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On the Run with Scott F. Parker

Running Book Reviews from an SL Veteran

Scott F. Parker has been a quadruple threat for our small press publication for several years now, contributing poetry, essays, literary journalism, even a video essay. Now, with running book reviews, he’s offering some critical insight into writings on a sport that is close to his own beating heart and blistering feet. Check out the following from “On the Run With Scott Parker.”

 

 

 

TENDA WEMA NENDO ZAKO^[1]

A review of Sarah Gearhart’s We Share the Sun

by Scott F. Parker

^[1] Do what is right and go your way.

As long as I’ve been writing about running, I have been extolling the virtues of running for the sake of running. If you’ve come across my writing before, you’ve likely seen me discouraging the focus on results, miles, training plans, and watches; you’ve maybe known me to encourage you to attend, instead, to the quality of your experience as you move your body through space and when you detect joy in the process allow yourself to freely move toward it.

Well, We Share the Sun: The Incredible Journey of Kenya’s Legendary Running Coach Patrick Sang and the Fastest Runners on Earth is not that. Sarah Gearhart introduces readers to runners who have dedicated their lives to succeeding at the far reaches of human possibility. Running in this world is very much about winning, with self-actualization falling much farther down the list of one’s priorities. Sang’s runners “‘come into the sport to make a living,’ he says. That is the driving force: to fight poverty.”

And yet Sang is hardly a typical winning-is-the-only-thing coach. Far from it, he comes across in Gearhart’s portrayal as a modern-day Stoic more concerned with character than success. His gnomic utterances could easily place him in the company of Marcus Aurelius. Consider that, for Sang, “character is everything,” where character means, in part, controlling what you can control. “What I’ve learned in life, and it started way back when I was young, is do your best. There’s nothing else.” If you do your best, after all, the results are just the results, nothing to feel overly good or overly bad about. And if you can’t something cannot be controlled, what sense is there in worrying about it? “If there’s no answer to anything that’s complicated, just leave it. Why should I struggle?”

As one of Sang’s athletes, Eliud Kipchoge, the consensus greatest runner of all time, said in explaining to a journalist how Sang gets the best out of his runners, “And above all, how to make that athlete a human being. In our camp, we want the best athletes. At the same time, we want to be human beings.”

So while economic realities might account for the plethora of eager Kenyan runners, by the time they find themselves in Sang’s company, something like self-actualization begins to come to the fore. This is demonstrated by the fact that, “For years, Sang has permitted locals in Kaptagat to attend his trainings.” Can you imagine, in this country, being welcome to join Des Linden’s workout (as she once joined Sang’s group)?

Running isn’t just about international results and prize money, for Sang. It’s about finding out who we are deep in ourselves. “‘Whenever I run, I always pray. I always confess. I correct myself. Whatever I’d done wrong. I get the right answers. I find myself apologizing,’ he says. Sang doesn’t let on any specifics, just that running affords a space for him to ‘get all sorts of solutions.’” There’s something ephemeral to Sang in We Share the Sun. Maybe it’s the language barrier, maybe it’s the limited access Gearhart had to him, or maybe it’s his propensity to ask questions rather than answer them: “‘Who are you?’ is the root question he wants each person he coaches to consider. ‘If you take athletics out of a human being, what is left?’ he says.” Whatever it is, the elusiveness makes for a compelling figure. I come away from Gearhart’s book curious to know more about Sang yet somehow also grateful not to know more but to be left with the curiosity itself.

Prior to coaching, Sang competed for Kenya in the steeplechase, winning silver at the Barcelona Olympics. For much of his professional career, he coached himself. “Self-coaching is just being aware of yourself. If you do too much, listen to your body. If you do less, listen to your body. Evaluate yourself after competition. You tend to sort of mold your way into the business of coaching.”

He comes by coaching naturally, then, and is seemingly an ideal fit for the job. The only hitch seems to be that Kenya has been hit with a spate of doping violations in recent years, including some for Sang’s athletes. Most disturbingly, one of Kipchoge’s training partners, Philemon Kacheran Lokedi, received a three-year ban for testing positive for exogenous testosterone. Gearhart’s book would have gone to press before the Lokedi suspension, but she might have dug into this difficult reality instead of simply celebrating Sang, easy as he is to celebrate. Even assuming Sang isn’t implicated in Lodeki’s case, it reveals the limits of his influence. Character, Sang would be the first to say, cannot be granted, it can only be earned.

