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.
It’s funny how people fall into their lives. What I find compelling about the title of Anne Tyler’s “Accidental Tourist.” How folks are following, have run to a path whose destiny is purely objective. Accidental. In my case I’m convinced that if I had not suffered life-threatening blood clots so early in my life .¤.¤. I’m twenty and a half with few burning priorities beyond sex, ice hockey and witty repartee with friends. But during one particularly unlucky winter thirty-six years ago, clots riddled my body for weeks refusing to leave and for long, dark nights I found it near-impossible to draw a breath. I survived, but more than that, set a course toward being a different person. Corny yes, but, in a way that I don’t fully understand I pledged to myself that I would make the most of whatever time I had left on earth. To safeguard my health, I’d run, which I have now done twice-weekly since I was able to hobble along a mountain trail the summer of 1975. I’ve strayed some, but I’ve never stopped writing.
Less than ten years after the “accident,” I pulled up what little stakes I had and traveled, first to Tahiti, then New Zealand, Australia, Cuba, and Mexico, where I met a Cessna pilot, hitched a ride, airborne, visual flight rules en route to Philly on a set date from Nuevo Laredo, Spring 1984, a wondrous trip where in the Many, La., airfield one morning we are minutes away from takeoff when four police cruisers come barreling onto the field, and yeah, from a quarter-century away I think what if, what if this near-perfect stranger Cessna pilot has unbeknownst to me stowed drugs onboard, and Whoa! that would have been it, what C.S. Lewis says, “A stone may determine the course of a river,” instead, though, the cops tear apart the plane, taking seats out, throwing our bags and knapsacks on the ground, then ransacking, digging into ever crevice and corner of the Cessna four-seater, finally coming up empty-handed, and sure they could have planted drugs on us (one cop did point out what looked like a bullet hole in the underside of one of the wings!), it would’ve made the outing worthwhile, my pilot friend breathing a sigh of relief because to look at me: long unwashed hair, baggy jeans, white shapeless sweater, leather bolsa, beaten-up highway backpack with ratty Canadian maple leaf, he had to think that I had at least a little weed or hash, some contraband. But no, that wasn’t my thing, and the cops, slowly, reluctantly, left, their keys to the Many, La., lockup unused that morning, and up we went, the two of us, wordless into the clear blue sky, pointed toward Philly but in no hurry to get there, and besides, in any kind of cloud cover we were grounded, reduced to VFR.
Later, I’m in New York City for the first time. Still Spring 1984. Nothing summer about those days. Staying with a friend, longing for a woman I’d left behind. Four and a half years before I would be back to the Big Apple to be with my wife and daughter for the rest of my life until now. This fall marking my twenty-third consecutive fall in the city. When the air is cool and fresh, and yes, this marks the tenth anniversary of that especially ill-fated day in New York, 9-11-2001. And yes again, I was there. Not in a Tower, but close enough. On the ground, a pathway at the Hudson River, looking up precisely when the first skyscraper began its terrible collapse, and I’ve thought for years, literally, that nothing would be the same. And I was right. But not in the way that I thought at the time.
Surely its okay to talk about, now that ten years after is upon us. To not begrudge the overused references to that time, especially for those New Yorkers and non who were in and around the city that day. When it comes to news and commentary, in this nation, a ratings prison, which must program content to the imperative of viewer interest, there is no more obvious fallback than to measure all deviance from normality – hurricanes, rising floodwaters, shaking high rises – against the day the Twin Towers, attacked by hijacked planes, thundered to the ground in a way I know that I and millions like me will never forget. The horror. A tiny piece of every September day when the sky is beyond blue and you say to yourself, because you do, we all do, that such a day may never come again.
Next: Running for Your Life: Return of the Thurb!
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