Tarmac Meditations

A Week In a Life

August 11, 2012 By Michael Lebowitz 1 Comment

Just watched a very smart show and had the thought that my life could have been/should have been filled with that kind of intelligence and adrenaline-excitement and I got very close to regret. Then it occurred to me that I couldn’t go back and change things but I could give the work I do every day the same kind of integrity, find that feeling there. So okay then, let’s get it on.

In Boise, Idaho. Heading to Boise National Forest in a couple of hours to shoot the Wild Idaho Fifty Mile Endurance Run(WIFMER). This event was the first true ultra I shot, a year ago this weekend; a lot has happened since, damn near all of it well beyond anything I might have imagined and damn near all of it very, very, good. I will see the usual suspects, meet some new ones, sleep little, work lots and maybe get some photo images that enhance but will never replace the effort and the memory of what these folks, what ultra folks everywhere, do when they set out on the single track, light out down the road, go over yonder, all of it just because. I have been given a great gift in this, my second chance, and I intend to honor it with my presence and hard work, with a little bit of prayer and a whole mess of good luck, the forces willin’ and the crick don’t rise.

People who are my age often say “things were simpler then” and I think that it is a crock but then I heard this on the radio” Hey, bad news, be no rockin’ tonight/hey bad news be no rockin’ tonight, baby’s gone, ain’t nowhere in sight.” Okay then, simpler and when I first heard that I had no idea that rockin’ meant what rockin’ meant in the way that Rockin’ meant it, although the parents of my generation who said it was all about sex and shit, they were right about thinking it was pretty simple and outright scary. Me, I thought it sounded great and you sure could dance to it.

Gonna go to Mt Hood today to shoot a 50 mile race tomorrow. Gonna see a lot of people I know, meet some new ones. Gonna drive home late, sleep some and shoot another mountain run on Sunday morning at Hardesty; gonna see a bunch of people I know. Meet some new ones. Thursday I’m gonna go to Idaho, to the Boise National Forest and shoot a 50 miler and see a bunch of people I know, meet some new ones: all these people I know love what they do and where they do it. I sometimes think I am pretty damned lucky to be allowed to participate in my own little way. Correction: I think that every freakin’ day. Rock on, y’all, the best is yet to come.

“It’s one of those things that I just got lucky, and I didn’t screw up. It’s about being lucky and not screwing up, and trying to be ready for some moment if you happen to be the right place.” David Burnett, photographer on a famous Olympic image (Mary Decker in ’84) I ain’t him, and what I shoot isn’t Olympic in stature but it’s damned hard for the athletes and not easy on me so when it works, and it sometimes does, I think, wow, I got it, well, really, I didn’t screw it up. Nice to know I’m not alone with that.

Early Morning False Alarm

July 9, 2012 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

In the distance, while lacing up before 5:00 “Come out with your hands up, you are surrounded!” this down the street on a what was otherwise a very quiet summer morning. I remember those mornings from another time-more like the end of another long bad night. I ran by, recognized a couple of the uniforms from some local races, nodded and got my miles. It was a very hard way to live. When I looked back the lights were still flashing and several lives were heading south. After my run my neighbor asked me what all the fuss had been about; I pointed down the road and said “It took us years to learn that the “shit” could kill you, I guess it’s their turn now.” He nodded, sipped his coffee, hit his smoke and went back inside. I don’t know where he had been when I had been where those kids are now, but he had been somewhere and the memory wasn’t easy. I was glad in that moment that I didn’t have his day.

Moondance by Van Morrison had been playing on the ‘Pod while I was running. When this song/album came out I was working a cement crew in a sewer treatment plant being built in Toronto. My girlfriend and later, wife and mother to my kids, used to get up and make lunch for me. In the early summer morning we would eat breakfast, usually maple syrup bacon and eggs and toast and coffee on the french paned glassed in back porch of our beautiful, soon to be replaced by a huge apartment complex, brick house with a view of downtown. What ever could go wrong with that? It was simpler then and maybe it was easier but inevitably it changed. Now the apartments remain, the wife is ex, the children are grown and lovely…the music and the memories are still plenty good. I can almost taste that bacon and really, there is no need to explain why I was smiling when I finished my run.

