Running for Your Life: Hand to Leaf

So you want to live in Park Slope department: Overheard climbing the GAP hill in Prospect Park, bikers, training in their team gear, “I was biking in a small town . . . in the south of France when a older French woman stopped me …”

It’s been too long. Prime season and all. Leaf-catching season. I’d like to think it’s about opportunity that I haven’t caught a leaf in a few seasons now. For a variety of reasons I’ve been out running in late October and November less often than in past years, and maybe it’s just bad luck, these blustery days when leaves are falling, a week of such weather and fully twenty to thirty percent of the prime specimens, whirlings, corkscrew their way to the ground and inevitably I’m not there, dunno where, but not in the park; there was a time when I didn’t have to keep track, every hand-to-leaf season I’d catch cleanly – not trap with my body, and rules are clear – only park leaves, those in the public domain are eligible, at least one leaf would not feel the humiliation, the despoliation of hitting the ground, held aloft only by the catching hand, and tacked to the cork board that hangs above my basement writing desk.

It’s not the end of the season. I may yet get my leaf. It is harder to catch while running with Thurber, and that too, may be a factor. I dunno. Soon, though, I’ll get my next leaf. It’s been more than six weeks since Steamtown – and most of those nasty post-marathon aches and strains are ebbing. It’s fun. And a whole lot more satisfying than any running app could be.

           Next: Running for Your Life: Getting Ready for Winter

Running for Your Life: Upstate With Thurber

Among the many benefits of working for a full-on tabloid (headlines: ESTUPIDO GIGANTE; graphics that, no kidding, have depicted a teachers’ union president as a dominatrix with collars on two hedge fund bosses) is browsing the novel-discard table. Hard to imagine how writers get the attention they deserve when the conversation about literature in today’s society is as noteworthy as a house fly on a heap of putrefying garbage, all the more reason that when you find something fabulous it is notable not only for its fabulousness but for the very real thrill of reading something that pretty much nobody in New York City knows anything about, cue deep throb of human nature, akin to the smugness at the perceived underachievement of childhood friends, their sense of their failure to measure up to the apparent fullness of your life, at least as my current society (New York, New Yorker) gatekeepers would score it.

• A boy with a Superman hair curlicue, ’do parted on the side and short, a la Clark Kent, in a herringbone jacket too small for him, the whitest sneakers this side of a cancer ward and black skinny jeans, Dunkin’ Donuts paper bag on the subway floor, white cup with raised drink spout – DEEP into the opening pages of the Ayn Rand paperback, “Atlas Shrugged.”
• Ah, the pick-up book. It is The Voyage by Murray Bail http://bit.ly/HxXHPF by a London imprint Quercus: married up to a novel I’m reading before bed, Mating by Norman Rush, http://amzn.to/1hk12Sy, back in a novelist’s frame of mind, having finished the massive and without mercy, The Spanish Holocaust by Paul Preston http://nyti.ms/1gscY3j, during my months of marathon training, the subject as sober and as dark and as shocking as the title suggests.

Thurber and Mary and I went for a road trip to Poughkeepsie, Millbrook, Cold Spring and Peekskill in October. We didn’t run, Thurber and I. But for a brief time on a swath of the Appalachian Trail, Thurber did scale a rock and scrub pine outcropping and stood on the top for more than a beat, a view before him that had to be so awesome that it was worth it, all these years now, of walking him during our routine park strolls, to see him up there, free as a bird …

Next: Running for Your Life: Hand to Leaf