Sprinting

Sometimes we run away from things. Sometimes we run towards things. And sometimes we just run.

In the spring of 1980, I was living on the upper west side of New York City, just off the campus of Columbia University. A junior at a college in another state, I had gotten an internship in mid-town Manhattan and, in order to save some money, slept on the floor of my brother’s walk-up studio apartment on 115th street. For a non-urbanite, the city was an exciting place to live; there was no shortage of opportunities to learn about cuisine, the arts, music, and the diversity of the human condition. There was, however, limited access to exercise facilities. And I was a person who needed to exercise.

Running helped keep me sane. I wasn’t the happiest of twenty year-olds, a young man with a mind that ran incessantly and a body that didn’t seem to fit its clothing or surroundings. My collegiate junior year, thus far, had been stressful, leaving me out-of-shape, overweight, and unfulfilled. So I took to the streets and parks of NYC, in search of respite through distance running. It didn’t work. With all the traffic lights and intersections, it was too difficult for to find a stride and a rhythm that relaxed. A run, in fact, almost made me more unsettled.

But one day, by happenstance, I noticed something about the upper west side of Manhattan between 115th and 110th streets. The traffic lights, while not timed, did have a certain rhythm. At a brisk pace, and beginning just when the first traffic light turned green, I could reliably run five city blocks without needing to stop. And five city blocks, I decided after a little investigation, was about a quarter mile. Ahha! If I couldn’t get myself into a distance running routine, I realized that I could devise my own “track” work-out on street named Broadway.

If you’ve ever run “intervals” on a track, you know that it can be challenging to run a series of single lap sprints without a running partner. There is nothing to chase, no one to keep pace with, and you always end up where you began. Striding on the busy streets of Manhattan brought more visual stimulation than an oval track. It also had some inherent dangers (things called cars, taxis, etc), requiring a heightened vigilance. But, despite the advantages, there was still the problem of motivation. Beating the lights and bettering my previous times down the five block linear track still left something to be desired.

Until one glorious day when I found the perfect running partner, a jackrabbit made for urban street pursuit: the city bus. With stops at both 115th and 110th streets, and a schedule that regularly supplied new chrome-bumpered hares, the exhaust-spewing public conveyors, I discovered, were ideal training companions. It took a work-out or two for me to get all the timing kinks resolved – bus arrivals weren’t uniformly in sync with the traffic lights. Within a week or so, however, I sorted out the details. And, quite mysteriously and wonderfully, I found a perfect urban training partner.

You may think it is difficult to beat a bus in a race. It is not. In fact, even with a beautiful stream of green lights and traffic moving at a nice clip, I quickly learned that the bus wasn’t too challenging a competitor. So I gave it a head start. And that – now that – added some spice to the whole scenario.

Picture it: a guy jogs in place at the corner of Broadway and 115th Street. A bus arrives at the corner, exchanging passengers with the pavement. If the traffic light is red when the bus is stopped, the scene is set. The light turns green. The bus starts. The runner moves into the street and waits for the bus to reach 114th street. Then bang! The runner is off. With a walkman in one hand, circa 1979 headphones pushed over his ears, and a bouncing cord connecting controls and sound, the sprinter focuses on the advertisement plastered to the bus’s behind and drops everything else from his view. If he is lucky, a taxi doesn’t stop between him and the bus, or a silly pedestrian doesn’t jaywalk, or some other obstacle doesn’t unexpectedly break his concentration. He isn’t timing himself. He isn’t running for the stares of New Yorkers on the Broadway sidewalks or the bus interior. He is simply racing the motorized machine with massive tires to 110th street. He is chasing something that may not know it is being chased.

Usually, he wins. But not always. It doesn’t matter though. Win or lose, the runner slows at the corner of Broadway and 110th, turns, and lightly jogs back up the sidewalk to 115th street. On the return trip, he considers the density of the traffic, wonders whether there is a difference between engine capability based on the year that the bus was made. He’s pretty sure that, over time, some of the drivers have noticed him, have realized that he waits for them at 115th street, and have decided to take up the spirit of the Broadway sprint because he can feel some buses accelerating more than usual like an athlete who senses being passed and finds another level of effort from deep “in the tank”. Also, from time to time, a driver smiles, smirks, or waves. Some see him. He sees them.

