Turkey Trot - 2014

Hi Daryl,

Congrats on finishing the Wellesley Turkey Trot today! Your time of 26:56 gave you a pace of 8:40/M.

Please find a link to searchable results below:

http://racewire.com/live_results.php?id=4179&bibnumber=836

Thanks!

Team RaceWire

Postcards from Dickinson

Postcards from Carlisle

Such a place

   Bourdain travels in the best way - widely, frequently, and at someone else's expense.   Surprisingly, he has a decidedly favorite hotel - the Chateau Marmont in Beverly Hills.  

   The writer Andrew O’Hagan has a favorite hotel in the city where he lives, to which he retreats to recharge and refresh, to indulge and escape.  For him, it is Claridge’s in London, of which he says, "Claridge’s is a state of mind and everyone should have such a place, even if it’s just a café, a bench or a patch of grass, a vantage point from which one can clearly survey the possibility of improvement."

   Great stuff, that.  

   I don't have a favorite hotel, although maybe I can work on that.  The closest thing I have to "such a place" would be a stream in Vermont.  Not a particular one.  Any one which has in it my waders, my brothers, and some trout.

Clarendon Springs

The Clarendon Springs Hotel, also known as Clarendon House.  Built in 1834.  One of many hotels and “curative spas” that thrived in Vermont in the 1800s, capitalizing on the  purported benefits of the local spring waters and a thriving railroad industry, which brought Southerners and city dwellers north in great numbers.  An article in the August 29, 1867 edition of the New York Times describes the village of Clarendon Springs as “one of the pleasantest places to which [one] can resort during the summer, to avoid the heat, and dust, and noise, and other great annoyances of the Great City.”  The hotel is long closed, and gutted -- the Southerners and city dwellers, the picnics and music and dancing, long gone.  The springs remain, along with just the husk of this once fine hotel.

  

Horses, fences, barns and wires

   So, what do we like about this picture?  Horses are nice, as are barns and fences.  

   And what is not to like?  The angles, for sure; the slope these horses are on make the picture seem tilted when it's not (see the roof line of the barn).  Also, the overhead wires, which are prominent and disrupt the otherwise bucolic scene.  How much better might the picture be without the wires?

   But imagine not the picture but the actual scene, the actual place, without the wires.  Imagine the farmer going out to his barn in the morning, in the dark, to milk his cows with nothing but his own cold hands.  Before the power lines were put in.  Imagine how he felt the day the poles went in right in the middle of his field.  

   I imagine he likes the view just fine.

Fly fishing - season 2

   A Sunday morning in July.  KC is in Los Angeles.  Megan is in Centerville, on the Cape.  Rachel is in Italy.  I am in waders, making my way down the Mettawee River, between North Rupert and Pawlet, Vermont.  A beautiful morning - not too warm yet.  As usual, not another soul on the river.  I move along from pool to pool, trying first a woolly bugger, then a small wet fly with dark red coloring. Casting pretty well, I think, but raising no fish.  I come to a riffle in a narrow crease of the river, with a downed tree on the left.  It like it covers a fairly deep pool.  I take the time to tie the woolly bugger back on, thinking I can float it down through the riffle and then swim it back up through the pool, making it look like a minnow.  I have trouble tying it on, for some reason, but stick with it, and take my time testing my knot.  I position myself left of the crease and loft the fly into the head of the riffle.  The line spools out as the swift current takes the fly downstream.  I have no idea what I'm doing, I think.  I start wondering if maybe I should pack it in early, and spend the morning driving the back roads on camera safari instead.  Half my mind on this, the other half working the fly up through the pool, and WHAM - a fat trout strikes through the fly like a blitzing linebacker, thrashing up to the surface one, twice, heavy on the long, pulsing rod.  I work the fish up into the shallows - stay on, just stay on - and up onto the rocky side of the stream.  A beautiful brown trout - which measures a full 12 inches.  A fine fish for this little stream.  A trophy for the novice fly fisherman.  Heart pounding.  Smiling ear to ear.  

