It has been brought to my attention that I am an idiot

The return of Standard Time makes it lighter in the early morning, not darker. So Woodbury’s early risers will not be spared the terrible sight of me grunting and drooling my lumpish and creaky way around town. They’ll either have to avert their eyes or get used to the assault on their senses. Or they can sleep later, which would probably be best for everybody.

Wrist watch

I’m trying to get back to regular running. Our morning walks are really, really good (though Paul’s gone off cosmopolizing again), but I need more if I want to remain merely moderately chubby, and a shuffle every-other day before the walk pretty much does the trick.

I have, however, been stymied.

Over the decades, I’ve been kept from regular running in all the usual ways, from sheer laziness to back spasms. My recent problem, though, has been one of those “who’da thunk it” deals. I sprained my right wrist a few weeks ago coming down off Wildcat D, when I fell on one of the slabs. I think my right Pacer Pole collapsed, throwing me off balance at the wrong moment. (If this is so, it was user error for sure, not a problem with the sticks). Since then, I’ve progressed from not being able to shift the car to (triumph!) being able to pour my wine right-handed (though using the corkscrew is still a bit dicey). During most of that time, though, I couldn’t run because my wrist hurt too much, a new and embarrassingly dainty state of affairs. *

I’m ready to roll now, though. Just in time for the return of Standard Time to ensure that it will be pitch dark at 6:30. Woodbury’s early risers will be spared the terrible sight of me grunting and drooling my lumpish and creaky way around town. In the spring, I will emerge from my chrysalis of darkness lithe, smooth, quick, and supple. Or perhaps merely moderately chubby. Either way, I’ll be down with that corkscrew.


* But not as embarrassing as this: Once when I was, I think, a junior in college, my coach sent me to the infirmary to be tested for mono because I was running so poorly. I was actually hoping I was sick. Test negative. I just stunk.

Friday jaunt

We had only a few light sprinkles as we drove the hour or so up to the trailhead Friday morning. I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to walk in decent weather, after the fine times I’d had recently hiking in downpours. P and M, however, who had endured some drenched Scottish walking and camping in August, seemed okay with it, so I decided to join the end of the line (P, R, and M) as we headed into the woods just north of the Connecticut-Massachusetts state line.


Our route was a six-mile loop that encompassed Mount Everett (2,624 ft.), a tall peak in this part of the world. Our path took us up Race Brook Trail, steep, rocky and beautiful next to its cascading brook.



The view from the first outlook showed that the New England autumn wasn’t quite over. The flame of maple leaves was gone, but the oaks hadn’t all put on their dull brown winter coats.


It took us a strenuous three hours (stretched a bit by our losing the trail and scratching around for a while before finding it again—on the other side of the brook) to reach the Appalachian Trail, turn north, slab up Everett’s shoulder, and eventually achieve the remains of the old fire tower atop the mountain.


A little further on, we stopped at a shelter for lunch. A snappy dresser with impeccable standards, R decided it was a good time to dry his laundry.


I, secure in my sartorial perfection, simply enjoyed an apple.


A little farther on, we passed this tree. At first I thought some thru-hiking vandal had carved a message, but no...it’s just ink.


We made good time down the gentle Elbow Trail off the ridge, debouched onto the attractive campus of the the Berkshire School, did a little car shuttling, and headed for home to clean up, collect some random hangers-on, and get over to R and MJ’s to enjoy some comfortable lolling about, a spectacular meal of veggie lasagna, and great good-humored conversation—accompanied, of course, by one or two swallows of terrific wine.

Hard to imagine a more enjoyable day.

Not barefoot in the park

Finally, an intelligent article on this whole running shoes-don’t-really-help thing. It’s very true that when you’re fit and light and biomechanically adequate—let’s just say when you’re young and genetically fortunate—that running barefoot is wonderful. As a kid, when I had to run short and fast, I always stripped off my shoes. Picnic and schoolyard sprints, touch football, that kind of stuff. Oh, that wonderful lifting fleetness I now experience only in memory.