Scott F. Parker is the author of Run for Your Life: A Manifesto and The Joy of Running qua Running, among other books. His writing has appeared in Runner’s World, Running Times, Tin House, Philosophy Now, the Believer, and other publications. He teaches at Montana State University and is the nonfiction editor for Kelson Books.

THE MYSTERY PERSISTS

A Review of Paul C. Clerici’s Oregon Running Legend Steve Prefontaine
& Steve Bence’s 1972: Pre, UO Track, and My Life with Them All

by Scott F. Parker

Two recent books have me thinking again about the legend and legacy of Steve Prefontaine. The first is Paul C. Clerici’s Oregon Running Legend Steve Prefontaine, a research-driven retrospective of Prefontaine’s career that offers as dense a packaging of Pre arcana as even a devoted fan is likely to need. I’d be surprised if there were a race result or an address change that Clerici fails tio note. It doesn’t make for the liveliest reading, but the coupling of information and archival photos will make this book a useful resource for track historians.

One of the sources Clerici quotes is the blog of Steve Bence, a former teammate of Pre’s, who is also the author of 1972: Pre, UO Track, and My Life with Them All (written with veteran journalist Bob Welch). The book is exactly what its subtitle suggests: a whimsical, good-natured, scrapbook of a read.

Bence’s humble narration feels authentic. And the awe-shucks style makes Bence something like a transparent lens through which to recall the storied events he witnessed: Bowerman’s tenure at the University of Oregon; Prefontaine’s transcendent life and tragic death; and the rise of Nike, where Bence made his career. The portrayals are warm and simple. But the innocuousness that Bence aspires to is threatened by his employer’s regular controversies, some of which he raises only to dismiss, others of which (Alberto Salazar, the Vaporfly 4% “super shoes”) he ignores entirely. Needless to say, Bence manages to find his way to Phil Knight’s side of every issue, even if the defenses wear thin.^[1]

But the reason to pick up 1972 isn’t to read about Bence or Nike but to read about Prefontaine. Pre is such an enthralling figure that having been in his proximity is enough to warrant a book. And Bence was right there time and again. Most memorably, when Pre pulled him away from studying for his final exams to play cards before what would be Pre’s last race. At that same fateful meet, Bence would race in the 800m with a broken jaw. A photo taken before the race shows Pre offering tender assurances to a nervous Bence. According to Bence, Pre told him “I don’t think I could do what you’re doing, so why not make it worthwhile?”

Anecdotes like this bring Pre into focus more effectively than Clerici’s accumulation of data. Still, neither of these books, nor any other, can sate our curiosity about him. In the same way that another Dylan biography only confirms the need for still more Dylan biographies, a book about Prefontaine scratches an itch only to make the itch more compelling. The intrigue of Prefontaine only deepens.

And at the heart of the intrigue is the mystery that lurks behind every consideration of Pre: What accounts for genius? And what but genius can we call his example? Genius for Emerson is self-reliance, the courage to “believe your own thought,” which Pre embodied as well as anyone. And so, like Emerson, he calls upon us to become better versions of ourselves. I dare the most sober and rational thinker to read one of the books or watch one of the movies about Prefontaine and not feel greatness inside themself.

And yet, the mystery persists: what accounts? We might name here Pre’s charisma or his success or his confidence or his look or his personality or his Munich result or the timing and circumstances of his death and say that each is necessary but that even all of these together are not sufficient. I think of what Greil Marcus said about Dylan: that if effects like these had causes, there’d be genius on every corner.

The mystery persists. And we are left in wonder. Wonder that there ever was a person such as Pre. Wonder that wholes sometimes are not reducible to their parts. Wonder that the depths of us are never reached. Wonder that one runner could teach us so much about ourselves. Wonder that no matter how many times we hear the story it never gets old but that, as Molly Huddle (quoted in Clerici) describes running at the old Hayward Field, it’s “like an old memory is happening now.”

^[1] And please don’t get me started on Nike’s attitude toward Hood to Coast, which Bence relates in a remarkably self-unaware chapter. What can you do with someone who comes away from that race saying “No more of this ‘winning-isn’t-everything’ stuff” but pity them and maybe keep your distance?

Scott F. Parker is the author of Run for Your Life: A Manifesto and The Joy of Running qua Running, among other books. His writing has appeared in Runner’s World, Running Times, Tin House, Philosophy Now, the Believer, and other publications. He teaches at Montana State University and is the nonfiction editor for Kelson Books.