This American life

In the past two weeks I have:

flown to Denver to attend a conference, go for a couple of runs, walk several times up and down the 16th Street Mall, eat some good food at the Squeaky Bean and Kitchen and Lucky Pie Pizza and drink some excellent beer,

flew to LA to interview some lateral partner candidates whom we will never hire, stay for a second time at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza in Century City, eat moderately well but drink excellent beer at BJ's Brewhouse at the Westfield mall, and - most satisfying - photograph a paparazzo outside our restaurant in Beverly Hills,

flew home and drive directly the next morning to Vermont, to hike up the E trail to the summit at Killington, stay overnight at the not-so-grand but utterly pleasant grand hotel, wake early the next morning to fish on Woodward Reservoir with E - insisting that we fish the setback on the way back in, and catching the fish of the day,

discovered downtown Keene on the way home - after all these years, who knew?

drove Megan to Logan so that she can fly to Chicago to see her boyfriend

drove Rachel to Kennedy so that she can fly to Italy for three weeks

stayed over in Greenwich and then stopping over in Mystic on the way home

played softball on Sunday morning with the boys, rediscovering my stroke with two solid line drive singles, only to pull up with a lame hamstring.  

Ah, well.  

It only means that next weekend I'll be out in my kayak with a fly rod and a camera.  

Let's go.  Let's go.  

Things are looking down

With apologies, sort of, to Kings of Leon:

I've been roaming around,

I've been looking down,

at all I see.

Killing I have done

Every plant given to me, or us.  Pretty quickly, too.  Many trout, a small number of bluefish, striped bass, largemouth bass, perch and panfish, all to eat, about which I feel fine and wish to do more.  A few fish to show off, about which I feel less fine.  A mouse the cat brought in when I was in my teens.  It's back was broken.  I took it out in the yard and killed it with a hatchet.  Mice in the attic, with various "traps."  They do more than trap.  The occasional squirrel or chipmunk with my car.  There is only so much you can do.  The bird that broke its neck against the window of a house I bought?  I refuse to accept responsibility for that.  Japanese beetles, which my brothers and I pulled off the potato plants and dropped into a coffee can with a couple of inches of gasoline.  Old coffee cans were mighty handy.  Many worms, for fishing, and bugs, for all the reasons one kills bugs.  I feel like there is a garter snake back there somewhere, too, it's head cut off with a hoe.  But why would I have done that?

On Golden Pond

Morses, actually.

Furnace Brook

   Furnace Brook falls sharply down a narrow valley, between great boulders, through deep, cold woods, until it relaxes into the fields of old farms in the meadows outside Proctor.  The brook is named for an old iron furnace, the ruins of which are settling slowly under fallen trees and brush and creeping vegetation at the edge of the woods, across the road from the old Ironmasters Inn.

   In the fall of 1990, my older brother and I went fishing together every day for four days, three of them on Furnace Brook.  My brother said it was teeming with trout, some of them “lunkers.”  On the morning of the last day, before he drove me into Rutland to catch the bus to Boston, my brother caught a trophy brown trout – a beautiful fish of 18 inches, truly a prize for a stream like this these days.  A thrilling, completely pure and satisfying moment that we shared. 

   After three days of mild, frustrating rain, it had become a beautiful fall afternoon.  Golden leaves showered down around us in the stirring wind. 

   As we hiked up through the forest to the road, I thought about how timeless was the fishing that we do, in the old simple way, with worms from the earth, not fussing with our casting or our tackle, only searching for the trout that hide deep in the clear, cold water, hunkered down behind worn rocks, waiting for what food the surging water would bring tumbling into the pool.

It felt as though we could have been two brothers in 1890 or 1790 in this moment, in the woods along Furnace Brook.

Through frozen branches

   

   I want to tell you of a night in January when I was young, when it rained hard just before a quick, deep freeze.  The rain pushed south to Massachusetts.  A full moon rose, pouring its own cold light over the hills, sudden and absolute.  A stunning cold.  It left an even layer of crystal coating on the night.

   We rushed into our jackets and black rubber boots with metal buckles, grabbed our leather mittens from their hanging place behind the kitchen stove, and charged out to skate on the sequined counter-top that was now our front yard.

   I remember most the lilac by the driveway.  Twigs that were soaked in the black night rain, then flash-frozen.  An explosion of sparkling shafts, a bundle of frozen sparklers in the green street light. 

   Thinking at the time that I would remember it always, I slid under the lilac on my back to look up through the frozen branches at the moon.

Even mercy

   We have been watching the story unfold for the last few nights on the local news.  It is a story we have heard before, with minor variations.  It goes like this.     

   A young, dark, evil-looking man has killed his ex-girlfriend's mother in her driveway and taken the ex-girlfriend hostage.  Every night, just after the weather and before the sports, we are reminded that he is believed to be traveling about with this woman, and that he is, as they say, believed to be armed and dangerous.  No kidding.

   Tonight we hear that the police finally cornered him in an old apartment building, which they efficiently evacuated and placed under siege.  The killer soon released his ex-girlfriend (it is his true love for her, after all, that has started all this), and settled in for the obligatory night of phone calls from the police negotiator. 

