Running for Your Life: December Shorts

No, I haven’t gone out in them yet. My December shorts. But it’s been close but no.

The main reason for that: I’m still struggling with a wonky knee. More on that later. Much later. As in, not in this post.

Has time sped up for everybody? Or is it just me? I literally cannot believe that today (Dec. 28) is, well, today, as in the fourth last day of 2015.

If you are looking for some holiday reading, here’s what I’ve liked in December: Shakespeare’s Dog by Leon Rooke, House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Beatlebone by Kevin Barry. I’m currently reading and, loving, the short detective novel Equal Danger by the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia.

Didn’t score big on the movie front this month. Saw Brooklyn and Spotlight. They weren’t Birdman. Made me think that I’d like to make a movie called Owen Sound. In fact, all hometowns should be made into movies. It would beat Netflix.

We have a radio. My wife, M, wanted one for Christmas. The only gift she asked for. I had a shortwave radio sitting unused on a basement shelf since we moved to our home in 1992. I bought it for $400 in 1986 and used it during my years at the Windsor Star newspaper where I worked as the assistant night editor for most of that time. The shortwave dial was shot, but one day in early December I picked it up, thinking that the FM and AM dials may work perfectly fine. It was worth a try, anyway. I took the radio up into the kitchen and plugged it in, pulled the antenna out to its maximum length, and sure enough it worked like a charm. When M came up from her home office, she found her Christmas present – and has been inordinately pleased with it through the following days of December. It was the only gift she received, one she says she will never forget.

Next: Running for Your Life: Resolution Rumblings

Running for Your Life: On the Road Again

Call it a broken record. But I’m on the shelf again.

I had been hoping to be back on the road again (as per the title here). That is going to have to wait.

Hmm, running for your life. Well, in theory, yes. I have every intention of getting back on the road again.

Biking for Your Life? Or Elliptical for Your Life? Tennis for Your Life?

Nah, they don’t cut it.

I’m convincing myself – and my friends in physical therapy – that my latest setback –  running up to 29 minutes before my cranky left knee swelled with inflammation, then following that with a few days of rest, only to re-injure same by a slow jog home from the gym – is just that. A setback. What’s required, as M and K have so rightly pointed out, is for me to just f—king stay off the knee – i.e. NOT run on it – for at least a month.

Which is what I’m doing. With gritted teeth and a snarl.

Truth is, I’m not showing my best side on the shelf. That, too, I pledge to do something about.

Next: Running for Your Life: December Shorts

Running for Your Life: Diary Food

Some time ago I was working on the subway, with my diary on my lap as is my practice, and a stranger on the train asked, while I was pausing, a pen at my lips, deep in thought, “Pardon me, sir,” in a whisper that I would charitably describe as exaggerated respect. “But are you a writer?”

Hmm, one wonders what my gentle intruder was getting at. That as an aspiring “writer” herself, she was hoping to make a casual, if not significant, connection with a more established “writer” in New York City, a place chock-a-block with “writers,” as in someone whose work she might know. Or someone simply hitting on me. Or  curious. A low-tempo busybody …

The truth is when I write in my diary on the subway I’m generally miles away from thinking of myself as a writer. It is not at all comparable to the example of running in the park, say, and a stranger hails me as I slow for a drink, or take a walking break, and asks, “Pardon me, sir. Are you a runner?”

Some truths are regarded to be self-evident. When it comes to my diary food, though, I don’t necessarily think of myself as “a writer.” It is, like my running, just what I do. I have no living clue whether it will EVER be part of what would be considering “my writing.” Snatches of it will end up as grist for stories, or a novel that I’m working on. This blog. I’ve a “running” title for something that will include drawings and captions of riders blankly immersed in social media … http://bit.ly/1P3tp5p (Don’t miss the forgoing here … You’ll get where I’m going with that.)

True to the blog title, I like to think of my diary time as part of a healthy diet. Breakfast. Diary Food. Lunch. Five-Mile Run. Dinner.

So how did I respond to the woman on the subway?  I am writing, yes. And then I put my head down and went back to work.   

Next: Running for Your Life: On the Road Again

Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday

Consider Hooker, the divine creation of one prodigiously talented Canadian scribe Leon Rooke (1934-), given life in the pages of his recklessly, wantonly creative novel, “Shakespeare’s Dog (1981). With the Trumps and Clintons and Sanders and Carsons vying for our attention in sound bites that would cause our literary hound of hounds to cringe, if only a baying Hooker were alive today. Or in the best of all possible worlds, go viral! Herein is a taste, with bard, and his love Anne Hathaway playing their parts. The named “Marr” is Hooker’s comely bitch ...

