On the Boston Post Road (not really)

The run to Canada continues along the Connecticut coast. 65.9 miles of the thousand run. I haven't a clue exactly where in Canada I will cross the border but that's months away. I'm going to turn left at New Haven and head North.

MAP

Can you see this map? If not, use the link above.

This line added to keep the map separated from the bottom of the post.

Let me ask you something?

What would you say if I asked you a question?
Are you okay?
Are you alright?
Are you mad at me?
Are you glad to see me?
Can you hear me?
See me?
Touch me?
How have you been?
What have you been doing?
Read any good books recently?
Ever?
Did you see that?
What!?
What do you mean what?
Ever done something about the war?
What about your mother?
What about my dad?
Wasn’t that that summer?
Have you heard from my mother?
Did you pay those student loans?
What did they say about that lump?
Was there anything to those sores?
How is your addiction progressing?
What did you do about those pics on the web?
Do you think Global Warming is real?
Is your depression different than mine?
Do your headaches make you blind?
What about those noises from next door?
Is that box still under your bed?
What about that one in your closet?
Do you remember that box in the cupboard above the refrigerator that you can't reach without getting on the top step of the stepstool?
Do you have a stepstool?
Where did you go that night?
Where were you last night?
Where were you on the night of October 9th?
How about October 9th the year before that?
How about those Red Sox?
How about 1968?
Did you ever hear back about that test exam?
Have you heard from Lenny?
How about Bennie?
Don’t you remember?
Is your brother still over there?
Will you be home for the holiday?
Will one bag be enough for you?
Are you cold?
Are you too cold?
How about now?
How old are you?
How about now?
Want to grab a bite?
Is this seat taken?
Did you eat yet?
What will you have?
You want this to go or eat in?
Will you have one lump or two?
Any Cream, half and half or Non-fat?
I meant to ask: Mac or PC?
Are you Hillary or Obama?
Do you HD-DVD or Blu-ray?
Are you Manet or Monet?
Are you more Vivaldi or Pachelbel?
Is it a matter of dark or white meat?
Do you want dressing on the side?
Is it a matter of dark matter?
Are they joking?
What do they mean Cashier Charge?
What other choices besides Paper or Plastic?
Do you have the time?
How much time do you have?
How can anybody know?
What time is it?
Does anybody really know what time it is?
Does anybody really care?
Do you know what the next line is?
Is that Eddie in that picture?
Did he ever forget?
Did you ever forgive him?
Do I have it all wrong?
Is it my turn already?
What did you just play?
Is that really a word?
Can you use it in a sentence?
Does it have a future pluperfect form?
Would that be too much to ask?
I was just wondering what you meant?
I was just wondering what you thought?
I was just wondering how you felt the future might unfold?
Do you believe time can be folded?
Do you think time can bend and be twisted and shaped?
Have you ever felt like this before?
What are you feeling?
Do you need some kind of multiple choice?
Where is the library?
Is this the pen of my aunt?
Is this a dagger I see before me?
Can I walk you home?
Will there be coffee?
Is it hard to say right now?
What would you say if I asked you a question?

Top Ten Train Excuses for Being Late

10. Some frigging guy kept holding the doors for people so the train couldn't leave.
9. It was so crowded I couldn't get on.
8.It was so crowded I couldn't get off.
7. The frigging Express went Local the whole way.
6. It never came. I'm here but I don't think it ever came.
5. Some frigging guy got into a fight with another guy over holding the frigging doors.
4. The Local suddenly went Express right by my stop.
3. It just stopped. We sat in the tunnel forever. No announcements, no nothing.
2. They made us get off and take a bus.
1. I was running for the train, I yelled for them to hold the doors but the frigging guy didn't hold the frigging doors.

The Sendoff

They threw your brother/uncle/cousin Brian a little sendoff this afternoon at St. Augustine’s. I went. I thought it would be a small affair, some cake, some coffee, a few old folks.

Uh. No.