   Now the clean-cut District Attorney is telling us how it ended.  At some point the police decided that the “situation” could not be brought to a peaceful resolution.  Just what led to that conclusion is not explained, although it was awfully cold out.  In any event, someone decided it was time to storm the apartment building.  Apparently that was enough to also convince the man barricaded inside that the situation could not be brought to a peaceful resolution, and so he shot himself in the head.  The District Attorney says, with a straight face, “Unfortunately the suspect shot himself before we were able to reach him.”

   I wonder what the District Attorney would say if he could look directly into the camera, like they sometimes do on clever television comedies, and tell the audience what he really was thinking.  I know what I would say. 

   We waited for a good long time for this guy to come out and give himself up to our usually fair and generally lenient system of criminal justice.  Having waited through most of the night, we should not be required to wait indefinitely, further endangering and inconveniencing the people we evicted from the neighborhood and all of these policemen who have spent the night crouching behind their patrol cars while their own women and children are worried sick.  So we went in to seize him but he shot himself first.  That’s the way it goes sometimes with these extremely troubled, extremely violent types. 

   And on the whole it is not such a bad result.  This way the ex-girlfriend (whose condition no one has asked about) does not have to live through all this again  at the trial for murder and kidnapping.  She can begin to try to put this behind her as best she can; and if we put half as many resources into helping the victims as we did housing and feeding the offenders, no doubt she might have a better time of it.  And, come to think of it, this also allows us to avoid the considerable expense of housing and feeding and psychoanalyzing this very troubled, very violent man. 

   Even more to the point is this simple question:  who would be better off if he had surrendered and lived?  Not the killer, who has expressed rather clearly his own preference in the matter.  Presumably not the ex-girlfriend, who, among other things, now is spared the agony of waiting for the parole board to release the killer from prison.  Who?

   In short, I did not wish for the killer’s suicide, but neither am I troubled by it. 

I am reminded of a line in an essay I read a few weeks ago – to the effect that remembering, like burying one’s dead, is an act of mercy.  That is one thing that burying the dead can be.  It also can just be about preventing the smell and disease.

    And so here you see it.  In the long list of qualities where I fall short – even mercy.

This brotherhood of man

   Raymond Carver is dead.  He was, is, perhaps my favorite writer.  He died too young.  It must have been the drinking.  He finally had stopped in his later years, but you can't just stop all the damage.

   He wrote one poem about John Gardner, another favorite of mine, who also died too young.  He slid his famous motorcycle under a truck.  Carver's poem captures him on the motorcycle, long white hair flying, racing along, distracted, toward his sudden end.

   A young man from my hometown died in just that way.  Sliding his motorcycle under a truck.  He was on his way to meet his classmates to ride the senior float in the Alumni Day parade.  They got the news but decided to go on and march without him, in his honor.  The girls riding the float cried all the way.

   Aaron Manor was his name and he was the best basketball player our high school ever had.  So when he died they made a trophy with his name on it at the top.  Each year the award goes to the most valuable player, for about a minute, before they take it away, add his name on a plate at the bottom, and put it back in the case outside the principal’s office.

   I went back home for my 25^th reunion and wandered into the high school for a look around with some of my friends.  I found the trophy in a different case down near the gym, tucked among the other trophies and team photos and basketballs that accumulate in such a place. 

   I found my name on the plate at the bottom, with a few new names coming after it.  Something they stopped doing twenty years ago.

   I remember the awards ceremony in the high school auditorium when Aaron Manor was recognized for scoring over a thousand points in his high school career.  I was probably in the eighth grade at the time, and found it thrilling.

   And then my own turn came – not to score a thousand points, I didn’t come close – but to be the star of our team for a year.  To be the last one in the line we formed at the base of the stairs below the locker room before we ran out to take the court.  Hopping up and down a bit to get loose and burn off a little of the excitement.  Waiting for the cheerleaders to start singing “When the Chiefs Come Marching In.”  And then the song would start and the crowd would cheer and the line would start to move.

   So now I’ve been back to see the trophy and the gym.  And in my house I have a bookshelf half-full of Carver and Gardner that I need to visit again, too.

All that goes on

   Left alone here for a few days, I handle it better than I used to.  I don't watch as much television.  I eat better.  I don't use the same glass all week, for everything, just rinsing it out.  Still, it's best they don't know all that goes on when they're not here.  

          

The rich still use summer

Armies used to use winter as a verb.  The rich, they still use summer.  

Of mice and women

   Only now, in May, it occurs to me that we went the winter without hearing any mice in the attic.  The women in my house are mighty pleased.  It was my wife who called the animal control guy last year.  He came with traps and poisons. And control the mice he did. 

