I’m on a 1:05-long run when I hear the baby bird’s distress call. (First a bit about 1:05. Be patient, I’ll get to the wee bird.)
I’m in the Boston Marathon 2012. I received an email confirmation on Sept. 15th. A runner’s (in my case, since 1976) lifelong dream. And I’m determined not to do what I did last year: overtrain and injure myself. This time I’m not going to go into body-punishing training until 105 days before the race.
That means I’ve got about 105 days that, every other day, I’ll be doing my 1:05 tone-up run. In order to be strong, have a good physical base from which to ramp up in those final, critical 105 days before the marathon on Monday, April 16.
Why 105? One day M and I were walking around our new-at-the-time neighborhood of Park Slope when we each drew attention to a colorfully designed New York Fire Department fire truck with the squadron number 105 emblazoned on it.
“Wow,” I said. “Look, that’s my favorite number.”
M looked startled, disbelieving. “Really !?! That’s my favorite number.”
What are the chances? It’s not 7, or 8, or 9, 11. Even say 27, the number of the Big M, Frank Mahovlich http://bit.ly/rqS5gK, the Toronto Maple Leafs sniper who last epitomized a Stanley Cup champion Maple Leaf.
Who has 105 as their favorite number? For M (my M, that is), it evokes home, the place where her earliest stories came from. Those stories that I fell in love with as I was falling in love with her. From her early story collections: Vanishing Animals and The Bus of Dreams, a myriad stories first lived in the mind of a young girl at 105 Hazel. So for M, No. 105 has magical powers.
In my case, 105 takes on numerical and graphical dimensions. I was born on Oct. 5, 1955. 105 55 10 (the last number, the addition of single digits of the birth year, 5+5). A sequence of numbers, 1, 0, and 5 that strings out to infinity. Now consider the name, O’Connor, in which I substitute the O’s and N’s for O’s resembling 0’s, the N's, 5’s, (of the course the 1's are I's). When I look at a sea of names in a phonebook, say, or a marathon race printout, the name O’Connor leaps out as if it were 10555101055510.
Bear with this additional note of synchronicity.
M and I often differ in our literary tastes. I tilt toward novels by David Foster Wallace, Beckett, Per Petterson, David Mitchel; M: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, George Eliot, Flaubert. So it was a pleasure to find a decade ago that we both admired the “Ester Stories” by Peter Orner http://amzn.to/ppP16i. The same name, Orner, M realized after reading the book, of the person who bought the house that her dad built for his family at 105 Hazel, who just happened to be Peter Orner’s, dad, Ron.
Catherine, the former owner of the Community Bookstore in Park Slope http://bit.ly/9axODv, who hand-sold us the “Ester Stories,” was an early Orner booster (he later won the writer-in-residence award with the Academy of Arts of Letters in Rome, a prize M also won) and invited Peter to a store event.
We introduced ourselves at the reading, and left together for a bite and drinks. It seemed that not only did Peter live during his boyhood years at 105 Hazel, but he grew up in the same room as M. Their first stories forming in a room at No. 105, on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan.
It was early fall, and we asked of his plans for the next few nights.
“I’ll be with friends celebrating my birthday,” he said.
“When?” I asked.
“105” he said. "October fifth."
*
I’m running down the steps of the Lake lookout in Prospect Park. Here, in fall, the birders come. It must be a migrating moment, to judge from the number of folks walking around with binocs. A family of cardinals lives in the trees here. Throughout the year I hear them. No Pavarotti, just a clear, rounded cheep, cheep, cheep. But this sound isn’t anything like that.
At my feet under a jumble of big branches, chopped-down trunks, myriad twigs, debris from the summer storms, Tropical Storm Irene the biggest and most devastating, I hear the unmistakable cry of distress. With birds you can always tell. What I’ve learned from living with one. Tessie, our African Grey parrot, who when I was gathering my things on my way to work this morning (Sept. 20), after another successful run with Thurber, Ole UnReliable, but on the park pathways with me a puppy prince, Tessie cried out loud and clear, “Love You! Bye!”, which is to say that birds live on the high note, the up and up, as M and I like to say, their calls in the wild and at home purposeful, singing for a mate, echolocation, and so often on beautiful sweeping dawns to mark a new day, what sounds more like delight than anything, which is why the desperate alarm call of what sounds to me like a baby bird saddens me so. What reminds of what Erich Maria Remarque wrote in “All Quiet on the Western Front” (wait for it, the remake, starring Daniel Radcliffe, due out in 2013, or get it on Netflix, the version that won Best Picture in 1930), the otherworldly utterances of dying soldiers on the front line, never-not haunting their former pals and ghostly survivors.
That is the connection I make because of one of my earliest sound memories. A bird is chirp-crying, strangely and insistently. I’m maybe four or five, and drawn to the terrible sound, bending down to the base of a tree, curious and alarmed, spy a baby bird, no bigger than the palm of my hand, and reach out to try to pick it up to help, when suddenly, I’m under attack. I see an adult bird out of the corner of my eye, but not with enough time to protect myself as she lands hard-beak blows on my head – one, two, three. First, I can't draw a breath, then I cry, loud and scared, struck hard with the blow of the unfairness of the world, which is what I say to myself as fifty years later I run by the dying baby bird that I can’t see but only hear because she has undoubtedly fallen into the heavy debris of the summer storms and on this brilliantly blue fall day cannot be saved.
Next: Running for Your Life: In Reply to Roz Chast
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