“She wasn’t class, my Marr. She knelled I had a soft spot for her, and how to work it up. It was her very commonness that yanked my dogger hard – to which Will would say, “I know what you mean, Hooker, for in these woods man and dog are one.” I liked her coarse features, her hair a russet stain deeper than fox yet not quite the same mud hue. Her stink. “Oh, there’s a firebox that burns our king of log as we burn to fill it up,” is what Will would say. Or quote me more aptly yet the print-brand he meant to put on his Hathaway, as earlier in a Shottery time she had put her witch on him:

‘Graze on my lips; and if those hills be dry,

Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.

. . . be my deer, since I am such a park;

No dog shall rouse thee, though a thousand bark.’”

Next: Running for Your Life: On the Road Again

Running for Your Life: All-Heart Division: Pascal Dupuis

Today (Dec. 9) is the first day in nine years that Pascal Dupuis will not be suiting up -- either in skates or in street clothes -- as a proud member of the Pittsburgh Penguins hockey team.

Dupuis, 36, a sufferer of deep vein thrombosis like myself, could no longer balance the risks taken in one of the most physical games with the likelihood of further serious injury. He will not play another game for Penguins. In my case, I steer away from contact sports because of the risks of internal bleeding. Dupuis, God bless him, skated full speed into the fray.

Until today. Dupuis wasn't a feared scoring threat like Sidney Crosby or Evgeni Malkin, or an all-world goalie like Marc-Andre Fleury. He wasn't all-world, he is all-heart. A man for all seasons, not just from October until June.

Next: Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday 

Running for Your Life: Guns, Guns, Guns

American hunter, bring’ em up the north side

Guns, guns, guns
Run, take the money, here’s a bullet for your boyfriend
Guns, guns, guns
Eagle all gone, and no more caribou
Guns, guns, guns
You be the red king, I'll be the yellow pawn ….

When I think of the title above, for sixty years of life – the first thirty-two in Canada – these lyrics from the Guess Who were first to come to mind. That all changed with the shocking events of San Bernardino.  My wife, Mary Morris, has done us all a profound service by saying what must be said – and helped me to the realization that we need more than the poetic resistance of rock ’n’ roll to foster real change.  Her comment, that I’m repeating in its entirety below, was posted on Facebook on Dec. 3. Since then, it has been “liked” by more than 400 people, drawn 51 comments, and sparked 39 shares. I couldn’t be prouder of Mary for speaking out in such an incredibly moving and powerful way.

“I need to say this. We are insane. You cannot go out and get married or drive a car in this country without a license, some delays, a learner's permit. Why can anyone walk into a store and walk out with an AK47? How can there not be background checks? You cannot marry ten women or have more than a certain number of DUI. It is against the law not to wear a seatbelt. Yet anyone can amass literally a stockpile of weapons intended only to kill and there's no database that red flags this and no law that impedes it. We look at the horrors all around the world and fail to fully realize that these same horrors are happening right here and that there are things that we can do to curtail them. Forgive this rant, but I find it unbearable. I am committing myself to doing something about this. Whether it is voting or donating or supporting the Everytown movement in any way I can. Because I can no longer be proud of being who I am in a country that does not stop people who are clearly mentally ill from destroying innocent people who happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Next: Running for Your Life: On the Road Again

Running for Your Life: December Beginnings

It's funny to think about but I came from Canada to live in the United States in December, almost thirty years ago. There are many things about the United States that is different than my home and native land, not the least of which is that the days between Thanksgiving (second Monday in October in Canada) is so blessedly close to Christmas (and Hanukkah for that matter) that I find them to be sister holidays -- one all about food and the other -- arguing what it's about.

Then there was this conversation that I overheard at PT today (Dec. 1). Believe me, this is 100% urban America ...

Young Person 1: After college, I started teaching high school.

Young Person 2: Where?

Young Person 1: In Bed-Stuy (a currently gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn). I taught there for five years. And then in Bushwick.

Young Person 2: My wife taught in Bushwick. What do you do now?

Young Person 1: I'm a nanny.

She gave the impression that she is much happier, makes more money, more time off ...

Imagine that happening in Canada? Leave a teacher's job, in say, Scarborough, and trade up to being a nanny ... The mind boggles.

Next: Running for Your Life: Diary Food