Sunday night of the New York Blizzard, M and I turned on the TV set and “The Buddha,” a PBS special was on. The following Monday, she is off to India, to lands that Prince Siddhartha roamed, on a personal quest of her own.
I am moved by “The Buddha,” but curious. I feel the excluding of family in the Buddha’s teachings because, it is written, that at twenty-nine he abandoned them to meditate on the suffering of mankind when, even though he is an affluent prince of the warrior caste, he is bringing on – certainly – sufferings to his own young family by abruptly leaving them to go on his vague quest for the path to “happiness” for all men (and women.)
Windows rattle with the wind. I’m home from work just as the worst of the blizzard hits. Slumbering Thurber, who can sleep through a sidewalk jackhammer, is stirring on the couch.
Running for Your Life: Why Run III
“Happiness is having Doug Marshall (1) sign your Caravel (high school yearbook) twice. Doug Marshall (2)”
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In “Black Swan Green,” a year in the life coming of age novel by David Mitchell, Jason Taylor takes us on a journey – the voice of a boy whose perfect pitch, seizing of irony, wins us over at least once, sometimes multiple times a page. Mitchell guides us back to our own times because we all knew a Jason, a boy with inner sight, who if we had the luxury of getting to know him would instruct and delight and amuse us, and whose example even in such a short time as a year would stay with us as an inspiration for a lifetime.
Such were the qualities of Doug Marshall. Or Marsho, as we called him.
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In “Black Swan Green,” a year in the life coming of age novel by David Mitchell, Jason Taylor takes us on a journey – the voice of a boy whose perfect pitch, seizing of irony, wins us over at least once, sometimes multiple times a page. Mitchell guides us back to our own times because we all knew a Jason, a boy with inner sight, who if we had the luxury of getting to know him would instruct and delight and amuse us, and whose example even in such a short time as a year would stay with us as an inspiration for a lifetime.
Such were the qualities of Doug Marshall. Or Marsho, as we called him.
Running for Your Life: Why Run II
The life of Kate, my daughter, (the touch in the rain, below right), is a great lesson of love to me. From the beginning, from her first breath, Kate has been her own person, and if we, as parents, see our role as doing the best to guide her from odds-on danger, our utmost to show our love for her so that she is as close to us today, going on a quarter-century, as she has ever been, then there is a better than average chance that she knows what love means.
My parents’ love is enough, too, so that I have felt safe in my choices, in my impulses. So that I’m able to feel, if not know, because that is too much to ask, that I am born to write, to read and to run.
My parents’ love is enough, too, so that I have felt safe in my choices, in my impulses. So that I’m able to feel, if not know, because that is too much to ask, that I am born to write, to read and to run.
Running for Your Life: Why Run?
One of my favorite anecdotes about origins is by Paul Auster in a crystalline personal memoir called “Why Write?” In it, Auster, as a boy, is at the Polo Grounds at a time when Willie Mays was king. Miraculously, Auster and his adult companions find themselves alone with Mays. They have paper, but no pen or pencil, so Auster misses a golden opportunity to get his hero’s autograph: “Sorry, kid. Ain’t got no pencil, can’t give no autograph.” Auster says he has never again gone out the door without a pencil in his pocket. And he still doesn’t: “If there is a pencil in your pocket, there is a good chance that one day you’ll feel tempted to start using it.”
Running for Your Life: Barbs and Carbs
Okay, so soon it will be a lot easier to qualify for weight-loss surgery in the United States. An advisory panel to the federal Food and Drug Administration, that embodiment of public good and nutritional betterment under whose oversight in the past thirty years the sheer size of the per capita per capita has ballooned to such crisis proportions that no less than Michelle Obama has chosen childhood obesity as her chief First Lady cause to address, into the teeth of opposition from Sarah Palin (Ah ha! A Palin notice; my blog hits are sure to go off the grid!) and assorted tea partiers accusing plans to sweep Coke and Pepsi machines from school cafeterias as unAmerican, but no matter, the FDA weighs in with a vote this month that
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