I find my father when I run. Memory needs movement to lead it forward, to give it rhythm and life. After my cardiologist challenged me to make major life changes, I took to the road and listened for my father’s encouragement, though as I ran, it often felt as if I was running from his last breaths.
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On his first day of nursery school, the teacher said our son, James, paced back and forth along the fence of the playground, saying to himself, “This is a disaster. This is a disaster.” My wife, Lynne, and I needed to help him adjust, but how? The teacher gave us something positive to hold on to each week, and months later, we were happy to learn that James “married” Jane. According to the teacher, they married in the tree house on the playground, where they held hands and swayed. The boy could count on having a new friend at his new school.
That day, when James came home, he built a tower of blocks. He stood before the blocks, clapped his hands and said it was as tall as him. He’s learning how to make friends, Lynne and I thought. But the following week, James sat on the living room floor turning a block over and over in his hands, and asked, “Why doesn’t she want to talk to me anymore?” The situation gave us the opportunity to give him something more important to his self-image than an answer to his question.
Click here to read the rest of the essay in The Huffington Post.
“Night Running” appears in the spring issue of Connecticut Review. It was selected as a notable essay for The Best American Essays series, 2012.
Here is an excerpt:
“After a few blocks down the avenue, I turn left and ascend the street that separates the first two holes from the remaining front nine of a country club’s prized old New England golf course. I like to run under these tall oak trees. Their wide trunks bifurcate into branches of swaying leaves. I like to run on the uneven blacktop sidewalk. I know this path. I can anticipate dips and cracks underfoot. Headlights cast my silhouette on the bark of trees, lining the fairway like columns. The profile runs on tree after tree. I’d like to think I can catch the shadow of myself at the top of the hill where the sky opens up to a full silver moon, but when I am there, my shadow is gone. Airplane lights flash red, avoiding each other in the black air traffic.”
My essay “The Endangered Barber” appears in the latest issue of Weston Magazine. You can read it here, or in the eleven other regional magazines you might encounter in the greater New York area.
“I’m quite sure Al is the last remaining barber in town, and the only one who will remind me of my father. What I like about Al’s haircut is that he’s a true craftsman of a lost art. I trust him to hold shears and humming clippers to my head—to shave the back of my neck with a straight razor. Every five or six weeks, I sit in his chair, watch the traffic on the main road in town, and he takes care of me. Nothing changes in the barbershop except the magazines and newspapers.”
Even though we had been through having a newborn, the relentless demands left us all exhausted. I wanted to have some fun splashing with James. But I came to dread the lessons, which were like synchronized swimming to nursery rhymes. The water made James more timid then I had expected, and I didn’t know that in order to father him through his fears, I’d have to let go of mine.
To read the rest of the essay in The Huffington Post, click here.