I got there early, maybe I could help set up a table or something. Uh, No. There in the church basement was an army of volunteers. Some standing guard over the platters of food, some over by the steam table full of hot dishes, some getting ready to pour coffee from the four urns, some handing out the commemorative pens, some putting the finishing touches on the stacks of cookies and more people over by the big screen projection of what can only be described as An Unending Series of Thousand of Pictures of your brother/cousin/uncle Brian. Did I mention the commemorative pens? How about the long list of sponsors on the handout?


The people started coming through the doors at three. First, Brian was greeting them down by the hot dish tables, but someone mentioned that the line was out to the sidewalk, so he moved down to the middle of the hall and then they had him move all the way down to the stage, but the line of people, his people, kept growing. Few people in this life get to see a real community of love in love. I did today. I’ve never been prouder of anyone. Brian greeted every person by name, every one of them one of his favorites, every word important to him, every goodbye heartfelt, every wish he-didn’t-have-to-leave smiled at in a special way. On they came, the little old ladies, of course, but also some tough looking teary-eyed codgers and tall, strapping young men with families trying hard to find words to say without choking up. They did choke up a little. There were women holding the hands of babies, women holding onto their canes, women holding out their program for Brian to sign and kids, lots of kids, shyly getting a hug goodbye. It was hard to watch and a wonder to watch.

After an hour or so, the organizers decided it was time for some presentations. Brian went up on the stage. Nobody in the line moved. A fellow from the Knights of Columbus spoke a few words and there were some gifts opened, there was a plaque from the local police department thanking Brian for being part of the larger community of Seymour and a scrapbook from the fourth grade CCD class and a big book of remembrances from hundreds of people in the church.

Then they talked about the dumpster diving.

Apparently, unbeknownst to most of us but probably suspected by MaryEllen who just did a valiant job of helping Brian clear out his attic and closets of clutter for his move, the man is a trash picker, unable to walk by any large container of refuse without having a look-see. That’s where he found the window frame. A window frame, the bottom half of a window to be precise, and he brought it back the church after looking at it several times in a trash pile down the street.
Then it sat in the garage for a year. That’s when Alese, his devoted secretary, stole it.

They used it to frame a picture of the altar at St. Augustine’s which is perfectly appropriate and why there wasn’t a dry eye in the place. The altar, some of you may know this, is a combination of two other altars that Brian essentially found in trash heaps. Both the altar itself (hand carved marble Last Supper) and the solid wood backdrop, for lack of the correct word, were both lying discarded and unused in the basements of other Catholic churches. Brian rescued both and had them restored and installed at St. Augustine’s.

“I love this church and I love this altar and seeing it in this frame is a reminder to me,” Brian said to the crowd, “that when you get out of the way and let God lead, the wonders happen.” There was a nice explosion of applause.
I started watching all the pictures on the big screen. There was Brian with a beard, there was Brian without a beard, there was Brian with a huge hat, there was Brian wearing the oddest shirt ever sewn. Brian with kids, Brian with the people of Ghana, Brian in the statuary garden he made by the parking lot, Brian wearing a pink hat.

“He gave us back our church” people said to me, “He made us all feel like a family.” “And,” more than one said this, “He’s so much fun.”

Brian, meanwhile, was wrapping up the presentations by telling everyone the basics of his new life, yes, two parishes, some nights he doesn’t sleep at all, neither is air-conditioned—YET, and get this—they hand out the bulletins during mass---- the crowd roared----- family jokes, you know. Oh, and the cat is fine. When he started reciting his usual closing remarks from the end of mass the people recited it along with him laughing all the way to the “famous little table on the left.” More roaring. They were all with our brother/uncle/cousin because he has been their brother/son/father/uncle/listener/prodder/pleader/healer for all these years.

He went back to greeting people in the line. I don’t know when the line ended, it was just as long as it had been two hours before, and I had to leave for the city.

Tomorrow, Brian starts all over again up there in the corner of Connecticut.
Lucky them.

