Running for Your Life: Where Canada Meets Portugal

Last month we went to Portugal, and in the small seaside town of Nazare (famous for its world-class surf), we found a charming family-run restaurant where we ended up having most of our meals.

One evening in the restaurant we struck up a conversation with an adult foursome who we soon learned were Portuguese-Canadian from Toronto.

“How about those Leafs this year?” I said. “I mean, really, how exciting are they to watch?”

“Very!” one woman beamed. “Are you from Canada?”

“Yes, Owen Sound, north of you.”

“Of course. Small world.”

“We are big fans of the Leafs, especially now,” she went on.

“How is that?”

“Because their son,” she pointed to the second couple in the foursome, “won the Air Canada Center’s Maple Leaf fashion design completion.”

Then, Mom, takes up the conversation.

“It was such a shock for us when he made the short list.” [The winner would dress Leaf fans for the 2017-18 season when their capsule collections are produced and sold exclusively at The Toronto Maple Leafs Store.]

“Well, I can imagine.”

“And then out of the blue, I received a phone call from the prize committee. They told me my son, Richard Campos, had won the men’s division.”

“That’s the last I remember because I was so happy I fainted.”

“You fainted?!”

“Just lucky I didn’t crack my skull when I hit the kitchen floor,” she said with a wide grin. “Just fainted for sheer joy.”

We have this good friend in Brooklyn, B, who M and I have become closer to in the past few years, and it wasn’t until recently we discovered that he is of Portuguese origins – by way of Toronto.

Ha, in Canada, one finds yourself in the shadow of the United States; in Portugal, in the shadow of Spain.

Humble, small countries and friendly unassuming people who are natural givers and skilled listeners.

When it comes to Portuguese-Canadians they seem to have a double-dose of those properties.

Next: Running for Your Life: Eyes on the Sky 

Running for Your Life: Words to Live By II

Be kind, be kinder, be kindest.

Detect that friends, workmates are taking advantage of your kindness, misinterpreting it as weakness, and double down on the kindness.

Convince yourself that if those friends and workmates persist in this misinterpretation, break relations or reduce contact with them, if feasible, if not, just carry on, you know, being kind, . . .

Next: Running for Your Life: Where Canada Met Portugal  

Running for Your Life: Radio to Finocchio

At Christmas time our family looks for one elegant gift, something to mark the year that’s past in a special way.

Most recently, there was the case of a fancy radio that I bought in Windsor, Ontario, during the mid-1980s. For years since I came to the US in late 1988, the radio was either in a box or sitting unused on a shelf in my basement workplace.

M’s radio from college finally gave out in the early 2000s, and for years we went without one.

Then, one day, I looked on a dusty shelf and considered my radio. I had thought, for some reason, that it was either broken, or just ill-suited for our home.

Then, during one recent Christmas season, I brought it up and found it worked like a charm, offering public radio news and classical music, in a way that M’s old college radio had done. It’s a glorious gift – especially during the holidays. M has said more than once that my old radio has changed her life.

This Christmas, it’s finocchio. Finocchio, as poured during special occasions with our dear friends in Puglia, is a chilled cordial made with fennel – and other homey ingredients – all true to the family recipe of our southern Italian friends.

M has made two batches, and we plan to give away little bottles of finocchio to friends and family during the holidays, with the idea that people will listen to music or news before their “radios” and toast all that is right with love and life.

Next: Running for Your Life: Where Canada Met Portugal  

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