THE MIND INSIDE THE MYTH

A Review of Emily Pifer’s The Running Body

by Scott F. Parker

There is no mistaking the fact that Emily Pifer’s memoir, The Running Body, is a distinctly literary effort. Only secondarily—almost incidentally—is it also a book about running. Like any good memoir, it is less concerned with what happened than with the sense the author can make of what happened.

From a distance, what happened to Pifer is what happens to runners all the time. She was fast. She restricted her eating. She got faster. Then came the injuries. She never ran as fast again. Under a lesser pen, the arc of that story takes care of itself. Just tack on a reminder for younger runners to learn from the example and there’s your book.

But in refusing to keep the reader at a comfortable distance from which to feel sympathy for her younger self, Pifer brings the reader all the way in to that younger self’s experiences, revealing her inner world in all its torment. This approach is well suited to the material. As anyone who has become obsessed with her or his body and diet knows, the objective world can easily be blocked out by the bright-shining needs of the self. Taking us so deep into her subjective experience, Pifer sacrifices the familiar support of chronological narration. It’s a sacrifice that’s central to her project. She correctly anticipates the response she will get: “What happened? You are asking. Be more clear, you are saying.” And she knows how to respond: “But I have been wanting to show you what looking at this wound looks like to me.”

What do we see through Pifer’s self-conscious gaze? Here she is in her first paragraph introducing her idée fixe: “Flesh wrapped tight around muscle around bone. Every rib self-evident. Tendons so exposed. There were all these parts of me I had never seen. I called the sum of these parts the running body.”

It sounds so inspiring. So powerful. So healthy. In her own eyes, Pifer is like those runners she has observed: Shalane Flanagan and Kara Goucher and dozens of others. “I thought it was so beautiful how you could tell just by looking at their bodies that they were made to do the very thing they were doing.”  Yes! Watching such runners run, like watching Michael Jordan play basketball, can feel like glimpsing the essence of human prowess. But we know all too well that essentializing the human body as one that runs turns pathological in a moment. The temptation to want to look like what a runner looks like quickly becomes an obsession with the body’s appearance that eventually supplants even the running.

In addition to the professionals, Pifer compares her body to the collegiate women she races against for Ohio University. More punishing still, she compares herself to the male runners in her life. About her boyfriend Aaron, she writes, “every time we ran together, jealousy and resentment threatened to masticate away at all the good feelings. His body was harder and smoother than mine.”

At times it’s hard to witness the suffering Pifer undergoes. Seeing life as someone with an eating disorder does is to understand viscerally that solipsism itself is a form of pain. The self unfettered is a malignancy on the psyche. One wants to reach into the book, grab Pifer by the shoulders, and command her to eat. But a healthy diet—one sufficient to sustain a runner through weeks of long miles—would treat only a symptom of what ails Pifer. Beneath her disordered eating lies an unhelpful metaphysic that pits mind against body. Fundamentally, The Running Body is about the limits of will and the impossibility of control, no matter how desperate one is to achieve it.

Even when things are going well for Pifer, running-wise, the problem stalks. The true appeal of running for her is that it can liberate her from the controlling self. “Empty your body of what weighs it down. Empty of what you can’t use for distance and speed. Run your self out of your body, then you can be free.” Freedom, as in freedom from an oppressor, is the only concept that could apply here: “The way I ran for miles without having a single thought—like my mind wasn’t there at all.”

At moments like these, we could almost be talking about the selflessness of mysticism, but this is not the mystical insight of no-self. This is Pifer seizing a momentary victory on the way toward ultimate defeat, as the terms of this liberation are entirely the products of the mind, specifically a mind that defines itself in contrast to the body. The contradiction of the self trying to extinguish itself serves only to further entrench the self. Ruling over a shrinking kingdom, Pifer wants a control she can never have. In the end, she has only two options: either she must cede her power or pursue it to oblivion.

