Could there be better lines to underscore just how far we have come since Herman Melville came up with the final lines to "Bartleby the Scrivener," a novel published almost one hundred and sixty-two years ago?
Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!
Next: Running for Your Life: Safe at Any Speed
Running for Your Life: April Fools Day and Grampa
Every year it’s the same thing. April 1 rolls around and I
think of my grandfather, my mother’s father. April Fools Day was his birthday.
If he were alive today, he would be 126 years old.
There are people in your life who play a role as savior. I’m
a firm believer in the adage that you make your own chances. Some people may
have certain advantages in terms of wealth that leads to an access to a
first-rate education, or more important, contact with those who are blessed
with insight and compassion, those who help shape the people we become.
In each and every case, though, it’s the individual whose
actions yield the exceptional. At the end of the day, we look at ourselves in
the mirror and there is only one person who looks back.
Then there are people like my grandfather. William Samuel
Neath lived with us for three years. In a small room off the front door of my
Aunt Gloria’s house that we were renting in the early 1960s. He was old and
feeble then and I was a mere boy, sensitive and quiet. He did little more than
lounge in his LazyBoy and smoke a pipe. For breakfast he drank tea and ate an
orange that he’d first roll with the flat of his hand to better encourage the
juice to flow from what counted for bulk citrus in Owen Sound, Ontario, in
1962.
On April Fools Day, Grampa would have me trace the scar
from a wound he received in the Great War. Bone fragments had lodged in his
forearm, and when I’d do as I was told and press the hard lump, his arm sprung
up in mock salute and we’d laugh and laugh.
That thought always makes me smile. He is gone all these
years, but in the days leading up to April Fools, I always pause to think of
him. On that single day I convince myself that he too is looking back at me in
the mirror, I resemble him now as much as I remember him then.
Next: Running for Your Life: C’mon in to The Jazz Palace !!
Running for Your Life: If-The-Greats-Were-With-Us Thursday
On the event of the March 19 LRB http://www.lrb.co.uk/ review by Christopher Tayler of
the third volume of Samuel Beckett’s letters (1957-65) http://bit.ly/1CRUN1M, I can only imagine that Beckett would repurpose this tweet (from a letter to his friend Barbara Bray) to try
to restore order in the embattled conscience of someone close to him:
“Work your head off and sleep at any price and leave the
rest to the stream, to carry now away and bring you your other happy days.”
Next: Running for Your Life: April?
Running for Your Life: In My Blood by Pascal Dupuis
http://bit.ly/1ABbLQB Mad
April (and May and June), the Stanley Cup hockey playoffs, will be here in
no time.
They always make a great story. How will the Kings climb,
the Penguins swoon? The Maple Leafs? The Leafs wait till next year.
This spring, though, my favorite story when it comes to the
game is the one above by Pascal Dupuis in Derek Jeter’s The Players’ Tribune.
Take a moment and read this memoir piece above by a hockey player with a blood
condition identical to the one that has me running every other day for the past
thirty-plus years.
In a report out this week, http://bit.ly/1HyH3M0,
Penguins manager Jim Rutherford said, “I do feel confident he’ll return to the
team next year.”
If the Pens play with half the heart of the man on the
sidelines, they’d win the Cup in a walk.
Next: Running for Your Life: If-The-Greats-Were-With-Us
Thursday
Running for Your Life: Throw back Throwback Thursday
It seems to me if you’re in the mood to post nostalgia on
social media – and who isn’t? from time immemorial we humans have been accustomed to
the idea of seeing our early life as glory years, when we were more handsome
(more beautiful), had more energy (more fun) and were less unencumbered (money
worries? us?) – then post those vintage snaps every day, not just on Throwback Thursday.
In fact, when you look at the pictures that people use to
identify themselves on social media, the very notion of here and now – like what
is happening, or what is on your mind – is being filtered by that vision of a
better time, that Throwback Thursday, if you will. That photo on social media
we show the world doesn’t look like the face we look at every morning in the
mirror. It’s posed, caught in one perfect moment or another, often in such a
way that when you actually see the flesh and blood person and not the Facebook “friend,”
you won’t even recognize him (her) because, well, she (he) looks like someone
else.
I propose to throw back Throwback Thursday. Why kid
ourselves, the majority of us long for the past, not just on one day of the
week. A time when spring rolled around and lo and behold the mind did turn to
thoughts of love. Why don’t we just call it what it is: the Throwback Internet?
That is, unless you’re a millennial. Then social media is
all you’ve known. And there’s no simple blogpost prescription that can help to interpret and navigate the psychic potholes of that mental landscape.
Next: Running for Your Life: In My Blood by Pascal Dupuis
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