   Control.  It sounds like merely the responsible thing to do. The mice thing had gotten “out of control,” the women said.  Now the mice are controlled. 

   They are all dead. 

   I like animals.  The mice were harmless.  We gave them a warm place to be in the winter, safe from cats and foxes.  They had a good thing going here, if only they had done their running around midday, when no one was home. 

   But mice will be mice and women will be women.  And control of the home will be restored.

What people don't say to young people

     My older daughter met a boy in college whom I think she will marry.  I thought that the first time I met him.  They had been "seeing each other" a while by then.  We'll see what happens.  They're still in school, and a lot will depend on who gets what job where.

     Anyway, if they do get married - or live together - I am resolved to share with them some actual wisdom, or what seems like it, about that part of your life where you are starting to build an actual home with someone.  

     Okay, so maybe it isn't wisdom.  Maybe it is just how you felt at the time, or at some of that time, which might be helpful to share.

     You wake up some days with feelings of anguish and despair and fatigue.  Relentless pressure.  You realize you have been clenching your teeth.

     You are overwhelmed by looking for a place to live.  You are not poor, but are frightened to death of spending all your money.  

     You waste your time at work, but still are bitter at someone else for having to work on Sunday morning.  The work you have to do feels like shoveling coal.  

     You say your apartment is like a pig-sty and you mean it.

     Your partner feels the way you do.  When that happens, even though you love them, you can end up barking at each other like stupid, lunging dogs.

     Take a deep breath.  Go for a brisk walk in the sunshine and the cold air.  Stop at the store and buy something to cook, so that you can nourish yourselves and do something creative, even if you will eat it much quicker than it took to do and then have to clean up after yourself.  

     Resolve to hug the person you are living this life with when they come home, even if you don't feel like getting up from the couch. 

     At least do that, and the rest will sort itself out. 

Tool set

   Some day, I think, I will get to writing actual essays.  I would like to do that -- make well-built and functional pieces, like good cabinets.  Projects that take some real time, varied skills, and patience.  All of which seem lacking theses days.  I find at my hands only hammers and chisels and saws, nothing finer.  

20th and Walnut

   For a year after college, my girlfriend lived in a small apartment in a new building at 20th and Walnut.  A bunch of boxes way up in the air.  Down below a man on the corner also lived in a box.  More on 20th than Walnut, usually, depending how the wind blew.

Postcard from L.A. - No. 2

A homeless man lies in the middle of the street on Cesar Chavez Avenue in downtown LA.  A doorman from one of the apartment buildings kneels over him.  Two police cars arrive.  The officers position their cars to block some but not all of the traffic, then get out and stroll slowly over.  More slowly than you might think right, with a man down in the middle of the road.  Two fire trucks arrive, including an enormous ladder truck, for no apparent reason – an impressive display of both firepower and bureaucracy.  The firemen get out and walk around, waiting for the paramedics, who finally arrive and start doing things.  I see this unfold on my morning run, doing my slow three miles, jogging in place at the lights.  It seems the right thing to keep running, rather than stopping to stare.  The road rises and I plod up the long hill, nearly to the top, before turning around.  By the time I get back to where the man was, all that’s left is one police car.  It makes a u-turn in the street and drives off.  It’s seven in the morning in LA.  The traffic flows easily on Cesar Chavez Avenue, as if nothing had happened at all. 

Postcard from Savannah - No. 2 - Bonaventure Cemetery

After three days in Savannah, on our way to three more on Tybee Island, we make the obligatory stop at Bonaventure Cemetery.  At high noon on a sunny spring day, which we had, it made a good interesting walk, but it was not “achingly beautiful,” as the guidebook had said.   I bet it can be, though, early or late.  And especially with some fog. 

Postcard from Savannah - No. 1

People ask which you like best – Charleston or Savannah.   It’s like asking whether you prefer shrimp and grits to scored flounder.  The answer is what you’re in the mood for.

Having been to Savannah last week, and Charleston some years ago, it’s an unfair question right now.  I will say this:  There’s nothing quite like the historic district of Savannah.   The beautiful homes and churches, the fine squares – the best of which, with trees arching elegantly overhead, feel like small sunlit cathedrals – and especially the quiet, slow elegance of it all. 

The numerous squares deter most traffic completely and slow what little there is.  People stroll and bike.  In the rare line – for a popular breakfast spot – they wait patiently for their turn and happily follow the sensible rule that you don’t occupy a table until you have placed your order at the counter and got your drink.  

These are the things about Savannah that linger – the beauty but also the pace.