Running for Your Life: Running And Poems

I never know what will come to me when I run. How it will come. The “it” I’m referring to are ideas, often so fleeting that I don’t hold onto them.

Often, not so much ideas as images. Daydreams. Sometimes it’s a memory, perhaps a memoir morsel that, later, I write down in a journal. Sometimes a phrase, something about a movie that I saw a week ago, a month ago.

I have to get down these ideas, images, sensations. Sometimes just a quick sketch, dash a few lines. No, not the computer, or the laptop. Just pen and paper. (studies show a third of smartphone users go online before getting out of bed in the morning; that brains of Internet addicts scan a lot like brains of alcoholics; that the average teen processes 123 texts a day) and yes, if I had time that wasn’t circumscribed by salary work I’d take these ideas and writing fragments and devote hours to the construction of stories, memoirs, novels, plays and poems.

I think, though, if there is a single literary expression that best approximates running for me it is poems. Running is poems. What is an attempt at the universal, the precision of life and language. Close, close again. And beautiful. Small and large and perfect. And simple.

Can’t wait to try to reach that perfection again.

Next: Running for Your Life: “Wish You Were Here”

Running for Your Life: Hot Is In Your Head

I didn’t run for long today (Monday, July 2). Forty minutes – at my eight-minute mile lumber that’s five miles, which is what I did on Saturday (June 30) north of Milwaukee, Holiday Inn Express, Brown Deer, Wis., while visiting M’s mom, R, who turned 99 and a half on the weekend (when you get as close as R to 100 years old, you could the year in portions – only six months to go).

It was hot in Wisconsin. And hot in Brooklyn. In the 90s. Humid on Saturday, so I ran on the Holiday Inn Express treadmill. But a light summer breeze arose late Monday morning, so I chose an outdoor route.

When you’re fit enough you know how much you can do in the heat. When I threw open the kitchen window and felt the breeze, my mind was made up. I’d run in the park. The breezes in the shade of the trees would amplify the cool relief. Rather than run in the direct sunlight I’d run the woodland paths, connect the dots from shade to shade to shade.

Because here, in the “Summer Breeze” http://bit.ly/u8qAw of that Seals and Croft standard, hot is in your head. Your heart might be working a little harder, but, if you pay attention, the rewards are manifest. After two days of heavy humidity, the birds and squirrels are out in force. The treetops alive with sound and movement.

On this day I see a wee downy woodpecker on the forest floor and heard but didn’t see a songbird that was new to me, just missing as it darted higher into the trees.

In Wisconsin at dusk Sunday, from a picnic table in Brown Deer Park, M had told me of a blue heron she inadvertently startled into flight, and what she thought must be scarlet tanagers.

M and I are under the first full moon since being romanced by the one rising above us at Notre Dame de Paris and that night – Sunday – we are apart, and now today (Monday) after the run in the heat, where because of the breeze it didn’t feel like anything at all, just a light sheen of sweat, I think that M will be home tonight after saying goodbye for now to her mom, and we will be under a full moon once more.

Next: Running And Poems

Running for Your Life: Keeping It Real

Consider the letdown over. Paris – despite the picture at right, the moonrise over Notre Dame – is no longer at my fingertips. In some respects, it’s been hard to be back home. The working life, the lack of open endedness of our days.

It’s summer and although my mind is a beginner’s one, one that seeks flow and as M and I have declared, “The Summer of Stories,” the excitement and possibilities that come from creation, from new work, I’ve also returned to responsibilities: salary work, finances, family obligations, etc.

On running, I’m often asked, how do you keep it up? How do you keep it interesting? I can understand it with team sports, like soccer or softball, even individual sports like tennis, but how do you pick yourself up and got out for a serious run as often as you do?

“Rock of Ages,” starring Tom Cruise as Stacee Jaxx, is a musical-farce, rock-concert of a thing (think Tower Records as Celluloid Cathedral). At its heart rock god Stacee Jaxx seduces/confides in a Rolling Stone writer that he is on a never-ending quest for the perfect song: rock ’n’ roll secular salvation.

In my case, I run. And some runs, some races feel near-perfect. But I’m not there. It’s like some reverse Doomsday Clock. Joyce has Bloomsday: a near-perfect fiction that is immortal, a work to plumb and plumb some more.

