Running for Your Life: By Your Leaf

This tree thing is getting to be something of an obsession.

It started, I suppose, or you could make the case, when I began catching leaves in the park.

Well, one leaf at a time.

There are rules as careful readers of this blog will know. (How many readers there may be I can only guess. Given the exciting spare-time choices people now have [Yes! virtual porn and 4G video games], I would think the total number of those readers could fit comfortably in a New York City subway car.)

Leaf-catching rules are as follows:

During a run inside Prospect Park, Brooklyn, I make a valiant effort to catch a falling leaf from a tree.

It must:

Not hit the ground,

Nor be trapped against my body. But caught like that childhood fly ball with your bare hand.

It’s been awhile since I’ve caught a leaf in the park. I’d say four or five years. Some of that has to do with a slowdown in training. Last marathon: 2014; last half-marathon: 2017. I’ve just been running in the park less frequently than I was when I started this blog almost eight years ago.

But I’ve no less of a passion for the pursuit. And by extension, for the trees themselves.

In Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “Autumn,” he writes about the first Daguerrotypes, in which the primitive quality made it impossible for human figures, no matter how still they attempted to be, to appear beyond some fuzzy, nondescript entities, while trees, especially those at a distance, are elegant and immaculate by comparison.

And, as I wrote in this space, some weeks ago:

Love trees, like dogs; human beings need a lot of work.

Next: Running for Your Life: Radio to Finocchio

Running for Your Life: Doubt as Starter

Am riding the N Train, going local, on a Sunday (Nov. 12) and making notes.

When I arrived at the station on the R Train, the more convenient D Train was on the express track, doors open. We R passengers made a bee line for the doors, which closed before anyone could get in. Then the D pulled out, which is why I’m on my second choice: the slow-moving N.

How hard is it to look and see, to accept, without judgment? For without that state of mind, doesn’t creativity founder?  

What is doubt in art but the starter, what you build from the ground up, you know, like in sourdough bread-making.

In art, your particular brand of doubt creates something fresh and new, removed from the unoriginal, the creative equivalent to the subway ad campaign for an entrepreneur service that in one ad chastises those who take a simple career path, noting disdainfully that it’s called a path because someone else has blazed it, meaning by that very nature the path is unoriginal and therefore not worthy of the best among us.

Precept: Original and new is good; unoriginal and old is bad.

A second ad by the entrepreneur gurus says: “Nobody ever said: ‘Just think about it.”

Except, of course, philosopher kings and queens … After all, thinking is the one thing that, at least theoretically, we humans do better than other animals. We apparently think; it is other animals that “do,” who, in fact, are the masters of doing.

Next: Running for Your Life: By Your Leaf  

Running for Your Life: Cassandra, Curmudgeon Conundrum

Often I appear to find myself on the opposite side of the cultural divide: especially when it comes to the apparent intrusion, by my lights, of personal technology.

Thus the latest Run4YrLife idea: the Cassandra, curmudgeon conundrum.

Rather than pigeon-hole myself as a grousing grinch when it comes to cellphone addiction (Oops, there I go again …) I’m making an effort here to be more sensitive to the positive aspects of personal technology as it affects our lives.

Consider the education of our children.

Thursday (Nov. 9), while running in Prospect Park, I saw a small class of grade-school children, using a nifty green-fringed tablet to take photos – and do research while milling about on a bridge over a watercourse. I imagine them using software to identify trees and shrubs, minerals, even ducks and geese.

Perfectly benign, right?

Meanwhile, Silicon Valley poobahs like Mark Zuckerberg see a gap to fill. I’d like to think that had to do with adding employees, improving the educated “stock” in math and sciences. After all, private tech companies are seeking to take a more active role in educating our children. Wow. Imagine the poobahs thinking as the most righteous do, ie, What is more life-fulfilling than to do the selfless work of educating our children and improving their quality of life – and not insignificantly – potentially unifying our fractious society through a politics-free push to create good jobs for all people?

In other words, doing what public schools used to be equipped and funded to do. What underpaid teachers continue to be renowned for.

Could it be remotely possible that we could be seduced to think that the idea of tablets being toted around the park, children staring into them, seeing the world mediated by a screen is not connected to the goals of the likes of Mark Zuckerberg.

Alas, I fear (CURMUDGEON ALERT!) this is not about educating our kids.

It’s what John Reed says in the movie “Reds” when asked about the origin of another BIG IDEA, World War I.

“Profits,” he says.

 Next: Running for Your Life: By Your Leaf  

Running for Your Life: Gowanus Sharp Shooters !

Time was not so long ago that Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood was young Al Capone’s stomping ground.

Now the fedoras are, well, worn ironically.

The man who would be Scarface apparently hung out at a pool hall on Garfield Place, between Fourth and Fifth avenues.

Now, 100 years later, Gowanus will soon be home to those who see sharp shooting not as a gang activity but FUN !!

Because on Degraw Street, between Third and Fourth avenues, coming soon (in December!) is:

KICK AXE THROWING!

As in a bar that doesn’t specialize in something like Capone-esque darts, but the throwing to targets of genuine wood-chopping, artery-spurting axes. Seriously, what could go wrong?

Ah, Brooklyn … It was so nice knowing you.

Next: Running for Your Life: Any Leaves Yet?

Running for Your Life: The Marathon

There is nothing ordinary about it.

The New York City Marathon

Think of it as the world’s largest

Outdoor church,

Or synagogue,

Or mosque,

Or sacred native space.

I’ve been to a few marathons in my time, including the granddaddy of them all:

In Boston

But in New York, on the first Sunday in November, the most unifying of nontribal events occurs,

A road race, of all things.

On Sunday (Nov. 5) I went to “worship” on Fourth Avenue at 11 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.

That part of Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn marks the 7-mile watering station of the race.

The look on so many faces at that early point in the marathon: ecstatic, joyful, proud.

And those of us watching, urging on the runners, were no less a part of the sacrament.

For one blissful half-hour, during the weekend marking the first anniversary of the Election Day

Victory of Donald Trump, I drank in the wonder that human beings can be capable of.

These runners before me didn’t come to win prizes, most, on their list of priorities, would rank the goal of getting a Personal Best time way down near the bottom.

Or so it seemed to me.

Who can forget their first New York City Marathon? Either as runner or spectator?

Comes a place, deep inside, where real, positive change is possible.

Next: Running for Your Life:  Gowanus Sharp Shooters !