Running for Your Life: Discovering Jon McGregor

Jon McGregor is an author new to me. 

In the 2017 Betty Boop flasher New Yorker (Great cover!) you’ll find a piece about McGregor by James Wood.

So much of what Wood said (and quoted) from McGregor’s latest novel, RESERVOIR 13, sent shivers through me.

Like hearing the surprise rattle-clang of a cow bell, or the rush of soft soles through a long pile of dry leaves, the ribbed red oak leaf between my thumb and forefinger …

I bought RESERVOIR 13 at my local book shop and it was the last copy on the shelf. The man who collected my money, whose taste I respect, said he was reading it himself. “Very good” was his welcome critique.

On the cover’s back leaf I saw that McGregor (I like to use his name because the protagonist of my as-yet-unpublished pseudonymic  novel is called McGregor) edits something called The Letters Page.

I went online to look for it – and loved what I found. (Try it here http://bit.ly/2j41E48 )

It’s been awhile since I’ve felt the urge to send out new work to journals, but this one edited by McGregor put me in the mind to come up with a letter and send it along to him. If nothing else, I’d be thrilled to think that a writer as talented McGregor would be sitting down and reading my work.

With that, I think I’ll go for funny. In writing letters to friends and family I find they (the letters, not the recipients) are at their (same, the letters) best when I think of my reader being tickled enough to laugh.

Yup, I’ll be sending a letter to McGregor soon. Definitely something to look forward to!

Next: Running for Your Life: Curling? In Brooklyn?

Running for Your Life: Caught One!

It happened around 12:40 p.m. (Nov. 29).

I was hoping to get out for a long run, say, an hour. But time got away from me. You see, I’m paper-chasing the documents, photos and legal signer I need in order to renew my Canadian passport, something I’ve been meaning to do for months.

(Well, since a year ago November, when a certain someone was elected president of the United States.) I renew my passport, and, well, that gives our family escape “claws.”

Busy work like that always takes longer than you think it will – AND I took it upon myself to try to improve our home music situation, which is a jury-rigged array of playing devices that root in a “system” I bought in the mid-1980s while I was employed as the assistant night news editor of the Windsor Star.

I had a sudden hankering to hear tunes from Sean McConnell’s “Sean McConnell,” especially “Queen of St. Mary’s” and “Beautiful Rose.”

All of which reduced that long run to a half-hour scamper up and into the park: 12:30 p.m. to 1 p.m.

It takes me 10 minutes running to a park access route near what is known as the Litchfield Villa. Up I went on the path, leaves falling in front of me on this mild day of intermittent breezes. Hands out as I run along, off-road trailing in the way I like to do it, and then, just as I veered south, a darting leaf appeared to my right, just above my head, and with a swipe I managed to snatch it by its “lower body.”

It didn’t hit the ground before I grabbed it – my first caught leaf while running in I don’t know how long.

It was a red oak leaf. From the same type of tree as the magnificent one that for 25 years was a glory to behold in our backyard before advanced disease forced us to cut it down earlier this year.

Next: Running for Your Life: Discovering Jon McGregor 

Running for Your Life: Eyes on the Sky

This fall in my neighborhood in brownstone Brooklyn when you direct your gaze upward there seems to be more to see than usual at this time of year.

I don’t advise this practice on unfamiliar urban streets, or when the pedestrian traffic excites around school buildings and along the main thoroughfares.

But on a path toward Prospect Park, a mid-morning route I know so well (every sidewalk abrasion and gnarly tree pit) that I take with M and T (our coonhound-bloodhound mix), I like to look up as I walk along.

Skeletal branches of ginkgo trees, which lose their leaves like a grass skirt down slim hips, reveal bird nests touched by morning light.

Sky so blue it makes your heart ache.

In the park itself, the stands of London plane trees, scatters of dry leaves holding on like arthritic fists, are naked beauties that restore the glory of what being white can be.

And, soon, the golden larch is on fire. The one I like (at the eastern entrance to the Lullwater Bridge near the Boathouse) is near aglow.

Get there, if you can, or the equivalent place of calm in your neighborhood, and cast your eyes to the sky.

Next: Running for Your Life: Discovering Jon McGregor 

Running for Your Life: Drawn to Greatness

Set aside THE POST headline title for the new Morgan Library (Manhattan) show of a drawings trove that will literally knock your socks off.

M and I went there the day before Thanksgiving, and I had many moments alone before small masterpiece after small masterpiece.

A taste from Victor Hugo’s “Fantastic Castle at Twilight”:

“[He] spilled ink onto the page; by tilting the sheet, dipping his pen in the wet ink, and leaving white reserve of paper to form a stark contrast to the ink-soaked patches, he invented . . . ”

Happy (US) Thanksgiving !

Next: Running for Your Life: Eyes on the Sky 

Running for Your Life: Where Canada Meets Portugal

Last month we went to Portugal, and in the small seaside town of Nazare (famous for its world-class surf), we found a charming family-run restaurant where we ended up having most of our meals.

One evening in the restaurant we struck up a conversation with an adult foursome who we soon learned were Portuguese-Canadian from Toronto.

