Sputnik is overhead.

Sixty years ago today, I came home from kindergarten and my mother was at the stove in the kitchen of our house, making my lunch. I don't have a lot of memories from this period of my life but this image is locked in.

My mom told me that the Russians had put a sputnik into space and it was flying overhead even at that moment.  I had no idea what a sputnik was, or what the import of what she said was or even what it meant, but her tone, reflecting concern and momentousness, and the unusualness of her talking world events with me, a kindergartener, made this brief interaction forever frozen in time in my memory bank.

This started in lockstep the space race, because we were behind, for awhile, the Russkies, the supposed missile gap, the specter of hordes of Russian tanks sweeping over Western Europe and the Cold War, which we might still be in, after a brief pause for detente. This was the paranoid fifties, when we huddled under our schoolhouse desks with our arms covering our heads during nuclear attack drills.

In this period of mass murders and massive hurricanes, it seems like it was a quaint era back then.  My classroom five years later was on the 3d floor of a schoolhouse five miles from what would have been ground zero for a hydrogen bomb airburst over Manhattan; my wooden desk and flesh forearms would have saved my life in such an event for sure.

Joe & Pat's.

Thin crust.  You don't even have to say pizza after it.

The best pizza in the world is thin crust pizza, and the best is made at Joe & Pat's on Staten Island at 1758 Victory Boulevard.  Its sign out front doesn't even say "pizza".

A half vodka and half arugula pizza pie is a thing of beauty and that's what I ordered when I visited the restaurant on Staten Island last weekend.  I had the vodka sauce side.

All too quickly it was done.  When we left the place was humming with business, a lot of it for people dashing in for carryout.

You can't go home again.

My boyhood friend Erik from Staten Island got married last weekend in New Jersey in a beautiful Catholic church and put on a sumptuous reception nearby at a spectacular mountaintop restaurant in upstate New York.  His bride, a divorcee, could get married in the Catholic church because her first marriage was a civil ceremony and so never occurred (a nullity); Protestants like myself find the convoluted rules governing Catholic membership and available services incomprehensible.

Afterwards I returned to Staten Island for a trip through nostalgia.  The street beside the house I lived in when I was twelve, which I remembered to be plenty big enough for our numerous games of touch football and kick the can, seemed too narrow to be suitable for such activities to an adult eye.

The garage to that house with its simple one-level rental unit above it (the third story was a mere loft used as an attic) was sold off separately later as a carriage house and the property was separated.  I spoke with the papergirl delivering the Sunday Staten Island Advance and she filled me in on many of the folks I knew in childhood, who still had an association with the neighborhood.

For instance, the boy next door who was exactly my age and wanted to be a priest grew up to be a real estate agent, always lived at home, inherited the house and now lived there alone as a recluse with major health issues starting with "bad teeth," and the fireman on the block, a friend of my dad, had passed on recently and his widow lived on in their home with their son, a friend of my brother, who had never left the house and worked for the post office.  I eschewed knocking on any doors in the old neighborhood although apparently, half a century later, I would have known several of the people who answered.

You can go home again.

After attending Erik's wedding this past weekend in Ridgewood, New Jersey, I spent the night on Staten Island, where I spent my boyhood.  The Holiday Inn where I stayed was horrible, check out the view from the window.

Sunday morning I got up and went to the old hood in Westerleigh.  The house I lived in from 1963 to 1973 was there, in all its grandeur.

Later I went to the old homestead in Stapleton, where we lived from 1958 to 1963.  It was a pretty fine house in its own write.

That part of Staten Island is quite hilly and close to the water.  Check out the view from the top of the hill behind where I lived.

Mattel

I was so jealous.  Erik had acquired a toy Thompson Submachine gun for our WW2 forays into the hills above Stapleton patrolling for imaginary German soldiers, and all I had was a bolt-action 1903 Springfield trainer rifle that simulated single-shot fire.  Erik had 20 rounds ready to go in a single long burst in the form of a a sleek black and brown plastic spring action toy gun, whereas my wood and steel rifle's imaginary fire was solitary, followed by a four-fold mechanical action before I could sight and shoot it again.  Think of all those Germans that could evade my aim during those four movements, whereas Erik could mow them down en mass.