The Yellow Ladder

This is New York. You sit in your coffee shop at lunch in about the same seat every time and you order about the same thing on certain days.
"The chef salad today?" asks my regular waiter because it's a Monday,
"Diet Coke?" I only have to nod as he waves his order book.
"Okay, Johnnie-boy" and he is off to two other tables.
Johnnie-boy.
No one else calls me that, but hey, this is the neighborhood, so what the heck.

His name is either Juan or John or something his boss finds unpronouncable like Ysidro. The Diet Coke is always fizzy and the salad arrives (no dressing, no cheese without me saying) before I finish reading the second editorial.
(Don't you read the Times or your hometown paper from the back page of the first section? I do.)
Though JuanYsidroJohnnie is spinning between five tables, one occupied by six very tough looking NYPD detectives, he somehow zooms by by my fourth or fifth bite to see if everything is all right. 'Tis or is immediately adjusted. Once, the salt shaker was filled with a solid mass of crystals.
"Oh, my God!!," an ashen-faced Ysidro yelped as if the table was on fire... .


I'm telling all this as another example of how this city lulls you into routines. Your world here is in a little village, regular, usual and unchanging and then, you look across the street at the windows above the Pick-a-Bagel and all you see is a yellow ladder..

It's empty. The space is vacant. And you can't remember what had been there before. What was there?

Accupuncterist?
Apartment Rentals?
Used dresses, er, uh,I mean, Vintage Clothing?
All doing business one day, living in the routine of the city, and the next day just a yellow ladder.

The city doesn't wait long to let a business know if it's going to be open for long.
Burgers and Cupcakes. That sounds like a really good idea, right? Um. It lasted about six months.
Super Pita? Lasted about six weeks.
Veggie Dogs?? Still there. Unbelievable. Veggie Dogs.

Running to Canada, Week Two

So I decided, even though I still don't feel great, to do the run up the hills run in my neighborhood. I had never measured it and now that I have my Garmin all I have to do is push Start and it measures the route for me.
The up-the-hills starts uphill on Bennett,
followed by uphill on 181st,
followed by uphill on Fort Washington,
then there is a gentle downer to the bottom of the next set of hills.
You get the idea.
You run out behind the Cloisters and through the woods to.
.... the bottom of Bennett.
From there back to the start is one mile of constant up.
Makes my face red. Heartrate 165bpm

2.63 miles.... that was enough for me in the cold. 33F and 13mph North winds.
On the Long Run now puts me on the famous Boston Road.

It's Highway One, folks, the road traveled by the likes of Adams and Franklin and Washington. I intend to follow Highway 1 for as long as I can or until my friend George passes me going the other way, (He's running to Georgia, of course, then I will shift North to run through the hills of my hometown and beyond.
14.2 miles for the year, yeesh.

Joe(good thing I'm in for the long run.)Nation

Officium iudicum habemus

Day one.
The same movie which we saw five years ago starring the now deceased Ed Bradley. Many urgent pleas for understanding how they understand how inconvenient this whole process is and many heartfelt thanks in advance for being here.
Long wait. Borrowed a pen. NYT crossword.
First selection process.
Judge has laryngitis.
Talks anyway for twenty minutes about how they all understand ... .
No one sitting on the end of a row is ever called, persons in the middle are always called. Exits for lack of English, Dr's confirmation of inability to sit for an hour and one person claiming inability to be fair considering the charges.

First break
11:30 - 2:15
Freezing. Wind chill must be in the teens which must it really hard for the guys to stand in the fish shops. The wind is blowing in from the North. Woman arguing over the price of a box of snow crabs. Huge shrimp for $6 a pound. Live crab, beautiful fish... Went to the Chinese Bank for cash and then walked to Mulberry to grab some Italian. One sign that the restaurante is Italian is if the waiters are grousing in Arabic. I went down to La Bella Ferrara for some pizza.