You haven’t lived until you’ve sprinted down one of life’s Broadways – not because you need to, not because you are late or you are unsafe or because you want to catch a ride from a bus when it stops at 110th street – but instead because you find joy in the experience, you fill with exhilaration at moving with the same speed as technology, you yearn to release thought to the flow of movement that is a busy city street in Manhattan. And you survive the moment.

Our sprints in life are not always about winning or losing. They can be about being. They can be about achieving breathlessness for its own sake.

Sometimes we run away from things. Sometimes we run towards things. And sometimes we just run.

In the spring of 1980, I was living on the upper west side of New York City, just off the campus of Columbia University. A junior at a college in another state, I had gotten an internship in mid-town Manhattan and, in order to save some money, slept on the floor of my brother’s walk-up studio apartment on 115th street. For a non-urbanite, the city was an exciting place to live; there was no shortage of opportunities to learn about cuisine, the arts, music, and the diversity of the human condition. There was, however, limited access to exercise facilities. And I was a person who needed to exercise.

Running helped keep me sane. I wasn’t the happiest of twenty year-olds, a young man with a mind that ran incessantly and a body that didn’t seem to fit its clothing or surroundings. My collegiate junior year, thus far, had been stressful, leaving me out-of-shape, overweight, and unfulfilled. So I took to the streets and parks of NYC, in search of respite through distance running. It didn’t work. With all the traffic lights and intersections, it was too difficult for to find a stride and a rhythm that relaxed. A run, in fact, almost made me more unsettled.

But one day, by happenstance, I noticed something about the upper west side of Manhattan between 115th and 110th streets. The traffic lights, while not timed, did have a certain rhythm. At a brisk pace, and beginning just when the first traffic light turned green, I could reliably run five city blocks without needing to stop. And five city blocks, I decided after a little investigation, was about a quarter mile. Ahha! If I couldn’t get myself into a distance running routine, I realized that I could devise my own “track” work-out on street named Broadway.

If you’ve ever run “intervals” on a track, you know that it can be challenging to run a series of single lap sprints without a running partner. There is nothing to chase, no one to keep pace with, and you always end up where you began. Striding on the busy streets of Manhattan brought more visual stimulation than an oval track. It also had some inherent dangers (things called cars, taxis, etc), requiring a heightened vigilance. But, despite the advantages, there was still the problem of motivation. Beating the lights and bettering my previous times down the five block linear track still left something to be desired.

Until one glorious day when I found the perfect running partner, a jackrabbit made for urban street pursuit: the city bus. With stops at both 115th and 110th streets, and a schedule that regularly supplied new chrome-bumpered hares, the exhaust-spewing public conveyors, I discovered, were ideal training companions. It took a work-out or two for me to get all the timing kinks resolved – bus arrivals weren’t uniformly in sync with the traffic lights. Within a week or so, however, I sorted out the details. And, quite mysteriously and wonderfully, I found a perfect urban training partner.

You may think it is difficult to beat a bus in a race. It is not. In fact, even with a beautiful stream of green lights and traffic moving at a nice clip, I quickly learned that the bus wasn’t too challenging a competitor. So I gave it a head start. And that – now that – added some spice to the whole scenario.

Picture it: a guy jogs in place at the corner of Broadway and 115th Street. A bus arrives at the corner, exchanging passengers with the pavement. If the traffic light is red when the bus is stopped, the scene is set. The light turns green. The bus starts. The runner moves into the street and waits for the bus to reach 114th street. Then bang! The runner is off. With a walkman in one hand, circa 1979 headphones pushed over his ears, and a bouncing cord connecting controls and sound, the sprinter focuses on the advertisement plastered to the bus’s behind and drops everything else from his view. If he is lucky, a taxi doesn’t stop between him and the bus, or a silly pedestrian doesn’t jaywalk, or some other obstacle doesn’t unexpectedly break his concentration. He isn’t timing himself. He isn’t running for the stares of New Yorkers on the Broadway sidewalks or the bus interior. He is simply racing the motorized machine with massive tires to 110th street. He is chasing something that may not know it is being chased.

