Rich Wallace's Blog, page 2

proofreading

Reading "Summer of '42" for about the tenth time in my life, but the first time in at least 20 years. Found a typo I'd never seen before. Hermie's name is spelled "Hermy" on page 95.

Roosevelt Avenue

The house that was adjacent to my best friend's home when we were little was once owned by the famous gangster Willie Moretti, who'd been gunned down in a Mafia hit while eating lunch six years before I was born. His former house was covered in red stucco, and it sat on a double lot. The back of the lot was heavily overgrown with brush, but there was an old trellis with delicious deep-blue grapes with thick skin and green flesh. We would sneak in and eat those grapes in mid-autumn. The skins were slightly bitter and the seeds were plentiful, but the fruit was very tasty and we loved the minor thrill of eating them surreptiously. Half a block away there were a couple of apple trees in someone's front yard, and directly across Summit Street from the apples was a large cherry tree behind a spiky black wrought-iron fence. Another block down were a couple of plum trees, and there were even some small blackberries in the neighborhood. This was suburban NJ, but we took the fruit for granted and helped ourselves to any of it whenever we wanted.

Northern songs

I'm just browsing around on youtube tonight. Started with Kris Kristofferson doing "Sunday Morning Coming Down" and then just went from there by clicking on whatever looked good on the right side of the screen. So that led to several Canadians -- Neil Young doing "Heart of Gold" to him doing "Four Strong Winds," which was written by Ian Tyson, which led to Tyson doing "Someday Soon," which led to Gordon Lightfoot doing "Rainy Day People" on the tour we caught here in Keene last March. Some evenings I just get lost on youtube. "Wreck of the Edmind Fitzgerald is on now, so that's the end of this post.

weather

It's not often that you get to rake the leaves, mow the lawn, and shovel snow on the same day, but today might be the day. The snow hasn't started yet and I usually don't pay any mind to the predictions, but it seems likely that we'll get at least half a foot starting the afternoon. We left the house this morning without having oatmeal, so Lucy took all the trash out of the bathroom can while we gone as a warning that we should never again leave before she gets her second breakfast.

Frosty the Pumpkin

So it snowed last night; just a dusting here but combined with freezing cold and yesterday's rain we have very slick conditions. Saw several cars with 2-3 inches of snow on them, and more is expected this weekend. Too early!

pumpkin day

One of the great things about the Keene Pumpkin Festival is that they open up the old theater and show Looney Tunes cartoons all day. It makes for a nice half-hour break between gazing at the thousands of jack-o-lanterns and munching on pulled-pork sandwiches and hand-cut fries and home-made turnovers. Great day all around, and indescribable when the jack-o-lanterns are lit at night. Evie and Jonathan and I all carved pumpkins and added them to the scaffolding. What a cool town.

Friday Night Lights

I grew up in a football town. Back in the ’60s we were the only school for miles around with stadium lights, so our bleachers spilled over on Friday evenings in the fall. The football team responded – probably the best small-school team in the state of New Jersey some of those years. It was an electric atmosphere for a little kid like me and my best friend Gene, sneaking over the fence and laying low, then sprinting through the shadows and blending in with the crowd, saving the two dollars’ admission. I’ve written about that before; the lead salvo in my short-story collection Losing Is Not an Option (Knopf) details the night Gene and I began to drift apart at halftime, victims of our disparate hormones.

I put in my four years playing junior football, but by the time I got to high school, football was just one more thing on a long list of items I’d grown to be a cynic about. I’d always been a much better runner than a running back anyway, and cross country running quickly became a focal point. I was fortunate to fall in with a great group of guys, and by the time we were sophomores there were five of us running varsity. Our arc of success coincided with a brief and unusual low period for the football team, and that wasn’t lost on any of us. By the time we were seniors in the fall of 1974, there were six of us seniors running varsity, with Greg Daniels, Scott Beisler, Joe Coccaro, Keith Thompson, Rich Flanagan, and myself joined by a lone sophomore, tiny Dave Sarmiento, who wrestled at 101 pounds and was undersized even there. The coach was George Bate. We won the league, county, and state sectional titles, and even took the small-school division at the Eastern States Championships at Van Cortland Park.

Tomorrow night, as a team, we’ll be inducted into the Hasbrouck Heights High School Athletic Hall of Fame. Best team I’ve ever been on, for a lot of reasons that go beyond championships. College cross country was great, too, but never quite as desperately intense as those high school races, when our very identity seemed to be on the line every race. I had a lot of success in college track, too, and even today I don’t do too bad as a masters sprinter. But I can still taste those final minutes of a major race at Garrett Mountain, straining up that finishing hill and knowing it wasn’t just for me that I was sweating and panting and ready to puke but sprinting my guts out to catch a guy from Rutherford or Park Ridge or Queen of Peace, and knowing that my six teammates were going through the same effort for me.

Best I can offer these guys is some lines from Bob Dylan:

May your hands always be busy
May your feet always be swift
May you have a strong foundation
When the winds of changes shift
May your heart always be joyful
May your song always be sung
May you stay forever young

On Wisconsin

Another great city I'd never visited before is Madison, WI, specifically State Street, which runs from the state capitol building (home of the despicable union-busting governor) to the state university (home of The Badgers). Highlight for us last weekend was Dobra's tea house, where we took off our shoes and sipped jasmine, sencha, and rooibos and munched on great hummus and sliced apples. Also took in the football game (where the UW marching band stole the show) and read the menus posted at African, Afghan, Thai, Japanese, and assorted other restaurants (only had time to sample a few meals), and considered Brats, too. Can't wait to get back; the younger son works for a great company out there now so it won't be long. Madison rivals Edinburgh for the coolest place I've been lately. Of course, we have our annual Pumpkin Fest here in Keene this weekend, and that's hard to top anywhere!

great things I did today

-- seeded the strip of lawn around the brick walkway. (I did that two weeks ago, too, but it didn't quite take.)
-- went to the movies with Sandra and saw "Terri," a very sweet and hilarious film that is absolutely worth seeing.
-- caught the Friday night opening act of the Keene Music festival, which goes all day Saturday and is one of my favorite events every year. Tonight was Jatoba (bluegrass/fusion/roots) outside at Railroad Square. Tomorrow there will be nearly 100 bands at something like 14 different venues, all of it free. You can't see it all, but it's great to sample. I love this town.
-- Read the profile of Timothy Ferris in this week's New Yorker.
-- actually got some significant writing done.
-- Ran a nice interval workout early this morning on the astroturf at the college. 3x300 meters hard with 6x50 meters all out, some sprint drills, and a lot of abdominal work. I sprint almost every day, refuting conventional wisdom.
-- had two nice walks in the park with Lucy, sniffing pine branches that came down in the hurricane.

five stars out of five

-- chick fil a sandwiches
-- black-and-white Andy Griffith episodes
-- the Honeymooners
-- Red Stripe beer
-- the Ogunquit Playhouse
-- "One Man's Meat" by E.B. White
-- Ben Franklin
-- puppies