But the idea that modern, urban, middle-aged fitness runners—creaky, heavy, biomechanically inefficient—would be better off slogging their miles in naked tootsies is bizarrely absurd. “Three to five miles on the streets of Cambridge, completely barefoot,” might work out for a particular Harvard professor, but would pretty much guarantee a sudden epidemic of strained achilles tendons if the rest of us took it up, not to mention wonky knees and hips and the inevitable cuts, scrapes, and bruises. (Barefoot on city streets? I’m tempted to say, “are you insane?”—but this is a Harvard professor.)

The article, in this morning’s New York Times, finally talks sense and gets it right, I think.

Music At Twilight

Before I lost the hearing in one ear in the mid-’80s, I listened primarily to what’s commonly called classical music. My special love was the chamber music of the late 18th and early 19th centuries—roughly Hayden to Schubert. We used to go to a lot of live performances, the memories of which still give me pleasure many years later. Two of the most wonderful were given at Sprague Hall at Yale: a deep and intense Death and the Maiden by the Alban Berg Quartet, and a joyfully friendly reading of the Mendelssohn Octet by a group of superb local players.

After a multi-decade hiatus, we headed for Sprague again Sunday to hear a long-time favorite (and probably the only performer who could have gotten me to New Haven through what has become this autumn’s habitual rain, wind, and low temps), the splendid Emma Kirkby who, with Lutenist Jakob Lindberg, presented a program of “Songs and Solos from Early 17th Century Europe.” Lindberg is no mere accompanist. He took four or five solos, and plays his 500-year-old instrument with immaculate technique and great musicality.


I prefer Emma Kirkby in later music—the Handel and such that I’m more familiar with—but she certainly sold me on Dowland, Purcell, et al. What a voice! As the program said, she “values ensemble, clarity and stillness alongside the more usual factors of volume and display.” “Stillness” in a soprano—a miracle! It is this restraint in the service of the music, along with the remarkable purity and accuracy of her voice that made me a Kirkby groupie long ago.

I remember in the late ’70s listening to the long-time, long-gone, morning classical radio fixture Robert J. Lurtzema (I so miss Robert J.) interviewing Kirkby. On air, he exclaimed that he noticed she was wearing a band on her ring finger. He asked, in evident distress, if she was married. She was. He immediately, on air, went into a little public spiral of mourning. He’d obviously had a terrific crush on her. Surely, he wasn’t alone in that.

An almost walk, a short walk, and a non-walk

The almost walk:
Last Wednesday was flu-shot morning for sweet B, H had a cold, and it was also wet in New Hampshire. Rain came down most of the day, and when it slackened, H and I packed the baby up and bolted for the McLane Audubon Preserve, hoping to get in at least a little stroll in the fresh air before it resumed. Mais non, mes amis. Open car door, pull out Kelty, begin to slide B into it, and—presto!—downpour resumes. We wandered around the indoor exhibits and the cool eyrie (a tower for watching raptors) for a while, but the rain never ceased, and we headed home to Jasper the Wonderdog, who we’d thought wouldn’t be welcome at a bird sanctuary.

The short walk:
Thursday we motored northwest to Mount Cardigan. But poor B seemed to be feeling the effects of yesterday’s shot. She was uncharacteristically unhappy, and cried on and off in her Kelty as we started up the trail. After about half an hour, H and I realized things weren’t going to get any better, and we turned around and brought the miserable sweetie back to the car.

The non-walk:
On Friday, H’s cold was worse, she had scheduled responsibilities at the new house, I knew my creaky knees were facing the haul over the Wildcats on Saturday, and we decided discretion was the better part of valor.

All in all, though, we had a wonderful week together, H and I got out a bit with B, and the New Hampshire wing of the family finally set up housekeeping at their new address.

Which is how sweet B, again under her dad’s CamelBak, discovered that banging these things together makes NOISE!

Winter pokes its nose through the curtains

It’s snowing here in Woodbury...and this during what is usually the crispest, brightest, best time of year. Goody.