Running for Your Life: Minimalist Golf

An elderly golfer is briskly bag-walking his seven clubs – 3 wood, long iron, 5-iron, 7-iron, 9-iron, wedge and putter –  on his home course, playing his typical 36 holes.

A man half his age drives up in his golf cart, a bag twice as big in the back, and addresses the old fella:

“Say, I hope you don’t mind me asking … but, how old are you?”

“Ninety-two.”

“Seriously? Wow, you look so great. I’d love to look like that when I’m you’re age.”

“You could start right now.”

“No kidding. How?”

“Get out of your cart and start walking.”

This exchange reflects some of what I read in a book by Mark Cucuzzella that has a great title:

“Run for Your Life”

Cucuzzella doesn’t restrict himself to just running tips (Sound familiar?). And in one chapter he talks about how he’s a believer in minimalist golf – as in, just how the 92-year-old plays the game – the old-fashioned way.

I can relate. As a boy I caddied for my dad, carrying his clubs around our city golf links. For me, golf was like the tennis I played (on municipal courts) and street hockey.

Once you got your swing down, the mechanics of compact power, you are off to the links. Playing in soft-soled shoes, hitting the ball true and long and spending time looking at the treetops, the scudding clouds across the sky, as you strided up the course. Hole after sweet-release, energy-fueling hole.

Next: Running for Your Life: The Bay Ridge Half, Baby!

Running for Your Life: Cool, It’s October

There is something about October.

If April is the cruelest month, October is the feral one.

We’re near-civilized out of this state, but it’s there.

Take a deep breath, feel the brace of morning cold.

For days in October, don’t overdress. If you work protocol permits, wear summer clothing.

Shorts. Feel the cool air in your hairs on your arms and legs.

Got a working dog? Check out its manner. In the case of Thurber, my nine-year-old coonhound, he’s loaded for bear.

We’re bound in space, especially we urban office trolls. Not trolls. Drones. Trolls feel the feral in the air. Their very survival depends on it.

October is the first taste of winter. Instinctive (if we modern humans are still capable of basic instinct), we take stock. Our brains are piqued. There’s an extra lift to our step. Each breath of air more vital than the lethargic summer one.

Forest fauna are booking it: storing nuts, fattening up, digging earth for burrows.

Make no mistake. Bred in our bones lies early human DNA. Feel it. In every breath you take.

Next: Running for Your Life: Minimalist Golf

Running for Your Life: NAFTA notes

OK, there’s a Canada-US-Mexico trade deal. But here is the backgrounder:

Recall that NAFTA was formed to govern all trade and business relations, including sports and the arts.

In the case of sports, there are lessons that conceivably translate into other areas: manufacturing, natural resources, agriculture …

How in the world can the US and Canada find common ground, agree on even the basic terms of to come to a trilateral agreement, if

1/ In Canada’s national sport, ice hockey, the social-political axis spins on facts like this: The last preseason game been pro teams in Ottawa and Montreal served as a platform to report that in a week the team, players and fans had led efforts to raise more than $300,000 for those in need following freak tornados in the Ottawa region. The money would be used to address two areas: food security and mental health.

2/ In America’s national sport, football, courageous players kneel during the singing of the national anthem to protest the country’s crisis in social justice, and rather than the act serve as a hero’s call to address the problem, it divides the country and worsens its social and political divide.

Nope. Nothing to say to each other here. Whatever was signed isn’t worth the paper upon which I’m writing this note.

Next: Running for Your Life: Cool, It’s October

Running for Your Life: Ant Heel

On a run in June 2016 in Italy, I had a thought. Here’s what I wrote in my journal:

We newspaper editors are the worker ants of journalism.

No matter what, we gotta do it. Whatever is required.

Backwards, frontwards with diligence and skill, working without rest, and, yes, we constantly attempt more, take on tasks beyond expectations, big, bigger, biggest, with experience that should tell us that it will not be noticed by the queen when the task is finished.

Alas, the human doesn’t set aside hope of being noticed. If only we could learn from the example of the worker ant, that there is dignity in the simple task itself.  Work to be done. That is enough.

Next level: That we newspaper editors in our worker ant selves serve the queen and her court but we fail to notice that the queen is not as she was before.

She is corrupt and perhaps mad.

What was once a benevolent system is now one that serves no such purpose.

We are building a Frankenstein monster but we, the worker ants, cannot stop in our task.

Think deadlines. Worker ants work as if a deadline is always in place. Do it right and hurry. If it doesn’t work that way, try another. Whatever you do, don’t stop.

Otherwise, you’ll be noticed. And for worker ants that can never end well.

Next: Running for Your Life: Cool, It’s October

Running for Your Life: Paper Mate

In June 1983, I began the practice of writing in a journal.

That’s more than 35 years ago.

Granted we’re not talking about daily journal-writing for 35 years, or 23,000 days, give or take.

But I don’t let any of it go. Once written in a journal (ringed-paper variety these days for ease of flat-surface writing) the treasure is kept on a shelf in my home studio.

In that workspace I’m literally surrounded by pages and pages of cursive writing.

As I mine material for a new memoir I find myself re-reading journals.

Dipping into the past I see the younger me, desire for connection, observations from the surprising to the mundane.

Themes emerge, passions, some lost, some still budding.

I’m in a subway car as I write this. (I transcribe – and edit corrections – of my journal-writing in this space). I use a carefully chosen black ink craftsman pen.

Each letter is owned, idiosyncratically mine.

At times a face in the crowd attracts my attention and I pause with a few strokes on paper, capture something about that person, a mood, with the simple goal of showing one defining  feature.

The sketch, with accompanying script, makes a distinguishing mark on that brief occasion, both about the subject and me.

Max Ferber, a fictional character in Sebald’s “The Emigrants,” says, “Time is nothing but the disquiet of the soul.”

Maybe that is what I’ve done in this half-lifetime of journal-writing. Put in words, in this most modest way, an account of the disquiet of the soul.

Next: Running for Your Life: Ant Heel