Running for Your Life: A Subway Poem

Since I came to live in New York City in late 1988, I’ve had a primarily positive experience riding in the subway.

Some of this has to do with the circumstances of my work commute.

As a daily journalist tied to an evening deadline, I’m currently obliged to take midday trains to Manhattan, and evening trains home. Off-peak trains mean that I am typically able to get a seat and be alone with my thoughts.

That means working in a journal. I either write notes about books I’m working on or reading, or draw people who capture my imagination.

I call these images my “Track Work,” some over the years I’ve painted or collaged … One day I will collect them and see what I have, maybe put them on Instagram the way the kids do these days.

The other day I wrote a poem, that speaks to some of what I’m talking about here, giving a sense of wonder I still feel thirty-one years after calling New York my home.

IN THE SUBWAY

There is a joy to watching

out of town folks riding the

subway, making for a

fresh outlook

on just how unique

this trip can be,

a moment’s glance

and memory erupts,

a recollection of

my first days here

of first days everywhere,

the wonder that is

awareness of your surroundings,

the comfort that travel,

an open mind transports

mood, takes you away

to a new place where time

stands still, or seems to.

Next: Running for Your Life: Leafing It!

Running for Your Life: Prosperity and Amity

When it comes to good titles, this one, by journalist Eliza Griswold scores big-time.

Because these two towns a few hours drive out of Pittsburgh deserve the ink that Griswold spills on this book published in June 2018.

The subtitle, “One Family and the Fracturing of America,” takes away the guesswork.

Want to get a taste of what it is really like to be on the front lines in America’s resource growth economy?

Do you feel, at the end of the day, that local, state or federal governments are working to your benefit?

Does it stand to reason that the same old arguments from the same old political parties will find any traction in a places like Prosperity and Amity, where families are fractured, not in the way that so many commentators feel free to posit, i.e., as a matter of character of strength – by being strung out on opioids in jobless wastelands?

In what seems the endless campaign, we are less than 13 months away from the next national election.

“Prosperity and Amity” is no “Hillbilly Elegy.” This is the real deal. These are real heroes here. Told in a slow-moving book that pays homage to the noble character of the family members who Griswold came to know during her years writing about natural gas developers and their neighbors.

Next: Running for Your Life: A Subway Poem

Running for Your Life: Every Other Day Since 1977

That was 42 years ago, 1977.

In 1976, I had the misfortune of contracting a serious ailment that I’ve written about before on this blog: a blood clot in my leg that traveled to my lung. Following a long recovery period, I returned to my young man routines a shadow of my former self. My left leg twice the size of my right one.

I had never jogged before. A hockey player in the winter, softball as a kid in the summer, I had never been a runner. But in order to keep my leg circulation in check, I found that if I ran (really not much more than just shuffling along in the beginning), it helped a lot. Pain and swelling went down; for months I had trouble sleeping; after I started running, my sleep improved as did my healing.

Back then, I started running every other day. Every day put too much strain on my left leg, but every other day seemed about right.

That was nine marathons ago … And since then I have run every other day for 42 years, and my leg is still a problem but not at all what it was.

Yep, Running for Your Life. Those can be words to live by.

Next: Running for Your Life: Amity and Prosperity (Not What You Think)

Running for Your Life: Two Days Short of 9/11

Notes on 9/9/19 ….

Let the ‘9’s be wild on this date, two days short of the 18^th anniversary of 9/11.

Never 9/11/01, the shorthand likely to hold for generations.

It is true that the professionalism of words and images is mooted by the glorification of the self.

What is popular in terms of “messaging” exaggerates the individual. Her smarts, her athleticism, her wit, her knowledge.

We undervalue the drivers of ‘soul’: doubt, kindness, empathy, and most egregiously, humility.

What is the phrase that long amused my dad? “I’m so good, it’s hard to be humble.” What’s telling here is an awareness of the elusive objective: humility. That’s the core of the joke.

Instead, today, to be humble is to be weak, to be unheard, to be exploited, jeered at. Like that “SVU” episode about rape trauma. “I’m a nobody,” the victim says, “are you a nobody too?”

In the fantasy of the episode, the rape victim is victorious; we are given to believe that she has a chance to rise out of her special circle of hell.

We are given stories, myths, that make us believe in society; that an essential goodness will prevail if we choose to be essentially good.

Truth is not a factor; but love and faith are.

Next: Running for Your Life: Every Other Day Since 1977

Running for Your Life: On Beauty

FROM “The Book of Time,” an excerpt, in Mary Oliver’s book of poems, “The Leaf and the Cloud”

“Whoever shall be guided so far towards the mysteries of love, by

contemplating beautiful things rightly in due order, is approaching the last

grade. Suddenly he will behold a beauty marvelous in its nature, that very

Beauty, Socrates, for the sake of which all the earlier hardships had been

borne: in the first place, everlasting, and never being born or perishing,

neither increasing nor diminishing; secondly not beautiful here and ugly

there, not beautiful now and ugly then, not beautiful in one direction and

ugly in another direction, not beautiful in one place and ugly in another

place. Again, this beauty will not show itself like a face or hands or any

bodily thing at all, nor as a discourse or a science, nor indeed as residing

in anything, as in a living creature or in earth or heaven or anything else,

but being by itself with itself always in simplicity; while all the beautiful

things elsewhere partake of this beauty in such manner, that when they are

born and perish it becomes neither less nor more and nothing at all

happens to it.”

Next: Running for Your Life: Two Days Short of 9/11