So You Want to Live in Park Slope Dept.
Today (Aug. 3) I am interrupted on my final kick of a 7-miler, forced to stop at an intersection in Central Slope. In 85-degree heat a man in a heavy orange vest (sensible shoes, shorts and sandals) is walking ahead of a young woman pushing a cart full of food from the Park Slope Food Co-op http://bit.ly/rfTUOX, both of them blocking a turning Crate & Barrel delivery truck, the target of disapproving glares from some patrons at the outdoor seating area of Connecticut Muffin.
Running for Your Life: Dog Day Delights
“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.”
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.”
Running for Your Life: Canada!
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.
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