Running has some of that for me. Runes-Day. A kind of magic charm.

I say reverse Doomsday Clock because it turns the How It Ends http://bit.ly/MC5nP0 thesis on its head. That during a run, or while inside a Joyce sentence, the concept of end, for a moment, in a burst of ecstasy, ceases to exist.

It is, as I used to say among friends in high school, about keeping it real. When we – all of us – still believed that we could not only have dreams but we could live them too.

Next: Running for Your Life: Hot Is In Your Head

Running for Your Life: More Why Paris

Written in the spirit of Joe Brainard’s “I Remember”:

• Because the line about armed soldiers clearing passersby at Parc Beaubourg for no apparent reason, “Making the world safe to wear six-inch heels,” tickles M

• Because the views from the top floor of the Pompidou museum are more varied and historically evocative than anywhere else I can imagine

• Because the Pompidou offers free admission to card-carrying journalists (me!) and not to writers/college professors (M!)

• Because despite that, M loved every minute of our visit to the Pompidou

• Because the view we saw that night (June 13) in the Gerhard Richter show occurred after a sudden thunderstorm – with Saint-Exupery-esque clouds scudding across the sky. It was still light at 9:30 at night

• Because my left pant leg was soaking wet from the downpour, still-bothersome during the Matisse but magically dry during the dazzling Richter which hardly anyone was attending

• Because I stood before Richter’s “Funeral” for more than a beat before we left

• Because M speaks French not only well but with impeccable manners

• Because now I don’t have to feel guilty about not having seen The Best Picture “The Artist.” (I’ve seen enough Jack Russell-owning Frenchmen to more than satisfy)

• Because the wine seller, who sold us a delicious boutique pinot noir, remembered me fondly from the day that I lost (then found!) the apartment key during our very nearly ruined stay in the Marais last October

• Because the line, “We’ll always have Paris,” doesn’t seem corny to me

• Because the first excerpt I read of Paul Auster’s “Winter Journal” memoir was of his taxi driver encounter in Paris

• Because I can sit on the New York City subway and dream of Paris. Every day if I want to . . .

Next: Running for Your Life: Keeping It Real

Why Paris?

So you want to live in Park Slope Department
(Overheard while on a Prospect Park six-miler)

“I don’t even know if he is a guy.”


Why Paris?

It isn’t for the runners, all seemingly well to do and oh so many Americans contentedly running along the hushed-stone main paths of Parc Monceau.

Or the cobbled walkway along the Seine, which is both uneven and yields too many dead-ends into tunnels chock-a-block with cars, always bumper to bumper (at least in the one in which I ran for about a kilometer – not so smartly along a narrow ledge for emergencies, which cars zoomed past with zero regard to my foolish presence).

Or the rare bike lanes.

Or in certain arrondissement sidewalks where you’re just as likely to see a scooter as a person, driven by not just messengers and delivery folks as one finds in New York City but by all manner of men and women professionals in helmets, fast-moving burners who like New Yorkers seemed so much in a hurry but unlike New Yorkers unconditioned to seeing runners as they zip around the myriad blind corners of the old city.

Or for the prospects of running along the Canal Saint Martin, an inner city waterway that one would think would draw evening joggers, even more so to the north, the Canal de l’Ourcq, with its hushed-stone surfaces that make for pick-up bocce games. Not so much. At the northern end of Canal Saint Martin in June 2012 the Sally Ann deliver services to the down and out, all men, hungry-looking with pinched Orwellian faces, thirty clochards per evening runner.

Or for the tourists that clog up the Seine sidewalks at twilight, folks grabbing a postcard souvenir or a Tour Eiffel magnet for a 2 euro piece, and then back on the bus.

If I didn’t run in Paris I’d discover none of this. I’d be in Prospect Park. Or at the entrance to Green-Wood Cemetery, listening to the squawk of the Quaker parrots. Paris is a place where running feels as unique as it did when I first started thirty-plus years ago. That is, except in Parc Monceau. Where if you care to run in USA-like 2012, be my guest.

Next: Running for Your Life: More Why Paris?