So I saved up and bought a Mattel 45. calibre WW2 toy Thompson Submachine gun at the dimestore for $19.95, to add suitable firepower to our patrols in the highlands of Staten Island in the early sixties.  Abandoned was my sturdy trainer Springfield rifle, which my father had bought for me at my request and brought home one day after work.  I wonder what this combat veteran thought while bringing home to his only son a training (unfiring) rifle when returning home after work one day.  In the war he used a 15-round single shot M-1 carbine, a fast-firing but underpowered short barreled weapon.

Both Erik's and my toy submachine guns were made by the Mattel toy company and they were well-put together and worked really well.  There was no Made-In-China crap in those days.  Erik's was a Dick Tracy police model that looked like the actual weapon carried by American soldiers in WW2, brown wooden stocks with black barrel and works.  Mine was identical except that it was Mattel's military model and it was painted all in green camouflage.  I envied the looks of Erik's model, but mine had a shoulder strap and his didn't.  We did some climbing on our five or six hour traipses through the hills on Saturdays and Sundays so the strap was very handy to sling the tommy gun with while we climbed trees, posts or fences.  Erik eventually fashioned a sling for his toy weapon, made out of white twine.

Both toy weapons are merely dim memories in the recesses of our minds now but I saw a well-preserved working military model toy gun on ebay a few years ago, in its original box, and it sold after a fearsome bidding war for over half a grand.  The way these toy guns operated was you pulled a bolt on the side of the gun back which coiled a long heavy spring inside the toy and when you pressed the trigger the coil unwound with a brring sound simulating machine gun fire.  You could uncoil the whole spring all at once--it took a couple of seconds--or operate the trigger on and off and on again and fire short bursts until the coil unwound.  Then you'd rip the bolt back and be ready to go again, the equivalent of putting a new magazine in with twenty more rounds.  

 Erik and I caused countless German patrols to recoil and we slew several enemy soldiers each time with our forty rounds of firepower on our weekend boy soldiering.  And never once did we worry that we would get shot by the police while we played out in public with our toy guns.  Times are much different now.

The hills of Staten Island

Growing up on Staten Island, my best friend Erik and I made the hills above our homes come alive with the sounds of battle.  Some days we would don blue felt campaign hats and strap holsters containing cap-laden six guns around our waists and clamber up the steep slopes of the high rolling saddle back hills to the west called the Haystack, in search of Rebels as we re-fought the Civil War.  Most days we would shoulder our Mattel tommy guns, fasten World War Two surplus canvas belts adorned with canteen holders and magazine pouches about our hips and go kill Germans from 5 to 8 pm on weeknights.

On weekends we would battle enemy forces all day long.  Erik and I would traipse for miles through the hills and backwoods, laden with our toy implements of war.  There was a series of undeveloped high ridges up there so we rarely encountered a street or a yard once we crossed the street I lived on, Trossach Road, and got onto the Haystack. 

Usually we didn't see anyone or if we did,we skirted round them furtively.  I remember how annoyed I was when a man walking about up there came across us unexpectedly before we saw him and avoided him and, spotting the modern aspect of our toy weaponry, he thought he was playing along with us by saying that he had spotted some "Russians" back a half-mile and we should "go check them out."  This was even before the Vietnam war, and the nation's enemies were traditionally Germans or Japanese (or maybe Chinese in Korea), not Russians.  World War Two was a mere 15 years past, Vietnam from here is a distant memory compared to that. 

Erik was a swell best friend.  As a boy, he had a lot of similar interests.  If we weren't ensuring allied victory in the hills of Staten Island we were together literally wiping the floors in our respective bedrooms with Japanese or German soldiers.  We each had a few hundred little green plastic Army men, bought at the drugstore for 99 cents a bagful.  They were the enemy.  We also each had a few dozen painted lead soldiers, bought at the dime store for 19 cents each.  They were the Allied soldiers,  These lead soldiers, now called pod foots for their distinctive feet which enable them to stand, are now collectibles but back then they were our all-powerful American army and they always wiped out those little green Army men.

We read comics together, built model airplanes, had sleepovers sometimes and even had an occasional youthful fistfight.  But then I moved away and lost touch with Erik.  I knew he got into the Air Force Academy but didn't like it so he transferred to Wagner College on Staten Island.  After that there were four decades where . . . nothing.

Until a year and a half ago where through the magic of Facebook we re-connected.  Through instant messaging in quick order I caught up with him and he with me.  He is a successful administrator and he is also a pilot, fulfilling a life-long dream of his.  He has a wonderful family with several bright and capable children.  He came to DC a year ago and I had breakfast with him at his hotel, where I met his wonderful wife Jane, an accomplished woman in her own write.  We all had a great conversation, and I could tell that Jane learned a tiny bit more about Erik's childhood by listening to our animated talk.

