Walk, Don't Run

I used to run. In my youth. And not badly. A 4:56 mile once, a 9:54 two-mile. A 36 minute 10K. A single 10-mile run, but never a marathon (that’s crazy). I hated running mostly, the oxygen debt, that completely arbitrary left-side rib stitch, and, seriously, the pointlessness. At least now, for an old guy. Even in youth, I never experienced the mythical “high.” In middle age I stopped running with any regularity, a recurrent, persistent calf cramp would lock me up at about the 1.5 mile mark. My brother, the PT, chalked it up to “athletic deconditioning,” and so the deconditioning continues, happily. Now I tread the treadmill and ellipt at the gym for exercise and quietly, to myself, mock runners and running, the ridiculous gaits, the obvious labor of unrunnerly bodies, runners’ naïve hopes, and their burgeoning, misplaced self-righteousness. I make exceptions; for example, for Bill, a friend who sports a greyhound like physique, and a former graduate schoolmate of mine, Fred, who, with 100,000 miles now behind him after thirty-seven years of consecutive daily runs of at least 2 miles, among others. Which is not to say that I understand them or share their enthusiasm for that particular form of masochism, but I grant fetishists a bit of leeway.

Last week, for reasons I won’t elaborate upon—senior moment—I experimented with a return to running, beautiful weather for it and a lovely course along the river greenway. After lacing up, I made it about a mile before the slightly winded tedium of soulless exertion set in, long before any calf-cramping or the serious build-up of lactic acid. I slowed to a walk. Walking felt about right. I tried half a dozen times over the next 5 miles to pick the pace up even to a jog, but to no avail. Why run? Whereto? And I had to pee. Twice. A young man breezed past me on the bridge in a shirt that declared oxymoronically “Run and Fun.” He passed me again on that loop at the same pace (little fucker), but I was not convinced. I have already arrived at old age, to stroll, saunter, ramble, loiter.

Borland's

It’s Father’s Day, and I’m watching the final round of what used to be known as the Bing Crosby Golf Tournament at Pebble Beach, a landmark course celebrating its one hundredth year. I’ve mowed the lawn and will smoke my pipe on the stoop this evening on the lookout for the full moon and brood just a little on the passing of time and the unequal fates of landmarks.

The summerscape of my childhood is gone now to wrack and ruin, the remnants of the par-3 built by my father and my avuncular godfather in 1960. Uncle Dickie died years ago. Many now, most golfers of those days are dead; long extinguished their cigarettes and their occasional victory cigars, King Edwards, R.G. Dun, Dutch Masters, White Owl Invincibles. They’ve all been vinced, vanquished, except my father, whose handiwork now passes away. Golf is comatose here, though the course is strangely more alive than ever. Nine fairways are wildly overgrown with clover, broad leaf, cinque-foil, thistle, hardwood seedling. Nine greens preserve only faint outlines among these prolific new meadows. Eight flags lie flat in perfect disuse, marking nothing but demise. Number 1, alone, remains upright, but slanting irrevocably earthward. That landscape, once of seemingly endless and objective summer, is ending, with only its inscape surviving in memory. Though more than a little sad to me, its return to nature nevertheless has real beauties. If Borland’s becomes real estate, alas, sections of a bedroom community, those beauties will disappear as well—for me anyway. But perhaps, children, or a single child, will find their own edenic garden here on the lawn in what will become their own backyard.

Old Man Goriot

I was in Paris last month, browsing in the Shakespeare and Company bookstore for something appropriate, something French, when I came upon Honoré de Balzac’s Old Man Goriot. And bought it. I bought it to see what Balzac had to say about old manhood, old men, this old man. I bought it because my own old man, my father, I think, read Balzac as a young man. He doesn’t read books as an old man. He does, however, use the author’s name, “Balzac!” as an expletive on occasion. So, I took that as something of a recommendation. It’s a good novel, though it ends unhappily for old man Goriot. Not that he dies in the end, which he does, but then all old men do, eventually; rather, the specific unhappiness of his dying is Balzac’s point about this particular, titular old man. (I won’t spoil it for you.) Balzac doesn’t generalize about old manhood and old men, as I had hoped. He buried old man Goriot in Père Lachaise cemetery, where, sixteen years later, Honoré de Balzac, was himself interred. A hundred and sixty-nine years after that, I visited Père Lachaise, the final resting place of Abelard and Heloise, Marcel Proust, and Oscar Wilde, among famous others—and neglected to visit Balzac’s tomb. Next time, if I make it till then.

Only transcendentalish

Here’s a thought, prompted by HDT’s employer and landlord, R.W. Emerson: “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius.”  While reasonably self-reliant, I don’t think Waldo’s right on this point, or, if he is, “genius” is a suspect quality, a quite possibly narcissistic begging of the question, not to be overly encouraged.  Long experience inclines me to think rather that in my private heart “nothing but the tritest of truisms is true for all men, much less for all others: tritest of all—that humans are mortal.” And before our mortality, divining the truth of our own individual private heart is work enough for many, perhaps most, of us. I’ll leave that all-believing genius to someone else.

"Be counselled and retire"

This year a couple of my older colleagues will retire. Older colleagues have retired before, but I have reached the age now that younger colleagues inquire about my own retirement. Until recently I have not given much thought to it, or rather, I have not given too much thought to specifics about when and how. I have been “saving for retirement,” of course, as  conventionally recommended, and, assuming no meltdown to civilization as we’ve known it, no serious compromises to one’s health, no financial mishap among loved ones, the prospect of retirement seems bright enough to perceive at least dimly. 

I have long been imagining retirement as a sort of true leisure. Not to golf or fish or otherwise “be active,” for these are mere pastimes for most of us, and not the objects of true leisure. If these were the true arts of one’s life, they would be truly leisure activities. I could imagine golf, and once did, as a true leisure activity, as it was portrayed in Golf in the Kingdom, a way of looking at the world, a disciplined practice around which real life, good life, can center. But I am not a golfer at heart, only a hacker, and nothing of a fisher. My art, writing, will be my new next job. HDT dismissed the notion of retirement in later life; not the leisure it represents, but rather the deferring of it to our later years, decrying, as he did, the “spending of the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it.” For me, though, I never found what are often considered  “the best days of our lives” to have been all that superlative, however agreeable. I find HA a bit more forgiving and instructive, “A lifetime is not so long a time to learn to express one’s ideas.”

Senectute Corporis

This body is not what it once was. It was once, my body, I almost entire, almost indistinguishable from me in those years when I lived most fully and almost exclusively in it and through it. It has acquired now an existence of its own, an independent, sometimes mischievous physicality over which I exercise less and less control. For a former athlete, still actively living the motto mens sana in corpore sano, these losses, this decapacitation strangely does not diminish me. It may yet, but for now, I feel myself more me than ever. I have no particular desire to return to the day or the body in which I could run a sub-5 minute mile, play ten sets of tennis in the summer heat, get two finger joints over the rim, read without glasses, pee quickly. Even if one could return these faculties merely by wishing, I’d defer, settle for the restoration of my eyes and prostate, in that order. A body for games less becomes an old man. He should spend his time otherwise.