Brucian morning

I was out before seven Sunday morning, shuffling my usual VS², and I crossed paths with two other early morning pedestrians. Bruce 1 and I have known each other for decades. We played baseball together, and, temporarily but firmly known as Speedball, he captained my high school cross-country team when I was a junior. (Our team always arrived at away meets in style. The younger boys rode in the coach’s battered, early-’50s Buick, and we grand oldsters laughed our way along in the moving clubhouse that was Bruce’s rattletrap even-earlier-’50s Chevy hydromatic—known simply as The Bomb—urging it back up to speed with encouraging comments and body english after every stop sign or signal.) On our walks, Paul and I often pass a few semi-humorous remarks with Bruce in his front yard as he heads for his car and work. Sunday, he was out for a walk of his own, and as we passed, his question about Paul was asked and answered on the fly. (Away again, eating with Gotham sophisticates in swank New York restaurants.)

Bruce 2 I barely know, but he puts me to shame. Tall, and thin as a rail, he uses that upright, light-footed, short-striding, high turnover style you often see in ultra runners, to do his daily seven miles. He runs the same out-and-back day after day, and almost never misses. When I chatted briefly with him at the library recently, he told me he’d just taken his first two days off in almost a year. He’s vastly fitter than I am, and at least 10 years younger, but he described a familiar problem to explain his enforced rest: “I begin to feel good, I push things a little, and....” Yes, yes, I understand.

The brief encounter with Bruce 1 got me thinking about favorite running partners over the years, and I quickly defaulted to memories of running with our daughter when she was very young. She would sometimes accompany me on her first bicycle. She delighted in coasting on the hills. Down, of course, but up, too, where she giggled as I leaned in and pushed her toward the top, grunting, “Pedal! Pedal!” She began coming along on foot when she was quite small. I’d cant slightly to the right to take her little hand (a technique instituted after an unfortunate trip and fall), and away we’d go for perhaps half a mile, when she’d say, “Can we take a rest now?” and we’d walk along together chatting about one thing or another, until I’d say, “How about if we pick it up again when we get to that next telephone pole?” She’d say, “How about the one after that?” And, of course, the one after that it was. Favorite running partner? No contest, really.

Adenda

Ha! Nothing like forgetting the key to the door. I meant to include this link, from the Gallup Poll, as the focus of yesterday’s post.

Vin ordinaire

We drink mostly wine here. A glass or two in the evening, more if we’re joined by friends. There’s always a bottle of something bubbly in the fridge, just in case a celebration comes in order. (We celebrate promiscuously. Why not?) After the big Friday night gathering there’s a real chiming going on when I put out the empties.

When I was a young man, I got really wrapped up in wine. I read, I kept a label book with tasting notes, and I drank as much good stuff as we could afford. (I once found a bottle of Chateau Carbonnieux in a Charlottesville, Virginia Safeway bin for a little over $3. A steal even in the mid-’70s). Then I realized that a person with an obsessive personality should probably chose a cheaper and less—what?—dizzying obsession. Nowadays, with the help of an excellent wine merchant, we concentrate on good stuff that for one reason or another is essentially under-priced, and in an effort at mental health I make an effort not to keep close track of what runs through the rack in the closet. A bottle that costs over $10-12 is a rarity at our table. A bottle that costs less isn’t. We usually avoid disaster (though they make for the best stories after the fact—one of us has learned to say “this wine is corky” in Italian), cheerfully toss down the adequate, and bend our loyalties toward the occasional exceptional discovery.

Over the years, I’ve trained myself so far from expertise and involvement that I’ve never seen Sideways, and through a series of random opportunities a while back, I thought I’d discovered all by myself that American producers, after years of marketing Pinot Noirs that were mostly just not very good, had figured out how to make really fine ones. Of course, they’re all waaay too expensive.

Hey, I was just looking for some jazz...

If you subscribe to iTunes, take a look at the feature offered in “iTunes U” by the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Arts and Sciences, “60 Second Lectures” (which, as far as I can tell are mostly 90-second lectures). There’s a puckishly amusing one by poet Charles Bernstein, called “What Makes a Poem a Poem.” (He endearingly—and I’m sure by no means innocently—pronounces the word the way most Americans do: Pome.) There’s also the possibly unintentional poetry of “Human History,” offered by intellectual historian Alan Charles Kors. And 19 other cool stretched minutes, which I’ve just discovered you can also find here and here.

The big DeSoto

I grew up in an old house that had a wonderful screened porch looking


through the remains of an eccentric apple plantation down the yard toward the drive and garage.


In the summers of my pre-teen boyhood, I often had friends spend Saturday night, and we invariably “slept” on that porch, watching fireflies and discussing the vital issues of boyhood, which in my memory seem to have centered on the key topics of baseball and whether we’d get the mean teacher or the nice one in the fall. We’d eventually conk out, and very often I was nudged awake shortly after Sunday’s dawn to answer the whispered question, “Who is that guy?”

I never needed to look. “It’s my father’s friend, Mr. Anderson.” And there in the drive would be, not just our little 1953 Hudson Jet, but a big, gray, magnificently finned DeSoto. Next to it, on the dewy grass apron in front of the left-hand garage door, would be a very long man lying on a nearly horizontal beach recliner, singing a hymn.

Mr Anderson, six-foot-six, was a generation older than my father, but a friend and mentor from work. Divorced and lonely, as even a boy could see, he lived in the city my parents had left in favor of this fixer-upper in the country. He visited fairly often, sometimes taking us for cloud-like rides that always seemed to include a stop at an ice cream stand. At some point, he’d asked my father if he could come out on Sunday mornings to commune with nature and the deity at the edge of our driveway.

Regular sleep-over guests got used to the big DeSoto and the tall man in the chaise longue vocalizing in the driveway. (The whispered comment became, “There’s Mr. Anderson.”)

He didn’t expect company or an invitation to breakfast. My dad had discovered that early on and had decided simply to leave his friend to his own sabbath devices. Eventually, the tall man would stand up, fold the recliner into the DeSoto’s cavernous trunk, and motor silently away, leaving two boys, wondering, on that big screened porch.

Pair up your animals

Weathercasters this morning were gleefully terrifying us, showing maps of a green-yellow east coast and scaring us with video of cars consumed as torrents raced down streets. This is catastrophe of the first order! Pair up your animals and launch the family ark!

Oh, what fun! It was pouring out, and my choice of a brolly rather than a rainsuit may have been a little optimistic, though Paul, well swaddled, wound up looking once again like a drowned rat while I just looked like a guy who’d forgotten to get undressed before hopping into the shower, a much more fashionable presentation.

At the bottom of the cemetery, Lake H was full up. Oblivious drivers of the dwindling number of SUVs sent up sheets of water from the puddles along the roads.

Hardrocks, orthotics, and innersoles now line the entryway bench, slowly airing themelves dry.



It stopped raining some time ago. (Oh, too bad! No houses collapsing into swept-away river banks!). I’m off over the hill to Roxbury to buy some beautiful local tomatoes.

I imagine the weather people have turned their attention elsewhere. There are always those fires in California. By the way, how warm is it supposed to get today?

The well is dry...

...and since I’m my own editor, I get to say, “Oh, no problem. Let’s go with this clip from The Onion.”


Study: Most Children Strongly Opposed To Children’s Healthcare