenly, it comes back to me. Stone steps up a gully escarpment, as if it were a secret garden, emerges a great lawn, rimmed with many mammoth trees. Only the maple one in front of our house on our piddly dead-end street could match them. In my mind’s eye (could there anything more telling of our narcissistic age, the one shaped by invented spelling and texting stedda spelling bee and Hardy Boys reading, than the mangling of this common phrase, seen on Facebook the other day: My mind’s I?) a place where it was always sunny, a dozen boys running, playing tackle football, sheep’s home, and never, absolutely never, a Martin in sight.
“Yeah,” I say to T, excited. “I remember.”
“You’d sit up in the crux of one of those trees. It wasn’t so easy to get up there, but somehow you did. I’d come up and there you’d be.”
“Really? I don’t remember that at all.”
“Really? Will you did. So yeah, I can see why you’d have to have trees like this around.”
To write a memoir, a book of memories, is an impoverished thing. So telling in its poverty. I don’t know why it is that I don’t for the life of me recall the sitting in the tree overlooking the great lawn of the resident absent Lords, the Martins. We are, as this charming, infused with meaning, visit with T and L makes abundantly clear, the net result of memories – shared and otherwise – of the people we love and who love us. That those collected memories may just touch upon what it means to have a soul.
*
Well, it’s official. The confirmation arrived via mail on my birthday. I have a place in the 116th running of the Boston Marathon on April 16, 2012. Here we go again!
Next Running for Your Life: Pain Inc.
0 comments:
Post a Comment