So You Want to Live in Park Slope Dept.
Blackboard sign at our go-to patisserie:
“Do you like granola? Then you’ll love our new granola scone!”
In early June (six weeks ago), on the first day of our staycation (R4YrLife: Finding the Groove), M and I go to Dixon’s Bicycle Shop. I can’t say for sure, but Dixon’s has the look of a place that hasn’t changed too much since it opened (vintage signage: Est. 1966). M and I are planning to go on a bike ride sometime during our staycay, so we stop in to buy one for me. The last one – purchased a decade ago at Dixon’s – had been stolen in the past year. A rental outfit wanted a third of the price for a new one for a single day, so Dixon’s it is. M says she has an errand or two of her own and says she will meet me later.
Running for Your Life: Smoking Over Rules
So you want to live in Park Slope Dept.:
Late one weekday morning a woman in the front yard of her near-abandoned house is struggling to keep her balance as she picks berry-like fruit from a junk tree (stink weed?) that obscures her neglected brownstone, and eats them whole one after the other.
It is hard to think of anything good that comes of tobacco. The smoking of it, that is. What seems a hundred years ago, the highest-paying summer job in my neck of the woods was tobacco-picking. Fields and fields of it, in southern Ontario, http://bit.ly/lz9jy4, the heart of the elephant, Delhi and Tillsonburg, and it was hard work, big burly farm kids preferred at the hiring halls, my tiny frame, at eighteen I’m five-eight, one-thirty, reedy as a cornstalk so I didn’t even try, but still, as a young man couldn’t imagine a life without the tobacco fields, the sail-shape leaves waving in the summer breeze, acres and acres of them.
Late one weekday morning a woman in the front yard of her near-abandoned house is struggling to keep her balance as she picks berry-like fruit from a junk tree (stink weed?) that obscures her neglected brownstone, and eats them whole one after the other.
It is hard to think of anything good that comes of tobacco. The smoking of it, that is. What seems a hundred years ago, the highest-paying summer job in my neck of the woods was tobacco-picking. Fields and fields of it, in southern Ontario, http://bit.ly/lz9jy4, the heart of the elephant, Delhi and Tillsonburg, and it was hard work, big burly farm kids preferred at the hiring halls, my tiny frame, at eighteen I’m five-eight, one-thirty, reedy as a cornstalk so I didn’t even try, but still, as a young man couldn’t imagine a life without the tobacco fields, the sail-shape leaves waving in the summer breeze, acres and acres of them.
Running for Your Life: Holidays and Hamstrings
From my perch at the gym, the manager’s lookout when this place was a bank, I can see the lobby television which today (July 5) is playing a video loop of baseball highlights. With hockey over, a part of my brain, like metal filings slowing shaping around a magnetic gnat, attaches to my distant second sport, baseball, and in July the lobby TV favors ESPN and baseball highlights.
I’d far prefer vignettes of games, say, the play-by-play of the Chicago Cubs and the Chicago White Sox, an interleague game, like I watched while training an hour-plus on the Brown Deer Holiday Express treadmill while M and I were in Wisconsin during the holiday(s) weekend (Canada Day & Independence Day) to see Mom and Baby Leon, our new great nephew, two teams mired in the middle of the standings with little at stake but following muscle memory, playing the game they have since childhood been better than anyone else in the neighborhood, and now, all of them, champions of the sport.
I’d far prefer vignettes of games, say, the play-by-play of the Chicago Cubs and the Chicago White Sox, an interleague game, like I watched while training an hour-plus on the Brown Deer Holiday Express treadmill while M and I were in Wisconsin during the holiday(s) weekend (Canada Day & Independence Day) to see Mom and Baby Leon, our new great nephew, two teams mired in the middle of the standings with little at stake but following muscle memory, playing the game they have since childhood been better than anyone else in the neighborhood, and now, all of them, champions of the sport.
Running for Your Life: A Year of Blogging
It’s a pursuit that is seen as passe. Perhaps never rose to the precinct of fad. In some place, the butt of jokes. The BLAH-G. Blah, blah, blah-log. Scratch the surface and you’ll see what’s behind: naked self-promotion, pointless grandstanding, professional necessity (literary agent to emerging writer: “Do you have a blog? No? Get one.”)
Some blogs, not many, rise to writerly if not literary notebooks with a purpose, in my case, to write every other day in the hopes, yes, of offering some insights, telling some stories, linking to essays and books and articles of interest to me, and through the wonders of the Internet, to others. At root, Running for Your Life harkens to the blog-work one of my literary heroes, Jose Saramago (1922-2010), whose select blog entries between September 2008 and August 2009, are compiled in The Notebook http://bit.ly/bDqiLj, An example: “The division between actors and spectators is over: the spectator attends not only to see and hear, but to be seen and heard.” The ideal is to, perchance, elicit comments and responses to what I have put down here now for 12 months. According to my Blogger Account, today marks 79 posts on Running for Your Life. In the past 12 months that’s 1,856 visits. Average time on the site: 2:17. And many repeat visitors, I’m happy to say. Good enough for a blah, blah, blah-log.
Some blogs, not many, rise to writerly if not literary notebooks with a purpose, in my case, to write every other day in the hopes, yes, of offering some insights, telling some stories, linking to essays and books and articles of interest to me, and through the wonders of the Internet, to others. At root, Running for Your Life harkens to the blog-work one of my literary heroes, Jose Saramago (1922-2010), whose select blog entries between September 2008 and August 2009, are compiled in The Notebook http://bit.ly/bDqiLj, An example: “The division between actors and spectators is over: the spectator attends not only to see and hear, but to be seen and heard.” The ideal is to, perchance, elicit comments and responses to what I have put down here now for 12 months. According to my Blogger Account, today marks 79 posts on Running for Your Life. In the past 12 months that’s 1,856 visits. Average time on the site: 2:17. And many repeat visitors, I’m happy to say. Good enough for a blah, blah, blah-log.
Running for Your Life: Staying Cool
A pause to kvell. Kate, my daughter, she of the Rosa Luxemburg-like sensibility – “Enthusiasm combined with political thought. What more could we want of ourselves!” http://bit.ly/mIqiTV – burst onto the national opinion-making scene on June 17 http://nyp.st/ielb6l. That’s my daughter! Rosa’s letters, new ones recently published by Verso in English translation, cut to the heart of what I am talking about. Another quote: Attacking the decision by her former revolutionary allies, the parliamentary faction of the German Social Democratic Party, which voted in favor of the munitions budget in August 1914: “Workers of the world unite in peacetime – but in war slit one another’s throat.” Thank God Rosa wrote these letters – and that her friends saved them. Kate, I’m proud to say, is cut from this kind of cloth.
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