Running for Your Life: March Mood

It is the spring of 1976, I am twenty years old, and from the start of the year have been in a hospital bed. For days and nights during that time I didn’t know if I would live or die.

My recovery started in March.

It’s why my mind will drift back to those days in 1976 as I lie awake in all seasons when I can’t sleep. I just let time tick by. Each moment being precious, you know …

.. that’s a little of what March brings, an elegiac mood, combined with the first of more varied birdsong. The promise of spring after a long winter. Time to consider new projects, plan travel, leg it out in long runs. Savor the sweet elixir of just being alive.

It is March 1985 when I have returned from a trip to Cuba. I was making plans to go back. The previous year I lived abroad, traveled to Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, and Mexico, and then to Cuba. In July, to Nicaragua, about which I write for my hometown newspaper, the Owen Sound Sun Times.

What doesn’t take root in March? These past 34 years from March 1985 have been a whirlwind: love and marriage, a transcendent daughter, newspaper work, book-writing, many, many miles of travel, and many, many miles of running.

And last night (March 17) I couldn’t sleep – and took a little inventory. Felt the thrill of what is the incredible March of time.

Next: Running for Your Life: ‘Stone-d’

Running for Your Life: What I Think About When I Run for Three Hours

Military patriotism … How when Canada sends its boys – the best of our people – to slaughter we honor them with thousands of stone memorials across the country, that draw its citizens like “2001: A Spacy Odyssey” monoliths for quiet, solemn remembrance of not just the loss of life but the loss of potential for what the country could’ve been had these men (and women) come home instead of being buried in foreign soil. And because we lost so many people (World War I and II) as a percentage of our total population, not a family, it seemed, in my growing up years in small town Ontario was not touched by some devastating human loss. So, Canadians view new wars, those that are regional and strictly political, with suspicion. Patriotism takes on a compassionate aspect rather than a primarily militaristic one.

How a draft for a regional war (Vietnam) makes it possible to divide a nation into haves and have-nots. We find, here in the United States, that we can forgive those who escape the draft (current president, for example) through dubious means. Why? Because there is no overarching imperative in a land that capitulates on its potential by settling on being a society of haves and have nots. Not to mention that the draft is used to outfit a have-not army that is fighting a political war for imperial reasons, to create allies, supplicants for business, those who we will be able to treat as client states; with us, the American exceptionalists, in charge.

(Oh, and I think about how cold it is for March …)

Next: Running for Your Life: March Mood

Running for Your Life: Politics and the Past

So Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is quoted as saying the president is “just not worth” the effort that impeachment proceedings would entail.

Okay, well that is enlightening.

It is discouraging, isn’t it, the current political theater?

Take the current debate on immigration. Let’s just enter a reporter’s mindset for a moment and say, hey, maybe there is something to the story … . Rather than be comfortable with the he said, she said fight of middle school playground bravado, consider the account of a solid reporter like Mattathias Schwartz, who wrote “The Human Wall” cover story for New York magazine, Jan. 7-20, 2019.

https://nym.ag/2ETT16g

Or here’s something I encountered that’s, well, a little more “past” than January 2019, in terms of keeping the fire to the feet of what looks like a compromised political leader:

“All acts of the party – all things that explain or throw light on these acts, -- all the acts of others relative to the affair, that come to his knowledge, and may influence him, -- his friendships and enmities, his promises, his threats, the truth of his discourse, the falsehood of his apologies, pretences, and explanations, his looks, his speech, his silence where he was called on to speak, everything which tends to establish the connection between all these particulars, -- every circumstance, precedent, concomitant, and subsequent, become parts of circumstantial evidence.”

This from Edmund Burke’s 1794 report for Britain’s House of Commons on the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the governor-general of Bengal.

If only, right?

Next: Running for Your Life: March Mood

Running for Your Life: Goodbye Larry Poem

(Flight to Hong Kong, March 2014)

Goodbye, Larry

Goodbye, Larry

My father said in the last

Phone call before we had

To power down all devices

No comma or pause

Not a salutation the

Empty phrase lubricant

Of life’s daily mechanics

Onboard Cathy Pacific

And away                                                 again

More a title for something

A sign ignored on a perilous path.

Next: Running for Your Life: Sun Porch Poem

Running for Your Life: Eighteen Wheels!

It wasn’t perfect. It never is, is it?

It was freezing, Vaseline on the face to guard against frostbite, very cool hand-warmer packs that my wife M. thought to give me, an anorak vest (a Calgary-made gift from the 80s), long john top, marathon jersey from 2012.

Yeah, no stops, three minutes short of three hours, and that comes out to, at say, a conservative estimate of 9:45 per hour pace:

About 18.2 miles, give or take.

That will more than have to do. Truth is, come the Pittsburgh Marathon, on Sunday, May 5, there could be some walking involved. (I’m going to train like hell to not walk, but …). So far, these long training runs have included only running, and the body is more than holding up.

Slow it down, think it through, don’t take any chances, and run for all you’re worth.

It’s such a pleasure. Eighteen Wheels, baby! And 26.2 Wheels. Well, that’s only less than two months away!

Next: Running for Your Life: Goodbye Larry Poem