Almost Independence Day 2012

July 4, 2012 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

Sometimes I rewrite the past, make it up, turn things around, maybe what happened to me really happened to somebody else or the other way around. I used to think of it as lying, then later as imagination leading to writing. These days I sometimes think I do it to make things easier, at least easier until I have the courage and the willingness to turn into the wind and square up. It’s almost the Fourth of July 2012, Independence Day. Me and Van Morrison have been at this thing a long time. Together, after a fashion. Missing absent friends tonight, so I’m just listenin’ to the music, watchin’ the sun slip away over ridgeline, thinkin’ about how tired I get when I’m wonderin’ about how things are, about how they got this way, when I’m doin’ nothin’ more than waitin’ on the comin’ day.

Love Story #7

June 21, 2012 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

I woke up this cold summer morning in the arms of a nightmare. The taste of last night’s crack cocaine still rancid in my mouth, the smoke drifting across the dust in the morning light, I was right there, right back where I used to be every morning in those endless years.

These days I know that the dream is just a dream. That the taste is a memory of lost highways and bad medicine. That loneliness has been the way of my life. But then again, I’m clean. It is another day to work the spaces between the black keys of meeting my fate or the white ones of following my destiny.

And you? Where are you? I left you hanging on the phone after the last time you called me and asked for money to go to school. We both knew that two grand wasn’t for school. It was a coke buy and a short hard run into back to Hell.

I remembered taking all your garbage bag suitcases out to the front stoop, locking the door behind me, leaving town, going up river. A couple of days later I left the state and then the country. After awhile, a long while, it was far enough to get you out of my daily mind, my midnight terror.

Until this morning.

I loved you in my broken way. Recently I met someone and I think it might be a true thing, the real deal. I think you showed up last night to bless my escape, say goodbye, to let me let you go.

I hope you made it out, that you never found the two grand, that you got off the highway. I hope that I never hear how that worked out, that I never see you again; not in the street, not in a store, not in the drift of an early morning or comin’ in soft on the night wind. Never. Not ever.

But sometimes I know you are around and it reminds me that there were unexpected moments of kindness and fiercely sweet, an odd loyalty inside our unholy partnership, that we were danicng a Devil’s two-step way past the end of love.

Driftin’

June 19, 2012 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

The court stenographer reminds me of Sandy-what’s-her-name, quiet and proud, interior, aloof. I always wanted Sandy-what’s-her-name. She stood tall and straight. An athlete, a dancer. She walked softly, steady on her feet, blonde pony tail metronome. I thought she was, well, I thought she was beautiful. We talked all the time but I never knew her at all. I asked her to the Jr. High prom or maybe the high school prom.She said no. And then she smiled her lovely, sweet, sad smile.

It seems bizarre to me that I keep thinking of Sandy as I sit here in the courtroom during a criminal trial of a friend. He is facing five years for a felony count of possession of pornography. The expert witnesses are explaining how his bipolar disease had caused his drug abuse, which led to his hanging out with the hooker who led him to the porno sites which became the possession in question. It is very sad . He is my friend. I have been told that I have the same disease. Bi polar maybe, more likely addiction. Mine came on at about age nineteen. I abused drugs for forty years but have never been charged with possession of pornography. Or done hard time. Or died.

I keep trying to listen to the witnesses but mostly I watch the court stenographer. The judge gives my friend five years and then suspends the sentence. He puts him on probation in the care of the facility where he is still in treatment.

Something good has happened here or at least it seems to be good at this moment. I remember, as we walk down the hallway in the company of my friend and his Vietnam veteran Marine Corps lawyer who uses a couple of “oorahs” to describe his feelings, that Sandy had a brother who beat me up once after school. He was always in trouble with the law. Given the choice of going to jail after some serious incident or enlisting in the Marines he chose the Marines. Years later I heard that he died at Khe Sahn.

I wonder if she still walks quietly. I wonder if we met accidentally would we say hello and talk awhile. Maybe we would nod, not really knowing how we knew each other. Maybe we would smile but just keep on with the hurry of the day, waiting for later, waiting for the drift into how it was way back when, when we were all bored silly, scared half to death, filled with promises and dreams, waiting forever for our lives to happen.