Fortunately—and I use that term only relatively—she goes the former way. “I lost control—could not stop eating. . . . I would be jamming handfuls into my mouth. My hands would always try to do as much damage as they could before my mind intervened.” (45)

What are the people in Pifer’s life saying to her as her health spirals? The most striking response is not from those who gently probe her eating habits or from the teammates who are suffering similarly themselves but from Pifer’s coach, who practices self-interested neglect in choosing not to notice the danger Pifer is in as long as her results keep improving. In this, it becomes hard to tell much difference between collegiate distance running and other domains over which our extraction economy has spread. Like overlogging or overfishing, the cost lags the returns. You can encourage a runner to overwork and underfeed herself for a while, until you can’t. “And although I had been dangerously underfed, it seemed as if the running body that resulted in my undereating and overtraining had been encouraged, expected, and celebrated by nearly everyone surrounding me, especially our coaches.” (62)

Later, after her injuries, Pifer emails her coach, Rick, about possibly rejoining the team. “Rick never responded to that email though, and I haven’t communicated with him since.” (91) She was easily expendable when she could no longer produce the returns he needed. He walks away from her as if abandoning a depleted mine.

Right here, narratively, is where Pifer the author could have succumbed to memoir’s temptation toward straightforward redemption, but she approaches it only to blow right past it to a deeper, more careful reading of the self:

The correct response is to find meaning in the injury. To tell the story this way: I overcame. To say I hurt my body, but because it is a body, it healed. And because my body healed, I too have healed. And when I look back, I see a broken body but one that has taught me all the things that breaking is supposed to teach you. And look how I’ve let go, moved on, gotten over it. Look how I’ve told myself the story of a body redeemed. Look how I’ve organized my life around this new body, this new me. Look how much stronger and smarter and better I am. Look how I leave out the details that trouble me: all that I have not been able to pull myself out from, the phantom fractures and the way they haunt me, the dream that even on my least delusional days still pulses in my blood to the rhythm of maybe maybe maybe.

Narrative closure is the last thing Pifer will settle for. She’s too sensitive, too honest a writer for such fantasies. Consider this crucial admission: “I wish I could say with certainty that if I had understood the costs, I would have done things differently. But I can’t say that, or much of anything about that time, with certainty. I think I was just sick, is what I mean.” A life is what a life is, and the self looking back can’t imagine undoing the past without simultaneously undoing itself. And how scary it is to let go the past: “Healing is supposed to be a beautiful thing, but healing requires you to shift your relationship with the past. It requires you to rewrite the story, or at least, the ending. To heal properly you must forget, maybe not the whole thing but parts, certainly. The whole must become hole-y. In this way, healing is its own kind of loss.” Who is Pifer if not her miles, her injuries, her disorder?

A story of the self in crisis is not one that can be easily resolved. But in this it is only a stark example of what is always the case: that the self can never be entirely beyond itself. It is always a pile of sand. The ground is always giving way. There is always another reflection in the reflection. Narrative closure can only be imposed from the outside, from someone else’s point of view. But a memoir is bound by the life it depicts, one that hopefully fumbles toward consciousness, knowing all the while that it will never arrive.

Pifer is dead center in The Running Body as she enacts the various riddles of consciousness and butts up against the limits of their representation: “Now I know I must either find an alternative way out of this story, or stay in here forever, spinning. I don’t know if it’s wrong or right to presume I have the ability (the power? the agency?) to make the choice. Of course the choice is yours to make, part of me says. If the choice were mine to make, why have I not made it? Another or perhaps the same part, answers.” (95)

Writing a life is like running on moving ground, but that doesn’t mean you stop running. The job of meaning making goes on.

Scott F. Parker is the author of Run for Your Life: A Manifesto and The Joy of Running qua Running, among other books. His writing has appeared in Runner’s World, Running Times, Tin House, Philosophy Now, the Believer, and other publications. He teaches at Montana State University and is the nonfiction editor for Kelson Books.

On Being a Human Being

A Review of Des Linden’s Choosing to Run

by Scott F. Parker

If you know just one thing about Des Linden, it’s that she won the Boston Marathon. If you don’t already know about her victory in Boston, it’s right there on the cover of her memoir. Either way, there will be little suspense as Linden and her co-author Bonnie D. Ford recount the 2018 race over the course of the book in chapters alternating between that race and Linden’s life and career before and after her greatest career achievement. And yet, to pluck just one more word from the book’s cover (this one from Angela Duckworth’s blurb), the retelling is utterly gripping.

Even if, like me, you watched it live and cheered for Linden as you had for years; even if you can recall the horrific weather conditions on that day, with some runners dropping out, some developing hypothermia, and some doing both; even if you scratched your head when you saw one runner (Linden) waiting outside a toilet (mid-race!) for another runner (Shalane Flannagan) to rejoin her; seeing the race again from Linden’s perspective is revelatory. No matter how well you know her race, only she ran it. And that point of view is everything.