Usually, he wins. But not always. It doesn’t matter though. Win or lose, the runner slows at the corner of Broadway and 110th, turns, and lightly jogs back up the sidewalk to 115th street. On the return trip, he considers the density of the traffic, wonders whether there is a difference between engine capability based on the year that the bus was made. He’s pretty sure that, over time, some of the drivers have noticed him, have realized that he waits for them at 115th street, and have decided to take up the spirit of the Broadway sprint because he can feel some buses accelerating more than usual like an athlete who senses being passed and finds another level of effort from deep “in the tank”. Also, from time to time, a driver smiles, smirks, or waves. Some see him. He sees them.

You haven’t lived until you’ve sprinted down one of life’s Broadways – not because you need to, not because you are late or you are unsafe or because you want to catch a ride from a bus when it stops at 110th street – but instead because you find joy in the experience, you fill with exhilaration at flying with the same speed as technology, you yearn to release thought to the flow of movement that is a busy city street in Manhattan. And you survive the moment.

Our sprints in life are not always about winning or losing. They can be about being. They can be about achieving breathlessness for its own sake.

Inevitability

We tend to think that much is inevitable in our lives. The rising of the sun, the expression of our talents, acceptance of and by others, our mortality. However, there is nothing certain about any of those things. The unavoidable is not deterministic. We cannot be assured of anything.

“Death and taxes”, some like to say, “those are life’s only certainties.” It is a cute expression, dipped in western wit. It is wrong.

I can feel your uneasiness. Ok, you might be thinking, taxes may be negotiable. Observe, for instance, the postponement of tax submission in the U.S. during the 2020 pandemic. Or consider the circumstance of job loss. And a person could move to an island in a distant part of the globe and subsist off savings and the land. But death? No, you might argue, death awaits all life. It is a surety for every species. Anything that is born must die.

Spirit. That is my response to the argument that death – the cessation of biological activity – is an ending, an extinguishment, an experience fit for the criteria of “certainty”. Have you never encountered a child or young person who spontaneously expresses, usually in the most simple of terms, something fundamental about the world and the feeling of living in it? What child does not, at least intermittently, embody the instantiation of being, of wonder, of – dare I say – soul?

Today is father’s day. Early this morning, while dreaming and yet awake, I heard the voice of the universe and its Creator remind me that nothing is inevitable, not even death. During one of those moments of consciousness that occasionally envelops us with the sense of pure “now”, of supreme “here”, I was aware that I was not just this body, that my life was not uniquely this form, that the past and future were not some places outside the realm of experience but rather components of the present that is so much richer, so much more alive, so more more “present” than the experience of life based on sunrise and sunset, you and me, birth and death. As I sit here, welcoming the arrival of words that my fingers release to the air like butterflies spontaneously born from hidden cocoons, I marvel at the fortune of fatherhood, at the sacred opportunity to nurture spirit that does not arrive because of me yet grows, thrives, and soars in partnership with me, if I am open to that possibility. My children came with spiritual pedigrees; my wife and I encountered that heritage, at the deepest levels of our “selves”, from the moment of our daughters’ births. The girls, in fact, named themselves, or were named, in some inexplicable way, by the dreamworld. They did not begin life as accidents of biology and recombinant nucleic acids. They arrived with histories, trajectories of insights and imperfections, spiritual flows seeking fulfillment. If you have been favored to be a parent, whether of a child who is “biologically” related or a marvel of the universe you have adopted or brought to your side, perhaps you have shared this experience, this sadly infrequent but miraculously magical sense of wonder that God and her creation chose you to be help guide this voyager through the streams, channels, and rapids of human life. The journey is not easy; it is not always smooth; it is replete with joy and sorrow, silliness and suffering, sanguine moments of buoyant heart and perfectly balanced points of soul.

I am blessed to be a father. I am blessed to participate in the unfolding of my, your, our children’s collective expedition into timeless growth and development, into their own parenthood and nurturing, into the unseen but deeply palpable love available to all of us through something we call a “lifetime”.

