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

From the master of the acerbic putdown, Evelyn Waugh, (1903-1966), best known as the author of “Brideshead Revisited,” whose work critic V.S. Pritchett remarked will delight long past his death for those who honor “the beauty of his malice,” words to borrow when you’ve been invited to something that, well, you just don’t want to attend:

“YOUR NAME HERE deeply regrets that he (she) is unable to do what is so kindly proposed.”

If only Evelyn Waugh were here to deliver on how best to skewer Donald Trump – and keep him skewered. Sigh. This from humorist Nancy Mitford: “What nobody remembers about Evelyn is that everything with him was jokes. Everything.”

Next: Running for Your Life: Stick-to-it-ness

Running for Your Life: Baseball, Hockey and a Birthday

There are more than a few reasons behind my October-love. It’s when baseball suddenly becomes real, like a favorite uncle who eleven months of the year is on the road, but every October he returns, refreshed with new and wildly entertaining stories to tell. I’m a Pirates fan (by default after my beloved Expos folded) so tonight (Oct. 7) is the night, which will be no horrendous loss if they fall to the Cubs, because, for God’s sake, they’re the Cubs! How can you not root for the Cubs in part of your heart – or your gut – for all those following the latest developments in the world of superorganisms http://bit.ly/1LiEgYL. This is a dated article from Michael Pollan but you get the drift …

Today also marks the opening of hockey season. In past years that delightful event has occurred on my birthday (Oct. 5), but no matter. It’s my birthday week, a Wednesday, and the Rangers are playing the ’Hawks. If only my Penguins were on against the ’Hawks, then it would make for a Pittsburgh-Chitown double-header. In any event, drop the puck. Let’s get it on!

Oh yeah, the birthday thing. Sixty. My seventh decade. On Nov. 15 I will be running in the Brooklyn Marathon, my first shot at qualifying for Boston in the 60-64 age group. I’d be in range to qualify under ideal weather conditions: 45 degrees F with a 20-mile-an-hour swirling wind that miraculously is always at my back.

I know this blog can at times sound eye-rollingly upbeat. So, cynics, pass by. This decade promises to be the best yet! Hope the same is true for you, dear reader. I know I believe it, and there is power in that.

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

Running for Your Life: Marathons and War

Not so long ago I wrote about Tony Judt (1948-2010) who coined the phrase the crappy generation, whose members “grew up in the 1960s in Western Europe or in America, in a world of no hard choices, either economic nor political.”

I had Judt in mind when I was talking to my friend J last month over cocktails. When J and I get together for Hendricks martinis and dinner on the side, we often talk about running.

One thought I had during out last session was that as a member of the crappy generation I had no mass, or national, war to occupy my body and mind. So, as a way to compensate for this deficiency (after all, we are talking “crappy” here), I run marathons.

How are marathons like wars? As a group, we marathoners struggle and suffer through months of basic training to bring ourselves up to the standards of road “combat,” which is running continually for 26.2 miles. Out there on the course, we urge each other forward, like mates in the trenches. We understand, as best we can, the common enemy (especially at mile sixteen or mile twenty when we are convinced that we have nothing left.) Along the course, the civilians cheer as if to the soldiers on march to harbor and their troop ships, saying reassuring war-years-like things: “Looking great!” “We’re proud of you!” “You’re all so amazing!”

At the end of race, we have a memory and a medal to show to those at home. And, after our marathoning days are over, we put the medal in a drawer for safekeeping. When we take it out we will handle it carefully and memories of our own sacrifice and those who shared it will come flooding back.

There will be no marathon cenotaphs, no memorials built for the nameless marathoner. It is, I’m sure you agree, better that way.

Next: Running for Your Life: Baseball, Hockey and a Birthday!

    

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

Tom Thomson (1877-1917) grew up breathing the air of southern Georgian Bay as I did a half-century later. In Canada, Thomson is known as the Great Outdoor painter who got away, the northern magus, the promise of a singular vision at a time when the nation itself hadn’t fully formed. His sudden, mysterious death by drowning occurred as the Great War was raging in Europe, when Canada was earning its stripes as an independent country, removed from England and distinct from the United States in the increasingly modern world.