“How about those Leafs this year?” I said. “I mean, really, how exciting are they to watch?”

“Very!” one woman beamed. “Are you from Canada?”

“Yes, Owen Sound, north of you.”

“Of course. Small world.”

“We are big fans of the Leafs, especially now,” she went on.

“How is that?”

“Because their son,” she pointed to the second couple in the foursome, “won the Air Canada Center’s Maple Leaf fashion design completion.”

Then, Mom, takes up the conversation.

“It was such a shock for us when he made the short list.” [The winner would dress Leaf fans for the 2017-18 season when their capsule collections are produced and sold exclusively at The Toronto Maple Leafs Store.]

“Well, I can imagine.”

“And then out of the blue, I received a phone call from the prize committee. They told me my son, Richard Campos, had won the men’s division.”

“That’s the last I remember because I was so happy I fainted.”

“You fainted?!”

“Just lucky I didn’t crack my skull when I hit the kitchen floor,” she said with a wide grin. “Just fainted for sheer joy.”

We have this good friend in Brooklyn, B, who M and I have become closer to in the past few years, and it wasn’t until recently we discovered that he is of Portuguese origins – by way of Toronto.

Ha, in Canada, one finds yourself in the shadow of the United States; in Portugal, in the shadow of Spain.

Humble, small countries and friendly unassuming people who are natural givers and skilled listeners.

When it comes to Portuguese-Canadians they seem to have a double-dose of those properties.

Next: Running for Your Life: Eyes on the Sky 

Running for Your Life: Words to Live By II

Be kind, be kinder, be kindest.

Detect that friends, workmates are taking advantage of your kindness, misinterpreting it as weakness, and double down on the kindness.

Convince yourself that if those friends and workmates persist in this misinterpretation, break relations or reduce contact with them, if feasible, if not, just carry on, you know, being kind, . . .

Next: Running for Your Life: Where Canada Met Portugal  

Running for Your Life: Radio to Finocchio

At Christmas time our family looks for one elegant gift, something to mark the year that’s past in a special way.

Most recently, there was the case of a fancy radio that I bought in Windsor, Ontario, during the mid-1980s. For years since I came to the US in late 1988, the radio was either in a box or sitting unused on a shelf in my basement workplace.

M’s radio from college finally gave out in the early 2000s, and for years we went without one.

Then, one day, I looked on a dusty shelf and considered my radio. I had thought, for some reason, that it was either broken, or just ill-suited for our home.

Then, during one recent Christmas season, I brought it up and found it worked like a charm, offering public radio news and classical music, in a way that M’s old college radio had done. It’s a glorious gift – especially during the holidays. M has said more than once that my old radio has changed her life.

This Christmas, it’s finocchio. Finocchio, as poured during special occasions with our dear friends in Puglia, is a chilled cordial made with fennel – and other homey ingredients – all true to the family recipe of our southern Italian friends.

M has made two batches, and we plan to give away little bottles of finocchio to friends and family during the holidays, with the idea that people will listen to music or news before their “radios” and toast all that is right with love and life.

Next: Running for Your Life: Where Canada Met Portugal  

Running for Your Life: By Your Leaf

This tree thing is getting to be something of an obsession.

It started, I suppose, or you could make the case, when I began catching leaves in the park.

Well, one leaf at a time.

There are rules as careful readers of this blog will know. (How many readers there may be I can only guess. Given the exciting spare-time choices people now have [Yes! virtual porn and 4G video games], I would think the total number of those readers could fit comfortably in a New York City subway car.)

Leaf-catching rules are as follows:

During a run inside Prospect Park, Brooklyn, I make a valiant effort to catch a falling leaf from a tree.

It must:

Not hit the ground,

Nor be trapped against my body. But caught like that childhood fly ball with your bare hand.

It’s been awhile since I’ve caught a leaf in the park. I’d say four or five years. Some of that has to do with a slowdown in training. Last marathon: 2014; last half-marathon: 2017. I’ve just been running in the park less frequently than I was when I started this blog almost eight years ago.

But I’ve no less of a passion for the pursuit. And by extension, for the trees themselves.

In Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “Autumn,” he writes about the first Daguerrotypes, in which the primitive quality made it impossible for human figures, no matter how still they attempted to be, to appear beyond some fuzzy, nondescript entities, while trees, especially those at a distance, are elegant and immaculate by comparison.

And, as I wrote in this space, some weeks ago:

Love trees, like dogs; human beings need a lot of work.

Next: Running for Your Life: Radio to Finocchio

Running for Your Life: Doubt as Starter

Am riding the N Train, going local, on a Sunday (Nov. 12) and making notes.

When I arrived at the station on the R Train, the more convenient D Train was on the express track, doors open. We R passengers made a bee line for the doors, which closed before anyone could get in. Then the D pulled out, which is why I’m on my second choice: the slow-moving N.

How hard is it to look and see, to accept, without judgment? For without that state of mind, doesn’t creativity founder?  

What is doubt in art but the starter, what you build from the ground up, you know, like in sourdough bread-making.