Nothing is inevitable – I heard that message loud and clear this morning, when I wasn’t even trying to listen. Don’t accept the common. Don’t relinquish yourself to the usual. We are not physical frames with singular beginnings and definable ends. All is possible when we are purposeful. Nothing is impossible when we seek poise inside the spiritual.

Sir Bumpers: Chapter 3

“Everyone knows that teenagers only use a small portion of their brains. It doesn’t take a scientist or a fancy experiment to prove it. Simple daily observation works just fine. Just look at Mr. McGillivibe.”

 That’s what Mrs. McGillivibe told the reporter from the Bobbing Apple Buzz when the young woman asked Mrs. McGillivibe why Mr. McGillivibe decided to glide Bonnie so low down Camelot Court. “I don’t know who he thought Bonnie was courting,” Mrs. McGillivibe said, “but it wasn’t Sir Camelot, I can tell you that.”

Mrs. McGillivibe’s remarks were aimed at Mr. McGillivibe, not Jeremy. The boy was, after all, only just turning thirteen. But Mr. and Mrs. James, based on their experience thus far on Jeremy’s thirteenth birthday, would have thought the remarks pretty a propos of their son as well. Things happen inside a teenager once he has a thirteenth birthday, things inside that teenager’s body that the body does not often understand. Many of those things happen in the brain of that teenager’s body. Most of those things are beyond the teenager’s control. But many of those things, especially the important things in the relatively unused portion of the teenager’s brain, make the teenager resemble Mrs. McGillivibe’s remarks to a, well, “T”.

Wouldn’t it have made more sense for Jeremy to have called the Wiley house and asked for his boomerang back? Or maybe even have knocked on the Wiley front door? Or rung the doorbell? Thirteen year-old girls don’t bite. Most of them don’t even scratch. 

Jeremy had thought about ringing the doorbell (calling on the phone was definitely out of the question). But when he had wandered over to Camelot Court from Lancelot Drive, he had found that there was more than just Bumpers to contend with. There was Rachel’s friend, Theodora Flannery. Jeremy was pretty sure that Theodora did not like him. But Jeremy still liked Theodora.

The world can get complicated, can’t it? One minute, a boy is almost thirteen years-old, is running down the sidewalk on Camelot Court, is jumping at leaves in birch trees, is thankful for the good luck that his new boomerang decided to fly around Rachel Wiley’s house rather than through one of its windows, and the next minute that boy is staring at not just Rachel, a girl who is easy to get along with, a girl who has the same birthday as he does, but at Rachel’s best friend, Theodora. And then Rachel tells Theodora, out loud, that it’s OK for the boy to be on the sidewalk outside Rachel’s house because the boy lives in a house behind Rachel’s, one street over. And Rachel calls her friend Thinky. 

Thinky. The name made Jeremy forget why he had jumped and hopped down Camelot Court. It made him forget about his plan to get his boomerang. It made him go down and around the cul-de-sac, past Mrs. Benny Benini’s house and two shiny metal trash cans stationed at the end of her driveway, past Mr. Matterson’s house and the sound of Schubert, up the opposite side of Camelot Court and right back to Lancelot Drive and a late night planning the boomerang retrieval mission. BRS1.0 was already designed and tested (for a tree retrieval) before Mr. and Mrs. James announced that Jeremy was bound for the skies in a hot air balloon on his birthday. It did not take too much additional work for Jeremy to convert BRS1.0 to the balloon-ready BRS2.0 version.

BRS2.0 worked brilliantly. It worked so brilliantly that it didn’t much care that it snagged a beagle and a boomerang rather than just the targeted boomerang. The fishing line was really strong (1000 pound test or something like that). The fishing reel taped to Jeremy’s forearm had a first class catch. Even the clear Teflon netting, something Jeremy had once ordered from the back page of a helicopter magazine, was up for the challenge. BRS2.0 was engineered to withstand a certain resistance, in case the boomerang was snagged. The boomerang could have been wedged in the ground. It could have been stuck under a tree root.