I haven't been good about keeping up with Erik since then.  There's always time to rekindle a little bit later, right?

This morning I received a Facebook message from Erik, wishing me the best and wanting me to be aware of the news.  It included a link to a news article.  My heart sank.  The code in the article's link included the identifying words "plane wreck."

Erik was seriously hurt when a plane he was aboard went down on August 19th on Long Island.  Neither of the other two occupants of the plane, including Jane, survived.  Erik is still in the hospital, suffering through painful burn surgery, gradually getting better, as I glean from the memorial website set up by his and Jane's children.  The bandages finally same off his fingers last night, allowing him use of a keyboard, hence the message to me and, undoubtedly, many other unknowing but not uncaring friends. 

I am so sorry Erik's loss.  I can't imagine how he feels but his lost ones are in my thoughts and prayers.  I am so glad that Erik gave me the opportunity of meeting Jane, I could tell from our brief encounter that she was a special person and that the two of them were very much in love.  Get better, Erik. 

The hills of Staten Island, those wooded ridges ranging westward from Trossach Road all the way to Wagner College, which a long time ago rang with the youthful shouts of boyish triumphs, sit still and silent now.

How I "Won" The NYCM

How me 'n Dave won the NYC Marathon last year.

You probably thought that Marilson Gomes dos Santos, the slight Brazilian who gave us cut-away opera gloves covering the arms as a fashion statement, broke the Africans' modern stranglehold on the New York City Marathon last year and won it. And he did win the race, tactically. But Dave and I won it strategically. (Above: Dave and I smiling before the marathon after it took us ten minutes, total, to get there. Photo credit S.)

The Problem. Everyone knows what the problem with the NYCM is. It's the 10:10 start from way down in the far corner of NYC on Staten Island. Everyone has to get there from somewhere else and it usually takes quite awhile. Official recommendation is to catch the 8 am Staten Island ferry and corresponding bus, because there are no later buses. To get to the southern tip of Manhattan to catch that ferry, many runners will be arising at 5:30 or earlier for the race.

There are buses that transport you to the race's start on Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island that leave from various parts of the city. But they leave very early, starting at 4:30 am. Don't try to catch one after 6:30 am (7 am from NJ) because they will be non-existent by then. (Left: Old Fort Wadsworth is dwarfed by the bridge.)

Stories abound about how uncomfortable the wait at Fort Wadsworth for the race to start is. Those hours are horrendous, especially for the obsessive-compulsive types (know any runners like that?) who catch the first bus in their can't-miss-the-start paranoia. It's cold in the early morning, sometimes bitterly so, and keeping warm for all that time is a problem. People bring blankets, snuggle in sleeping bags, make beds out of newspapers, beg clothes from strangers, go into a trance; all sorts of strategies are used. (Below: Fort Wadsworth.)

The race itself is fantastic, a twenty-six mile traipse through the five boroughs and over five bridges that range from the fabulous (the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and the Queensboro Bridge) to the interesting (the Pulaski Bridge) to the merely fun (the Willis Avenue Bridge and the Madison Avenue Bridge). Screaming spectators line much of the passage and immerse you in the diversity that is the genesis of the melting pot of America.

A funky bed and breakfast without the breakfast. When I got into the NYCM last year, I googled "bed and breakfast" and "Staten Island." Up popped a funky place on Daniel Low Terrace. It seemed roomy enough and it was only $100 a night. A call to the "hotel" gave me the owner who said he had several "units," and he'd give me the best one available when I got there. As he described each one, they were all suitable for my needs. I'd get one of them, he assured me. He told me to send a hundred dollars deposit now. Contract? Paperwork? Naw. Just the hundred, and show up.

It was a perfect location. Just off Victory Boulevard near the ferry, it was within three miles of Fort Wadsworth. Back roads would lead me right to the race's start. I received conflicting information concerning the availability on race morning of city buses running down Bay Street in Stapleton on their regular routes to Fort Wadsworth. If there were problems, I could jog the distance in thirty minutes. (Above: I watched this bridge being built out of my bedroom window when I was a boy.)

When I arrived six months later on the Friday before the race, it was funky alright. The owner was an iconoclast who had built, in stages, a series of units off the backside of his old house there in St. George. He was quite talkative and had plenty of stories about his battles with the zoning commission as his house grew. He also knew Hilary Rodham from school and ventured forth his opinion about her. It would hearten the soul of any Republican and many a misogynistic Democratic. My unit was a long narrow unit on the ground floor in the back with an outside entrance.