In art, your particular brand of doubt creates something fresh and new, removed from the unoriginal, the creative equivalent to the subway ad campaign for an entrepreneur service that in one ad chastises those who take a simple career path, noting disdainfully that it’s called a path because someone else has blazed it, meaning by that very nature the path is unoriginal and therefore not worthy of the best among us.

Precept: Original and new is good; unoriginal and old is bad.

A second ad by the entrepreneur gurus says: “Nobody ever said: ‘Just think about it.”

Except, of course, philosopher kings and queens … After all, thinking is the one thing that, at least theoretically, we humans do better than other animals. We apparently think; it is other animals that “do,” who, in fact, are the masters of doing.

Next: Running for Your Life: By Your Leaf  

Running for Your Life: Cassandra, Curmudgeon Conundrum

Often I appear to find myself on the opposite side of the cultural divide: especially when it comes to the apparent intrusion, by my lights, of personal technology.

Thus the latest Run4YrLife idea: the Cassandra, curmudgeon conundrum.

Rather than pigeon-hole myself as a grousing grinch when it comes to cellphone addiction (Oops, there I go again …) I’m making an effort here to be more sensitive to the positive aspects of personal technology as it affects our lives.

Consider the education of our children.

Thursday (Nov. 9), while running in Prospect Park, I saw a small class of grade-school children, using a nifty green-fringed tablet to take photos – and do research while milling about on a bridge over a watercourse. I imagine them using software to identify trees and shrubs, minerals, even ducks and geese.

Perfectly benign, right?

Meanwhile, Silicon Valley poobahs like Mark Zuckerberg see a gap to fill. I’d like to think that had to do with adding employees, improving the educated “stock” in math and sciences. After all, private tech companies are seeking to take a more active role in educating our children. Wow. Imagine the poobahs thinking as the most righteous do, ie, What is more life-fulfilling than to do the selfless work of educating our children and improving their quality of life – and not insignificantly – potentially unifying our fractious society through a politics-free push to create good jobs for all people?

In other words, doing what public schools used to be equipped and funded to do. What underpaid teachers continue to be renowned for.

Could it be remotely possible that we could be seduced to think that the idea of tablets being toted around the park, children staring into them, seeing the world mediated by a screen is not connected to the goals of the likes of Mark Zuckerberg.

Alas, I fear (CURMUDGEON ALERT!) this is not about educating our kids.

It’s what John Reed says in the movie “Reds” when asked about the origin of another BIG IDEA, World War I.

“Profits,” he says.

 Next: Running for Your Life: By Your Leaf  

Running for Your Life: Gowanus Sharp Shooters !

Time was not so long ago that Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood was young Al Capone’s stomping ground.

Now the fedoras are, well, worn ironically.

The man who would be Scarface apparently hung out at a pool hall on Garfield Place, between Fourth and Fifth avenues.

Now, 100 years later, Gowanus will soon be home to those who see sharp shooting not as a gang activity but FUN !!

Because on Degraw Street, between Third and Fourth avenues, coming soon (in December!) is:

KICK AXE THROWING!

As in a bar that doesn’t specialize in something like Capone-esque darts, but the throwing to targets of genuine wood-chopping, artery-spurting axes. Seriously, what could go wrong?

Ah, Brooklyn … It was so nice knowing you.

Next: Running for Your Life: Any Leaves Yet?

Running for Your Life: The Marathon

There is nothing ordinary about it.

The New York City Marathon

Think of it as the world’s largest

Outdoor church,

Or synagogue,

Or mosque,

Or sacred native space.

I’ve been to a few marathons in my time, including the granddaddy of them all:

In Boston

But in New York, on the first Sunday in November, the most unifying of nontribal events occurs,

A road race, of all things.

On Sunday (Nov. 5) I went to “worship” on Fourth Avenue at 11 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.

That part of Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn marks the 7-mile watering station of the race.

The look on so many faces at that early point in the marathon: ecstatic, joyful, proud.

And those of us watching, urging on the runners, were no less a part of the sacrament.

For one blissful half-hour, during the weekend marking the first anniversary of the Election Day

Victory of Donald Trump, I drank in the wonder that human beings can be capable of.

These runners before me didn’t come to win prizes, most, on their list of priorities, would rank the goal of getting a Personal Best time way down near the bottom.

Or so it seemed to me.

Who can forget their first New York City Marathon? Either as runner or spectator?

Comes a place, deep inside, where real, positive change is possible.

Next: Running for Your Life:  Gowanus Sharp Shooters !

Running for Your Life: Poem in Porto

A place far from what we

know

what are the sounds, the CREE-URR!

of the seagulls

beneath the clamor of voices,

laughter, scrape of chairs

rustle of brittle leaves of

the potted olive trees

the blood stirs

the heart lifts

the farther north we go

the closer the touch

until under the clothes

the hair tingles on

flesh from breastbone

to groin

not the full sink,

the descent from the cliffs,

the seagull CREE-URR!

or the wafts of ocean mist

Behold a taste. Salt on my parted lips.

Next: Running for Your Life:  Gowanus Sharp Shooters !