Linden’s ability and willingness to see clearly and say plainly is part of what has endeared her to running fans since her career began. Her charm, which comes through in the book as it does through the screen, is that of someone who knows herself and is herself and doesn’t apologize for herself. Lauren Fleshman got right to the point during her recent appearance on Nobody Asked Us, the podcast Linden hosts with Kara Goucher, when she said: “One thing I’ve learned from following your career, Des, is you’ve done a much better job for a much longer period of your life of not giving a fuck about other people’s opinions.”

But alongside the fucks Linden doesn’t give are those she does. She cares deeply about her success on the road. Running, though, is only part of who Linden is. One of the recurring refrains in Choosing to Run is the breadth of Linden’s self. Her interests outside running — including coffee, bourbon, and literature — are well known in the running world, but still how unusual, how refreshing, it is to hear an elite athlete say, time and again, things like “running was what I did, not what I was” and “I left my running gear at home, ditched the one-dimensional self I had to be in training, and steeped myself in trying to learn something new.”

There would be a way of reading this to suggest that Linden is hedging against her future disappointment. If there’s more to life than running, she has a ready-made excuse for failures (relatively speaking). Except that Linden’s disappointments are deeply felt and lead her to periodically consider retiring from the sport, thinking she’ll never improve on her second place at Boston in 2011 (by two seconds). Time and again, though, she returns from these losses. Her resilience isn’t that of someone who is monomaniacal in her drive but that of someone who can find rewards in the work itself independent of outcomes. As she quotes from the Bhagavad Gita,

“You’re entitled to your labor. You’re not entitled to the fruit of your labor.” Linden doesn’t always exhibit this kind of attitude; more impressively, when she’s feeling dejected she is able to work her way back to it.

The most striking example of Linden’s resilience follows 2017, the low point of her career. Coming in in great shape and with years of experience, that was the year she “was going to win in Boston.” But even hitting her goals for the race she came in fourth, more than two minutes behind the third-place finisher, Jordan Hasay. Having watched the leaders run away from her in supershoes that were not yet available to Linden or most other runners, she was dejected. “Overall, my sport seemed to be descending into disorienting chaos. It seemed easier to let go of ambition and stop caring.”

The year got worse from there, with Linden suffering a major health problem that limited the quality and quantity of her training. When she showed up at Boston the next year it was without her “usual competitive mindset.” Instead of expecting to win, she doubted she’d finish. The cold rainy weather that day was its own variable, but it’s hard not to think that Linden’s victory wasn’t also affected by the freedom with which she seems to have run. It is as if, without the pressure to perform, she felt free to open herself to the moment and respond to it as it unfolded. After expecting to drop out early in the race, she decided to stay in the race to support Shalane Flanagan, even waiting for Flanagan when she stopped to use the bathroom. This generosity was its own reward for Linden. “Working in Shalane’s service puts me in a more productive headspace.”

If you’ve ever had an athletic moment in which you feel like you’re simultaneously making no effort yet performing better than ever, Linden’s finish to Boston reads like that—a creative as much as an athletic act. About taking the lead, she writes, “I abandon any idea of a plan and start improvising.” This is Linden with the courage to run straight into the unknown, curious and without expectations about what she’ll find there. And what does she find? Before you accuse me of reading psychology into mere sport when I propose that she finds the self she has been creating most of her life, consider that choosing to run “was the first real decision I ever made.” And if you’ll give me that, I hope you’ll give me this, too: discovering what it’s like for someone else to self-realize in this way is the next best thing to doing it yourself.

There are a lot of books by runners. Many of them are good. Few of them are as human as Choosing to Run. Because Linden knows herself as a human in essence and only contingently as a runner, she writes not for other runners only but for any reader who suspects they might be human, too. It is examples like these that make us so.

Scott F. Parker is the author of Run for Your Life: A Manifesto and The Joy of Running qua Running, among other books. His writing has appeared in Runner’s World, Running Times, Tin House, Philosophy Now, the Believer, and other publications. He teaches at Montana State University and is the nonfiction editor for Kelson Books.

Track’s Sociologist:
A Review of Lauren Fleshman’s Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World

by Scott F. Parker

One of the hazards of the celebrity memoir — and one of the reasons it tends to be such a cringey genre — is the temptation to seize what is already a public narrative and revise or authorize it to serve the author’s own interests. Inevitably, such “memoirs” read more like brand-approved releases from someone’s PR team than like literature. Memoir works when an author is willing to subordinate the needs of her ego to the needs of her book. It is therefore a genre ill-suited to the self-satisfied and even to the successful.

