Tarmac Meditations

  • Writing
    • Fiction
    • Non Fiction
    • Journal
    • Archive
  • LongRun Pictures
  • Contact
  • About the author

© 2010-2018 Michael Lebowitz · All Rights Reserved · Powered by Genesis · Admin

You are here: Home / Archives for Tarmac Meditations

Facing Up To It

August 30, 2012 By Michael Lebowitz 1 Comment

“Endurance? You’ve only got to get out there and do it. Face up to it: Man was meant to run.” –Percy Cerutty. I am swimming upstream. Come the end of Summer, cool air, touch of Fall, the beginning of the end of things in this cycle, time to take stock, stock up, buy school supplies, bring on the next chapter. With age, my age, comes nostalgia and excitement sometimes in equal doses. Once I was sailing on Lake Superior when the mast broke a long way from shore.  We drifted for hours, panicked a little, got it back together, caught a break with a shift in the wind and finally got back to shore the help of neighbor who had seen us drifting away. It had been Summer, lazy, easy and sweet when we set out and Fall, chill, gray and foreboding, the few hours later when we returned to shore. Yeah, we were meant to run, we are also meant to ‘get out there and do it” by whatever means available, every single day, age and weight and troubles notwithstanding, on account of the river waits for no salmon and time waits for no man.

 WIFMER/WIHMER 2011

Photograph by Michael Lebowitz ©2011

Filed Under: Journal, Tarmac Meditations Tagged With: aging, drifting, running, Tarmac Meditations, time

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.

Motorcycle Morning_July 2012-2

Photograph by Michael Lebowitz ©2012

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.

 

Filed Under: Journal, Tarmac Meditations Tagged With: iPod, Moondance, running, Tarmac Meditations, Toronto, Van Morrison

Tarmac Meditations-It Ain’t Heaven…It’s Illinois.

May 29, 2012 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

I was riding in an ATV on my way to Memorial Stadium in Champaign-Urbana to get to the finish line of a 10K race event. In order to get there before the first finishers we scooted down a back road. I shot this from the back of the ATV, high shutter speed and ISO and a great deal of good luck. The sky wasn’t that precise blue and the shadows weren’t quite that long, but it felt like the end of day. The sunlight on the silo spoke of night coming and something special in the air. So that is how I processed it.

It ain't heaven...It's Illinois.

Filed Under: Journal, Photography, Tarmac Meditations Tagged With: ATV, Champaign, Illinois, Photography, Tarmac Meditations, Urbana