Dave? Dave's Not Here! I met Dave, another runner from Chicago, sitting on a settee on the house's porch enjoying the view of the lower Manhattan skyline across the harbor. Dave was in the initial throes of his discovery of running in middle age. (Left: Funky? Well yeah!)

He had run six marathons, all within the last year. His pace of running marathons was increasing. He had run two in the last five weeks. He had arrived on Wednesday to steep himself in the course. He expected to better his PR of a little over four hours because he had discerned that the course was pretty flat except for the bridges and several rolling hills on First Avenue in Manhattan.

His wife was with him, trying to share in his new found zest for life. They walked to the ferry to go into Manhattan every day and he would go scout sections of the course while she went shopping. He was leaving on Tuesday, his wife having said "no" to him staying until Wednesday to recover. "Remember the kids at Aunt Maybelle's, dear?" was how she put the reasoning behind them leaving sooner rather than later when he was explaining all of his running plans and aspirations to me. Dave was scheduled to run another marathon, necessitating another trip, two weeks after New York. She was going with him there, too. (Left: My unit stretched all the way across the back of the house.)

I got the feeling from looking at his wife as Dave spoke that this exhilarating new phase of his life, with its frequent one-on-one challenges that put new meaning into a life where awareness of mortality had intruded lately, was about to end. His wife had a tightness in her facial expressions, a quietness as he spoke animatedly, that demonstrated to me a noticeable tiredness with his ongoing personal quest into self-worth. Real life was about to descend upon this running warrior in the form of his family's real or perceived needs as mandated by the non-running member of the union. Hence, to us all when we take up running.

Dave is an electrician. I got the impression that he had mostly finished his life's work and the family was comfortable. He told me that his unit at the house was great, very comfortable and well-appointed. He told me, though, that he wouldn't stay there long-term. You really don't want to look too closely at all the new wiring in this old house, he said in mock horror. Dave and I arranged to go to the race's start together. A friend would drive us both there.

Excuse me, I've got a race to run in 55 minutes. Race day dawned cool, clear, crisp. I woke up at 8 and lay in bed thinking of the horror stories friends had told me about catching a 4:30 am bus and then spending four hours shivering in the open on Staten Island. That was a prominent memory of the race for all of them, whiling away the long hours in Fort Wadsworth. Starting the race itself was like swinging open the jailhouse doors wherein they burst onto the race course, trying to put the fresh memory of those enervating and anxious (and freezing) hours out of their thoughts.

By 9:15 I was dressed and ready to go. I met Dave and we climbed into the car. I directed the person driving onto back roads I knew from childhood, having grown up in this section of Staten Island. The trip to the race, as a matter of fact, was a trip down memory lane for me. Down St. Pauls Avenue, past my old church. Back-track on Broad Street, past the Projects which I used to walk by on my way to the den mother's house during my one year of being a Cub Scout. Then a straight shot out Tompkins Avenue past the YMCA where I used to attend summer camp to School Street, the race's entry point. Distances that had seemed to stretch out so impossibly far for a ten year old boy seemed incredibly compressed forty-four years later to a full-grown man. (Yes, on Staten Island forty-four years ago, little boys could and did walk around and play miles from their homes.) (Above: St. Paul's Episcopal Church on Staten Island.)

Encountering no traffic, we arrived at the traffic barricades half a mile from the race's actual starting line in ten minutes. Plenty of time for two visits to the port-a-potties and to find our respective starting corrals. (Below: Celebrating the finish of the 2006 NYCM with J (who is running today, good luck!), H (who ran the MCM a week ago), me and A (my charity partner who helped me finish at sultry Chicago last month)).

Last year I finished the NYCM more than a hundred minutes behind dos Santos. Dave discovered the course was hilly after all and finished a little further back. But we both strategically won the race by having pristine memories of an incredible run on a perfect fall day through the greatest city in the world, unblemished by a single bad memory of the transport to the start line or the stay in Fort Wadsworth.

Morning before the 2006 NYCM

Photo credit S.

Fort Wadsworth

November 4, 2006

The morning before I ran the New York City Marathon.

The last time I was at this spot was in the seventies. I had snuck into Fort Wadsworth, which was an active military base back then, to see the old brick fort which used to guard the Narrows. An MP spotted me when I tried to leave, and I barely avoided arrest.