Which puts Lauren Fleshman in a tough spot as a writer. She, first and perhaps best among runners, used social media to give herself a “platform” from which she could successfully self-brand. And so when she shows up on the pages of her memoir, Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World, not only does her reputation precede her but her largely self-created reputation precedes her. Well-known, well-liked, and supremely accomplished, Fleshman is nothing less than a generational star in her sport. What can memoir hope to do for someone who is already enthusiastically, even reverentially, received by thousands of fans?

Falling in line with other public figures as the last holdouts for memoirs that span the entirety of a life so far rather than narrowing their books’ focus to an area of inquiry, Fleshman takes us from childhood through COVID. Predictably, Good for a Girl is at its worst when Fleshman is running through her many achievements like lines on her resume: the Picky Bars company she co-founded, the Believe Training Journal series she co-authored, her popular website AskLaurenFleshman.com, and her sponsorship with the upstart women’s running-clothing company Oiselle. It’s all quite impressive and good material for her Wikipedia page, but in the book we need to see the narrator go inward in a sincere and sustained effort to make sense of her past.

Fleshman does this by interrogating rather than concealing her own shortcomings. No matter how Forrest Gumpy she gets in recounting her career highlights, it is her willingness to portray herself in a harsh light that earns her the reader’s trust and respect. For instance, at the 2008 U. S. Olympic Trials, Fleshman finished fourth in the 5,000m, one spot away from qualifying for the Beijing Olympics, after training through and around injury. It was a pivotal moment in her career. She had to write about it. But she did not have to write about what happened next. Two of the women who beat her, Shalane Flanagan and Kara Goucher, had already qualified for the Olympics in the 10,000m. If either one of them elected to skip the 5,000 to focus on the 10,000, at the Olympics Fleshman would go to Beijing in her stead. “I wrote each of them a brief email, reiterating our shared dream of being Olympians, the heartbreak of facing four years of unknowns and aging out, and explaining the contract consequences of not making the team. They both turned me down.” Pride, in other words, is not going to come between Fleshman and the truth.

Thankfully, it is to such ins and outs and ups and downs of competitive running that Fleshman gives the bulk of her attention. She writes with deep feeling and insight into what it was like for her to be among the world’s elite runners. Within Good for a Girl is a very good memoir, celebrity or otherwise.

Fleshman found early and regular success in running, posting the fastest times in gym class week after week until the day one of her male classmates displaced her by a substantial margin. But puberty would signify more to Fleshman than just that “a boy’s changing body threatened [her] identity.” In the relative advantage puberty gives male over female runners lies the opportunity to start seeing the female body itself as a deviation from the norm. And not only do girls not gain the advantage boys do from puberty, often puberty makes them slower, at least in the short term, and therefore can be seen as something that needs to be suppressed.

This view, pervasive among competitive runners, is one that Fleshman would herself internalize despite dominating her sport. After finishing second at the Foot Locker Cross Country Championships as a high school senior, winning multiple NCAA titles at Stanford, and starting a professional track and field career, Fleshman nevertheless finds herself unhealthily restricting her eating, despite her intentions not “take it too far” (1640), in an effort to take pounds off her body and seconds off her times.

What she doesn’t know during this period — and what many female runners don’t know — is that the physical damage of starvation takes time to announce itself. In the short term, runners often improve. But as the body’s stresses accumulate, the injuries accumulate, and the decline begins. “Looking back on the places we came from, thin, sick girls continued to lower records, win Foot Locker, succeed at NCAAs for a season or two, and then disappear.”

The pressure to deny the female body starts early. Recounting her own experience, Fleshman writes, “A period was a rite of passage into womanhood, and womanhood didn’t stand for anything I wanted” (702). And yet there are penalties to be paid here as well. The male gaze resides not only in Fleshman’s psyche but in the culture around her too: “The body that made me feel powerful in sports was not at odds with being the right body, the body that qualified as feminine.”