The waitress was a clone of the actress in My Cousin Vinny, a New York Italian girl. I had a glass of what they called Merlot Borgate.... Not good,.... okay... good after the second sip, but really, not good.
=
Very glad in be in out of the cold.
I ordered the Napolitana with a little pepperoni. Very nice REAL pizza. Nothing fancy, just pie.
The radio is playing over the PA, some station which only plays hits from the seventies.
One glass of wine has made me glassy-eyed.
=
I walked back to the courthouse by a different route. Exploring, trying to remember if I had ever been on a certain street before, looking for a seafood shop with lobsters. Found one. Three lobsters $10.

A blast of ammonia in the men's room (the cleaning kind, not the uretic acid knd) helped to wake me up, not that the walk back to the courthouse in the brilliant clear frigid sunshine didn't already.

We sit in the hallway waiting for 2:15.

Running to Canada

I'm running to Canada.

It's going to be a virtual run starting at Central Park and proceeding vaguely North through my hometown of Manchester, Connecticut and maybe Holyoke,Massachusetts for reasons that will become clearer later and then to Montreal or some other nearby place about 500 miles from Central Park. Then I will run back.

I will stop on New Year Eve.

So far, it has been a bad month for running.

I am only just off the island of Manhattan and into the Bronx.

Joe

Blogging the Family.

Blogging the Family.
Part One
My brother the priest called me. He is moving or rather I guess he's being moved. He's been the pastor at his church for ten or eleven years and there is some kind of rule that says priests can only stay in one place for about that much time before he gets moved to another church or in this case, two churches. He'll be the pastor of two churches in the Northwestern corner of Connecticut. He, with the help of our oldest sister, is sorting out and throwing out the accumulated debris, er, treasures from his attic at the parish. Mostly throwing because my sister is a very good sorter. (A large dumpster has been placed just outside the kitchen door.)
The phone call was one of a chain of phone calls and emails. We talked on the phone about a week before about the move and how hard it would be on everyone-- him, the parishioners, the cat, his loyal staff. He emailed later inviting us up to the farewell party which won't happen until after he's already moved and, almost as an aside, he asked if there was anything from our deceased parent's stuff that I'd want. I emailed back that if there were any pictures... .

Everyone's parents die. Our dad died suddenly over years ago. There was a wake where I got to talk to his to two of his brothers whom I hadn't seen for decades. There was a funeral where I read out a short eulogy.* Then there were weeks and months of caring for our mom who had been ailing for years. The sister who sorts well found a - aren't all terms abhorrent?- rest home, retirement center, convalescent home for Mom near my brother's church and we cleared out, closed out and sold the condo our parents had moved into from their three bedroom house up on the hill.
I'm sure there are some people who cope with loss really well and others who do not cope so well and there are those who think they are coping well but who really are in some kind of state of delusion. I was in that last group. It took everything I had to take a few things - a clock, some candlesticks -from my father's house. My father's house, my mother's house, my parents' things, anyone who has had parents knows what I am talking about, all those things that since the age of three I had been told not to touch, ever. Never ever. And now I was being told "Go ahead. Take. Touch. Go on."
(shudder)
I took my father's hammers, they are on the wall by my desk, I'd never use one. I took the tin tapper he used at Hamilton for thirty odd years. I took my mother’s little music box which plays Always.

A few years ago we found out that the favorite song of one of my wife's family was Always. They were surprised and happy that I knew the song so well and could sing it. I should able to, I said to myself, I played it over and over when I was five or six until my mother made me stop saying that I was going to wear the little box out. Now the music box is mine. I never play it. I'm afraid I'll wear it out.
What else? Oh, somewhere I found the little dishes from my sisters' dollhouse. I keep meaning to show them to my wife to see if she could use them as charms on a bracelet, but I haven' yet.

What I didn't take were any letters or pictures or documents which is really odd because I fancy myself as the family genealogist. That's right. The one most likely to use letters and pictures and documents didn't take any. I had some pictures that Mom had given me of her mom and dad, but not many and certainly not everything I could have used from the big box in the basement closet. Ah well. Such are the effects of a state of delusion.