It was actually stuck in Bumpers’s jaws. Little matter, because BRS2.0 scooped Bumpers by the back-end, not by the snout. And it was a clean scoop. It lifted Bumpers into the air like a superhero dog out for a morning spin above the treetops. 

BRS2.0 did something else. It withstood the pull of Bumpers on the netting, the fishing line, and the reel. Fishing line knots held tight to the netting. The reel held tight to the line. The twenty loops of tape held the reel tight to Jeremy’s forearm. Jeremy’s forearm held tight to his shoulder, his torso, his legs, and even his shoes. So, like a counterweight, when Bumpers went up, Jeremy went down. That is to say that, as Bumpers and Jeremy’s boomerang flew toward the balloon, Jeremy and the part of BRS2.0 taped to his forearm flew out of the balloon toward Bumpers and the boomerang.

Fortunately, for Jeremy (and all concerned), Mr. McGillivibe had not always been a hot air balloonist. Before he had decided on the quiet life of ballooning, he and Mrs. McGillivibe had pursued a very different type of lifestyle, one that, though it still required suspense above the ground, did so from the comfortable heights of a large tent.  No, Mr. and Mrs. McGillivibe had not been house painters. Yes, they were the famous trapeze artists of the Vaulting Vibe Family Circus. 

How does this in any way prove fortunate for Jeremy? Easy – especially for Mr. McGillivibe. When the reel took Jeremy’s forearm, shoulder, torso and legs over the edge of the hot air balloon basket, Mr. McGillivibe took hold of Jeremy’s ankles. Years of practice made him very effective. He could swing upside down on a bar and catch Mrs. McGillivibe (when she was a bit lighter) with his eyes closed. It was like his hands had their own sight. Feet and ankles flying through the air? Mr. McGillivibe’s hands grabbed them. So there was no thinking required when Jeremy’s shoes faded quickly from view over the edge of the hot air balloon basket. Mr. McGillivibe’s hands tossed aside the controls of the hot air balloon and dove over the balloon basket side in hot pursuit. Those hands knew better than to grab at Jeremy’s shoes. They went for the ankles. They locked on those ankles. They pulled Mr. McGillivibe over the edge of the hot air balloon basket too.

Not a problem! If Mr. McGillivibe’s hands had their own sight, then his feet and ankles had their own hands. Those ankles and feet instinctively looped themselves around two of the ropes holding the Bonnie to one side of her basket. They kept the BRS2.0 system intact.

A good thing, too, as any thirteen year-old who has studied physics knows. Because forces get pulled along something called vectors, and vectors are not something to be trifled with. The vector of force connecting Bumpers to Jeremy, call it arrow B-J, was definitely strong enough to reconnect Bumpers, and the rest of BRS2.0, to the ground (vector big G). Now that Mr. McGillivibe’s hands were connected to Jeremy’s ankles, and the man’s own ankles and feet were connected to the ropes holding Bonnie’s balloon to her basket, a new vector, call it arrow B-B (Bumpers to Bonnie), was in effect. Bonnie, being the more massive object in the vector, easily dominated that new vector. She stayed up, and so did Mr. McGillivibe, Jeremy, and Bumpers. If Jeremy is to be criticized for his failure to use only part of his teen brain in the planning of his boomerang retrieval mission, he is also to be praised for his engineering of BRS2.0. It sustained forces well beyond the requirements of any normal Australian boomerang retrieval.

At that time, of course, BRS2.0’s remarkable engineering mattered little to Mr. James. What mattered was that his son was no longer in the balloon’s basket. Gripping the ropes that suspended the other side of the basket from the balloon, and facing south, towards the edge of Bobbing Apple in which his factory was located, Mr. James had just convinced himself that things might turn out OK. The ride was smooth. Bonnie was not that high off the ground. Survival from a balloon flight was possible. The jolt to Bonnie’s basket from the counterforce of the new B-B vectorshook Mr. James from his calming reverie. The sight of Mr. McGillivibe’s shoes and ankles entwined in Bonnie’s ropes burst his optimistic bubble. Mr. McGillivibe was sightseeing from the wrong angle. Jeremy was sightseeing from somewhere unseen.

