Archives for October 2017

“But everything keeps on a-moving
Yeah, everybody’s on the go
You don’t find things that last anymore
Like an old woven Navajo rug.”
Navajo Rug, Ian Tyson

I have always loved this song, mostly on account of Katy, a waitress with an eye for woven products; she knew how to make good use of that old  Navajo rug. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.  

I often write about serious stuff, you know long distance running, bad health, bad attitudes, mine in particular, and, around last year’s election about the state of the nation as I saw it.  Today with this song as a reminder, I am thinking about something from way back, so long ago, that Dwight David Eisenhower was president. Who?? In my household that was a disaster. If my parents had not already passed on, they would be in that process now with Donald Trump in the White House. Be grateful for small mercies is what I say.

The other day in the seemingly  endless cycle of chronic back pain, I was trying to make my bed. These days that takes way more energy than it used to, so I found myself doing a blanket angel on the bed. I noticed not for the first time that the blanket in question was a classic Hudson’s Bay blanket, you know, the white ones with the green, red yellow and black  stripes. I bounced up and began staring at the blanket. As with Proust and his famous Madeleine, I was transported back to the long ago days before yesterday, when all the talk was about nuclear holocaust, the Red Menace, and either the Brooklyn Dodgers (yes, they usta be in Bwooklyn) or the New York Yankees. I am of the generation that learned to “duck and cover” in school under those God-awful school desks that were so popular in the 50s.  I left PS 164 and escaped to high school, just in time for the Cuban Missile Crisis. Living, as I did, under the flight paths of both LaGuardia and what was too soon to become JFK,  it was not only a large scale universal nightmare but  also a deeply personal one from the standpoint of a selfish, awkward 15 year old, in that I was terrified every time a plane went over head. In this I was not unusual. Unbeknownst to the millions of Americans whose nightmares were similar to my own, I was sure I had an answer, if not to the missile crisis, then to my own survival. I knew from my earlier experience in the 50s that if I was under my Hudson’s Bay blanket I would live forever, safe from whatever idiocies  the adult world  beyond my control could think up.

Despite the fact that I am no longer 15, (what a relief), I still confront the idiocies of a world that I no longer understand very well nor which I can control in any way.  The one that has Donald Trump as president. When Senator Bob Corker brought up the phrase World War 3, I found myself doing blanket angels on my now straightened up Hudson’s Bay blanket. These were not superstitious, or a return to my misguided, sometimes terrified, youth. I was simply exhausted with the anger that I have lived with since Trump was elected. I sat up on the bed and looked around, listened for air raid sirens, heard none and decided quite happily that today was not going to be a day when I would die in a nuclear holocaust. When I looked down at the blanket, a sense of great relief flooded over me, and just a little embarrassment for my instantaneous return to childhood demons, and to my simple, happy, impossible, solutions.  

Peace of mind is where you find it, so too relief… and a veteran blanket.

Photo Credit

Photo by Michael Lebowitz – All rights reserved.

My own personal road to perdition is lined with understatement, delusion, lies, ghosts, and prayers and sometimes, at 3:00 AM; the ghost women, who forgive my atrocities with a “well we’re past all that now and besides it wasn’t all all that bad,” show up in fragmentary images of destruction and renewal. So I need to stop apologizing, get back on my feet, get my sorry ass into the “right now” and keep on keeping on the way I am. I’m still here, you bastards (me, my addictions), you didn’t kill me… and I ain’t quit.

From a very different perspective, Yogi Berra once said “ when you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Well, okay then. Best thing I did today was to call my daughter who has upper respiratory misery. All a guy can do is stay in the game. Back to Yogi, Tarmac Meditations started out as a bunch of short pieces about me running and thinking about stuff. It changed into an umbrella for whatever I was writing at the moment, usually something about a moment in my past, an effort to explore my own voice and style as a writer or more accurately as a person/writer in recovery. Along the way I became an OK sports/ landscape photographer. The not so subtle fork in the road had showed up. But “Life” had it’s own plans for me in the form of several strokes and some seriously debilitating illness. I lost nearly all of my physicality, half of my vision and a lot of the fine motor control it takes to type. What to do and how to do it?

Just taking “it”, as Yogi suggested, looks like a potpourri of slow walking, light lifting, much complaining and some serious attention to good practices in handling my recovery. The physical deficits were bedeviling my ongoing efforts to shoot and write, let alone just getting to the store. Sounds awful when I read that last sentence back to myself. But it wasn’t awful at its heart, it was just hard. The long-distance runner I used to be employed all the tricks of the trade. The mental con games, the search for ways to push without causing more damage (gently) the use of “pacing” and “partitioning”, known more simply as going slower, taking breaks and REST. So here I am, healthier, stronger, older, humbled and looking for a new beginning.

It may be that the fork in the road is all in the mind and the person who lives inside our hearts and souls will make the effort to let clarity happen. Also known as “being here now”. I am still running (walking every now and then, lifting and shooting). I am slowly getting back to the world in the ways I know, having learned the most important lessons of my life. Letting go does NOT mean giving up. It means more precisely that the long distance runner in me has come to know how best to let the “run” come to him on the day; and whatever the results, pretty, ugly, awful or so-so that there are some days when “it” all comes together, as if in a dream. Those remarkable moments when the “flow” of a perfect turn in the deep powder, or a sunset’s back-lit miler’s stride in the stretch turn  is embraced once again, if only briefly.

I have come to know that keeping on is my only choice. That the shooting and the writing will be here only  so long as I am willing to use what I have learned from not running. it is part of my new life going forward, slower, humbled,  and grateful for the opportunity to make the miles ahead my own.

Photo Credits

Photos by Michael Lebowitz – All rights reserved.

“Tom Petty, who died Monday, was tuned in to the blank spaces between our catastrophes and triumphs, when we are desperately trying to sort out what comes next. When we take to running.”

The New Yorker, October3, 2017.

It has been that kind of week and, it is only Tuesday. RIP Tom petty (1950-2017)

A guy I know, from the running community here in town, said hello while we were waiting for coffee. I see him around from time to time and he always asks me, with a smile, “where is your camera?” and “are you shooting any events?”

I told him that I had cut back pretty much entirely but that I was still thinking I could run an event sometime in the near future. “My body is unwilling for the moment”, is what I said. “But my dreams are still alive”. Then he asked me if I liked poetry, I said, “yeah”. He said, “Langston Hughes wrote about dreams.”

Later I went home and looked it up.

Dreams

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

Langston Hughes, 1902 – 1967

Photo Credit

Photo by Michael Lebowitz – All rights reserved.