Running for Your Life: Raining Cats & Dogs

What is it about a dog? What New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik found http://nyr.kr/n2ITT7, that dogs are man’s best friend in large part because life on the farm is better than life in the woods.

Think pioneer days – Kansas, Missouri, Manitoba – scads more wolves than dogs. What was to stop them (the dogs) from running off and joining a pack of wolves? What Farley Mowat, the beloved Canadian writer and conservationist, author of “Never Cry Wolf” http://amzn.to/ofrush (it may not be “true,” exactly, the wolf experts say, but what the hey, it’s a great yarn) brings alive.

Catch a glimpse into the eyes of the stubborn breeds, top of the list, Redbone Coonhounds, that’s right, Thurb, and see into a wolf’s soul. Send a shiver down your spine.

Running for Your Life: The Fall Ahead

So You Want to Live in Park Slope Dept.
Walking Prospect Park’s Picnic House path at the Nethermead corridor, arrayed along the northern side, through chain links of the unscaleable fence are a queue of mothers pulling like galley slaves at rower rings attached to high tension rubber bands affixed to the fence, their respective babies (I’m guessing here) in strollers facing them, leaving just enough room for an elder women walking group to march through, heading toward to M and me, clapping and urging on the mothers: “Go! Girls, go! Keep it up!” One mother smiles. Not ironically.

Running for Your Life: Fire Island, Late Summer

Last weekend in Dunewood, Fire Island, C, who I never did see so I have come to think of her as Goldilocks, slept in G’s bed; G doing her first shift as hostess at Le Dock in Fair Harbor, FI, the next town over, the place with the grocery that sells a boxlet of dryish blueberries for the equivalent of a quarter apiece, G (our host’s daughter) not getting home until sixish in the morning because she too had slept over at a friend’s, Goldilocks gone in the morning before M and I get ourselves together after having tied one on (What I say to M as we make our way to FH from D when we arrived by ferry on the bay side where the waters are receding, “Let’s tide one on!”); Goldilocks is off to the wedding, what I first hear as her uncle getting married that I later learn is less wrong than incomplete, the reason she couldn’t sleep in her own bed the previous night because her uncle’s family and friends had taken up residence there for the weekend, but then, much later, when we are sunbathing on the ocean side, I learn that it’s G’s (Goldilocks’) uncles who are getting married. Her uncles taking advangage of the Great Cuomo Summer Triumph, getting gay married.

Running for Your Life: The Movie, Continued

We pick up in hospital, with establishing shot: L is feeble, his leg raised high and strapped in some contraption so that it doesn’t rest on bed, or even have sheets drape on it. It just hangs there in air, lathered in white goop, monstrously big thing. He is surrounded by medicine drip bags of many types that are needle-syringed in multiple places on his body.

Closeup. He is with the nurse, but we can’t hear, with benefit of subtitles, we read, “Where’s Sam?” Nurse touches him in a motherly way. “He’s gone. This morning.” L exhales, head back heavily on pillow. “Gone. Where?” We see a touch more of the hardened look that we saw at the opening.

Running for Your Life: The Movie

On black screen the sound of hospital machinery, beeps and whooshes and splunks. As if from a deep murky well, a face appears. An old man staring down, noise of a buzzer, then immediately a female voice, “Yes, Sam?” “Get in here quick; he’s stopped breathing.” Then, a young woman in nurse cap replaces old man’s face, she too staring down, noisily fiddles with something and then as loud as anything yet we hear the sound of a heartbeat, then the gasp of a single breath. Then another.

Fade. Slowly developing image of young man in ill-fitting hospital gown. Scraggly beard. He is at the window and places hand on glass, makes for a palm print on the icy pane. Nurse comes in and calls his name. “Larry, over here, time to take your pills.” L looks up and into the glass, starts a bit, as if for the first time he sees himself as he is, wasting away, as if he has been a POW in the South Pacific, hint of being hardened to his fate but then something sad comes to mind, and he bows his head, body shuddering, weeping.

Running for Your Life: Balance Beam

I’d like to think that I’m keeping this blog in balance: reading, writing, running and yeah, riding (subway). Because five days a week I ride to work; that is when I write, often about running, but equally about my other practices. Because my message is embedded there, in these ways of being.

Recently, I received the official publication of the Boston Marathon 2011: Racer’s Record Book. The race that I’d trained for but didn’t run. I was a little surprised to see that of the 26,907 runners who entered, only 1,719 were men in my age group, 55-59. That’s 6.4 percent. And of those men who but did not race I was joined by 156 others, or 9.1 percent, of the group members who made it there for the 115th running of the world’s most famous race. Certainly it is a young person’s game. It’s not as though a 56-year-old man is going to win. As if winning counted.

Running for Your Life: The Play’s The Thing

Four shorts, loosely classified one acts, heavy and dark and deep and funny, hilarious, East Side but the bearable type with an after-theater bar where the cast will stop by for a drink, well at least some did on Friday night (Aug. 5), except for the underage girl actors (Avid Theatergoer and Family Friend: “Has anyone told you, well, I’m sure they do, but has anyone told you that you look just like Faye Dunaway? UGA: “Who’s Faye Dunaway?”) in “Carrie and Francine” http://bit.ly/p4LWwv, the winning playwright of this summer production, 17-year-old Ruby Rae Spiegel, chosen from an open competition against young and experienced alike, trenchant and wise beyond her years, and introducing Lydia Weintraub (she of the Faye Dunaway line and the delightful, talented daughter of good friends of ours) and equally gifted pal Louise Sullivan to audiences everywhere, see it if you can, it rhymes: Series A through Labor Day, you won’t be sorry, and you may even be inspired to write, because these plays are being staged as part of a one-act competition: an East Side Manhattan Fringe, Check out “Summer Shorts 5” at 59E59 Theaters http://bit.ly/dblPp5.

Running for Your Life: Summer Reading, Part II

So You Want to Live in Park Slope Dept.

Today (Aug. 3) I am interrupted on my final kick of a 7-miler, forced to stop at an intersection in Central Slope. In 85-degree heat a man in a heavy orange vest (sensible shoes, shorts and sandals) is walking ahead of a young woman pushing a cart full of food from the Park Slope Food Co-op http://bit.ly/rfTUOX, both of them blocking a turning Crate & Barrel delivery truck, the target of disapproving glares from some patrons at the outdoor seating area of Connecticut Muffin.

Running for Your Life: Dog Day Delights

“When did it turn?” I’m talking to my friend D at the annual memorial barbecue for the great and underappreciated cartoonist/filmmaker and my very great friend, Mickey Siporin http://bit.ly/qG4Fp4, now in his early 70s, he knew Mick when they were art student freshman college roommates in Carbondale, Ill. D grew up in The Village, in the heyday of The Cedar Tavern, Frank O’Hara’s “Second Avenue,” Jackson Pollack, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg. If aspiring novelist Gil Pender (Midnight in Paris) saw Paris in the Twenties as his ideal place and time for artistic imagination, then The Village in the Fifties and early Sixties works for me. D was in his twenties then.

So I ask him, “When did it turn?”

“When I saw my first bottle of economy-size Coke,” D says.

“Wow!” I say, ‘that’s –”

“You’re a writer. Feel free to use that.”