Running for Your Life: Back to the Fire

Love the run (Sept. 2) to the phallic spear, west Fire Island, a herd of deer graze on the lawn oval, from my starting place from Dunewood, probably three miles, am thinking that I can run much farther, amazed at the lack of Irene damage, some salt water, diseased-looking trees, toppled over, some dead, undergrowth, except it seems for a tiny oasis, mosquitoes at night but not now in the breeze, nip in the air, which also helps.

Elsewhere, the breeding grounds for the Minnesota state bird expand under near-compromised homes on stilts. Remember nowhere can a basement flood here. The depth of the land itself no great shakes, literally a spit of sand in the ocean, laugh riot of a reality TV show, Survivor: Fire Island. Look for it.

Running for Your Life: Discovering Derek Parfit

It’s been a long, long time since I got so much out of a single New Yorker http://nyr.kr/otYONF. (Talking magazines, not my daughter, she of the powerful intellect http://nyp.st/ielb6l and perfect-pitch loyalty, that’s her. In case you’re wondering my wife M lives in New York but is as Midwestern as Fitzgerald; and yeah, nods to Paul Simms and “God’s Blog” http://nyr.kr/oAzqQX

Back-to-back wonders, the undressed-down, let-his-story-tell-the-story style of Larissa Macfarquhar’s “How to Be Good” profile of the heretofore unknown to me philosopher Derek Parfit, and the crystalline father and son story, “Town of Cats,” by Haruki Murakami. Seems the work of a single mind. Our heroes, Parfit and Tengo, find joy and passion in both science and literature. This from “TOC”: especially in “TOC”: science on the one hand and literature on the other:

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.