It's odd what we mourn. Once, dad and I took a bunch of trash out of his workshop to the dump. We actually did that several times before he died and yet there was still an incredible amount of just junk in that corner of the basement. This one time we were clearing the pieces of lumber and pipe and there was a large piece, about two foot square, of solid flat-planed oak. Pop said he had always had meant to make something with that wood, he just never did. It was a beautiful, flat piece about an inch thick - just right for an oversized plaque of a coat of arms or the depiction of some holy Saint. Neither of us could bring ourselves to put it in the dump's chipper. We left it standing up near some barrels where we hoped some woodworker would spot it and take it home. Pop mourned that oak plank as a sign of things passing and I thought about that oak plank and the pictures I didn't take.

So my brother called me. He said I should come up right away and get the pictures.
You mean, I asked, there's some left? Boxes of them, he replied, we were going through the stuff and I thought we had found them all but a few moments ago we hit the Mother lode and there are some letters that you should have and some other stuff.
I took a Zip Car up from the city early the next morning. My sister and brother were waiting at the rectory and we loaded the car. There were seven boxes and two plastic files. Not all pictures, they said grinning. My brother had kept everything. A glance in one of the boxes showed that I was now the possessor of several, many, 8mm films, one of which is entitled St. Lawrence Seaway Locks. My father had helpfully added the words "in motion". Well. Yes.

We had a nice breakfast at a diner where we talked and remembered things - my sister how she and our other sister would go to work in the tobacco fields. How on Fridays they would put their hair up in curlers and go to work that way so that they could get to the Friday night dance on time.

There’s an inventory to be done.

Cool Running

This was one of those ideas that doesn't arrive as planned. How few do, but still... .

The idea was to go to the track at 137th Street because the streets were icy. At least, that was my excuse was for not going all the way down to Central Park.

And I wanted to re-calibrate my Garmin, that's my new toy, uh, training tool.



um

It's a watch,
it's a timer,
it's a speedometer,
it's a pace keeper,
it's a heart monitor
AND it takes all the data it gets from the sensor on your shoe and the band around your chest and puts it on your computer.

But of course, the track was frozen solid. Really solid.
I did a lap like the guy above on the inside rail on the crusty snow.
Parts of it on tippy toe.
That should be accurate.


It was so cold that no one in their right mind would be...hey...here is someone who REALLY likes to paint.

I watched him for a moment getting set up. There would be three hard parts I think: 1) keeping the easel from flying off with the geese into the river below, 2) keeping the paint from freezing on the pallet before it froze on the canvas and 3) using your bare hands to draw anything like a fine line.

I did meet a couple of people, the guy running in the picture is actually a personal trainer who was waiting for his client to show up. (Best of luck with that, I said.) And a woman runner who wanted to know more about the Garmin after I mentioned I was there to calibrate the thing. "Does it measure distance?" she asked. "Down to the hundredth of a mile, " I replied, "and it will tell how many steps you took to get there." I love stats.

While I took off to do my lap I saw them head North up the river. I thought about just packing it in but ... if they could do it..... so I headed North too, thinking I would just run the three miles or so home. The path was icy and covered with water at points but mostly clear. They passed me coming back at about a mile and half and yelled that it wasn't any worse ahead. I chugged up the hill at the George Washington Bridge. The path in the woods was a solid sheet of ice and snow making the going very tough uphill. (At one point the chart shows a dead stop, but I was moving the whole time, I just had to dig the edges of my sneakers into the crust. I met a biker on a road bike, think very skinny tires in that icy stuff, coming down. He was walking his bike astraddle. I told him that after the big water at the bottom of the hill, he'd be okay. Cold, but okay.

The re calibrated thingy says it is exactly three miles to the house from the bottom of the stairs to the track. A good thing to remember for next Spring.