“Where’s Jeremy?” Mr. James hollered at Jocelyn. The girl made a face like a pensive rabbit. She pointed over the edge of Bonnie’s basket. 

The effect on Mr. James was immediate. He felt violently ill and wickedly weak. Trying to overcome the pull of the basket floor on more than his knees, he staggered into the center of the basket and reached up, hoping for something to hold onto. He found something. A lever. Extending one hand toward Jocelyn, Mr. James bravely pulled himself up with the other. The lever, however, came down under his weight. A burst of flames shot upward. And the balloon, and the basket with it, responded.

While the upward movement felt nauseating to Mr. James, it felt rejuvenating to Mr. McGillivibe. The former high-wire acrobat had been yelling, at the top of his lungs, for someone to make Bonnie go up. Admittedly, he had been doing so from inside the jacket that had fallen over his mouth and face, so the sound was better heard inside his jacket sleeves than in the air above Camelot Court. But he didn’t need sight to tell him that a man and boy hanging over the edge of a hot air balloon made for a tail that could drag along treetops and housetops. And he didn’t more than a teenage physics to know that a hot air balloon with additional weight will fall if it isn’t given a reason to rise.

Mr. James’s knees and stomach gave Bonnie a reason to rise. When they fell, he grabbed, and when he grabbed, Bonnie rose. 

Mr. McGillivibe whooped like he used to do in the circus. Jeremy hurrayed like he thought a good pilot hanging in midair beneath a rising hot air balloon should respond. Bumpers, in turn, barked.

The bark was what got Mrs. Benny Benini’s attention. Standing in her bathroom, enjoying the smell of the morning while brushing her hair, Mrs. Benny Benini was interrupted from her own reverie, a reverie that went something like this: I don’t know why I bother to brush this stiff nest of wire. It doesn’t look any different when I do. Mrs. Benny Benini liked to stand in her bathroom early in the morning. She liked to pretend that she was brushing her hair when in fact she was really watching to see when the robin chicks would have their first flight. There was a nest in the top of the oak tree just outside Mrs. Benny Benini’s open window. In that nest were two robin chicks. Each morning, those chicks seemed closer to flight. Today the chicks’ mother was no longer sitting on the edge of the nest. Mrs. Benny Benini was pretending to brush her hair, thinking about the ridiculousness of the act, when what she was really doing was watching, from the reflection in the bathroom mirror, the events in the robin’s nest at the top of the oak tree. One morning, she had seen the chicks hatched. Another morning, she had seen seen them fed. Yesterday, she had been sure that they were going to fly. Today, they were perched on the edge of their nest, looking down. 

So the bark, above the treetops, about the same level as the chicks, was unexpected. It does not need to be mentioned that the dog likewise fit into that category. 

Bumpers can hardly be blamed for assisting the chicks in their first flight. Boomerang in his mouth, he must have found it hard enough to bark let alone avoid the nest and the tree beneath it. It could be argued that Bumpers’ yelp was actually a cry of “look out”. It was argued, much later, by Rachel, that the beagle had borne his lift-off without much fuss. All Mrs. Benny Benini knew, however, at this very moment, was that the Wiley dog, boomerang in mouth, jumped out of the branches of the oak tree, and scared the chicks off the edge of their next. Bumpers did not hit the nest. No, he rustled the branches next to and near it. The ripple effect was sufficient though for the nest to shake and for the chicks to jump. Then Bumpers was gone, the nest was empty, and Mrs. Benny Benini, startled, dropped her hair brush onto the table beside the sink. The brush hit the lavender spray, a direct hit, just to the top of the spray bottle such that a puff of lavender, and the clatter of the hair brush continuing its descent, distracted Mrs. Benny Benini from the sight of Bumpers flying at her window, front paws extended. We can’t be sure that Bumpers saw Mrs. Benny Benini grasping at the air behind the path of her falling hairbrush. We can be sure that Mrs. Benny Benini did not see Bumpers. We can also be sure that Mrs. Benini, bending into the suspended spray of lavender, saw something completely unexpected on the floor of her bathroom just next to her hairbrush. One of the robin chicks had landed inside her house.