This founding artistic father of Canada has always been a kind of spiritual brother to me … So, in some respects, this great is always with me. Here’s a sample meditation:

"It’s not like we have many letters from Tom Thomson. Not like Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) a generation before, a loner of an entirely different type, Vincent, whose shouts and sighs and embitterments seem mixed in the thick paint itself and is why I can stand before the paintings of his later years, or the other that started the thrall, “The Potato Eaters,” and if I’m still enough I can shut out the phone-snappers and loud, hard-of-hearing visitors, the ghouls who step right in front of me.

With Tom, you have to fill in the blanks. His paintings, say “West Wind” or “Jack Pine,” don’t shout or even mutter. They are like the place of his birth, Owen Sound, and the bush beyond, the bird-wing and tree-crack, the crunch of dry, hard leaves underfoot – and when Tom could he’d seek out the muddy shores and hear the sound of the loose suck with each step of his bone-dry hunting boots, think of the men at war.

Even in the trenches of Passchendaele, the Canadians don’t shout or mutter or cry of their lot. Tom didn’t go to war and at no point in his few letters and cards home and to friends does he say why. The papers, of course, wrote of nothing else. With photos too. So when he sought out the mud it was to pay homage to his fellow Canadians, those who didn’t rule men but felt the pull of the factory, the farm, the mine and, for Tom, the fishing hole. When he paints the browns, dull grays when the scene demanded something brighter, blame the war. What drove him even deeper into himself, brought a darkness to light."

Next: Running for Your Life: Marathons and War

Running for Your Life: Nobel Peace Prize Candidate Couple That You Should Know About

Their names are Christopher and Regina Catrambone, two thirtysomethings who live in Malta, who founded the dark niche of all niches in today’s grave new world: a war-zone insurance company, Tangiers International, that provides kidnapping, terrorism and death and injury coverage to journalists and military contractors.

They also have been in the forefront – before the headlines of the past several months – of a consciousness-raising high-energy civilian approach to the migrants-at-sea crisis in the Mediterranean.

You might miss their story. I would have, if not for a random reading of Outside magazine. Typically, the magazine is not for me. Too much about mountain climbing, extreme sports, pricey and wonky gadgets that, if anyone has read even a shred of this blog will know I don’t cotton to the high falutin when it comes to exercise or fitness.

Occasionally, though, Outside will surprise you. With articles like this one by Joshua Hammer, whose “The Bad-Ass Librarians to Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts,” will be published by Simon and Schuster next April. See this link: http://bit.ly/1FDwnwt.

Chris, of Louisiana, and Regina, of Italy, might not have everyday routines like you and me. They live millionaire lives on an island in the Mediterranean. But they couldn’t stand by and watch as the crisis worsened in those waters. The Catrambones should be considered for the Nobel Peace Prize because they answered the call, the one we all feel when we see the pictures on television and ask how in the world can we ever get ahead of this crisis, or even make a little bit of a difference. I mean it’s all in the article, including their self-financed 131-foot rescue vessel MV Phoenix, but here, to me, is the moment of truth. From whence Nobel Peace Prizes are born:

One day near Lampedusa, an Italian island south of Malta that has become a  purgatory for tens of thousands of migrants, Regina was sunning on the top deck  [of their yacht] when she noticed a winter jacket bobbing in the water. The Catrambones asked their captain, Marco Cauchi, a search and rescue commander moonlighting from the Armed Forces of Malta, about the incongruous piece of clothing. It was, he replied, almost certainly the jacket of a refugee. Cauchi told them how, during one military rescue, he’d watched a migrant sink beneath the waves a few feet from him. “There were 29 people on this boat that capsized, and most could not swim,” he told them. “I saw those big eyes open, and I saw him go down so fast. I couldn’t reach him. It stayed with me always.”

 As Hammer tells the story, the Catrambones refused to look back. They jumped on board and since that day in July 2013 have worked to save thousands upon thousands of these desperate souls. These are the kinds of actions that should be more widely known. A Nobel Peace Prize, an evening’s visit with Stephen Colbert. Couldn’t we just dream of a world in which “Keeping Up With the Catrambones” was must-watch television?

Next: Running for Your Life: Marathons and War