It is observations like these that lead Fleshman to her thesis that all too often female runners are treated by the sport as defective males, when what they need is to be understood as biologically distinct and treated as such. Females develop on a different timeline from males and have different biological needs. “During the small window of years through age twenty-six when women’s endocrine systems are responsible for building the entire bone bank we spend the rest of our lives drawing from, so many of us are creating an environment where we’re barely able to maintain what we have” (1731). Yet generation after generation of female runners is pushed past their breaking points, sacrificed at the altar of normative masculinity.

Fleshman is a sociologist of her sport. Her primary research method as a memoirist is self-reflection, but this self-reflection is always carried out with an eye toward the societal implications of her observations and experiences.

In the 50 years since the passing of Title IX, girls have widely been extended the opportunity to participate in sports. Now, Fleshman is demanding, they need to be extended the opportunity also to be girls and to be allowed to become women. On this point, Fleshman is persuasive. How dispiriting is it to witness a system that encourages young athletes to sacrifice their health and well-being for the sake of their sport? Surely, these cannot be our priorities.

Except, as we know from the traumatic brain injuries that are a part of football, athletes will reliably accept substantial personal risk if that’s what their sport entails. What are we to say to female runners on this front beyond “Compete at your own risk”? Fleshman considers the football analogy, citing the fact that the NCAA, “when confronted with concussion research and potential liability, created research-backed and strictly enforced checklists and policies for head injuries that all programs must adhere to” (812) and bemoaning the fact that “the NCAA still has no official policy concerning eating disorders, despite creating the ideal environment for them to propagate.” But the analogy breaks down when you recognize that football can change its rules to try to decrease the incidence of concussions, whereas no sport can define “healthy diet” let alone enforce it.

As long as the incentives point in the direction they do, with weight loss tending to improve times, appeals to abstract notions of health are unlikely to carry the day. So unless we are going to return to the paternalistic days of protecting fragile women from running competitively (we don’t want their uteruses to fall out!) before age 26, our only appeal will be to culture: the culture of women leading by example as they attempt to balance performance, longevity, and health; the culture of women coaches and experienced women athletes establishing better norms and expectations around diet; the culture of Lauren Fleshman writing this book and challenging the prevailing values of winning at all costs and of just doing it and of treating women like proto-men.

It can come as no surprise that for Fleshman, “Making everything about winning, about the Olympics, about being the best . . . it felt bad. Not just when things went wrong, but most of the time.”  How far away Fleshman got from what attracted her to running in the first place — that feeling she can still recall: “I would ramp up my speed until it was impossible to think of anything else but the running; until I wasn’t a girl, or a middle schooler, or in PE class at all. I was just a body, limbs and blood and breath and power.” Isn’t that why any of us run, for that feeling that running, when it really happens, is nothing less than a source of deep elemental meaning in what I have no choice but to call our souls. Fleshman isn’t telling us something we don’t know when she reflects that “any pursuit of excellence had to center these moments of joy, or it wasn’t worth doing”; she’s reminding us of the priorities that are already our own. Or should be.

Scott F. Parker is the author of Run for Your Life: A Manifesto and The Joy of Running qua Running, among other books. His writing has appeared in Runner’s World, Running Times, Tin House, Philosophy Now, the Believer, and other publications. He teaches at Montana State University and is the nonfiction editor for Kelson Books.

Max and Me and Uncle Itch:
Lessons About Sports Betting

by David Blumenfeld

In the 1950s when I was in high school, my father Max and I and a close family friend, my “uncle,” Itch Fink, each learned a lesson about betting on sports. This is the story of those lessons.

Max’s Lesson
“Hello, Potsy? It’s Max. Let me have $100 on the Sox today, and $500 on the Pirates against the Cubs tomorrow. Yeah, I’m splitting that one with a few friends. You know, the usual: Put it all on my account. I’ll get back to you later today for the odds on a couple of fights.”

“Right Maxie. You got it.”

For as long as I can remember, Max had regular phone conversations with his bookie and close friend, Morris “Potsy” Pearl, a leading figure in the Chicago bookmaking racket. Max was the biggest sports nut I have ever known. I realize that sounds like hyperbole but it’s true. He had two passions in life: his retail jewelry business in the steel mill town of East Chicago, Indiana, and sports. But sports — and especially betting on sports — was the bigger passion. Max followed just about every sport popular in the U.S. except hockey and he always had a bet on the games that interested him most. He’d fly across the country to see important ballgames or boxing matches, frequently to Las Vegas where he’d stay up for as much as three days and nights straight, gambling and going to sporting events with his pals Louis Prima and Prima’s ebullient sax player Sam Butera. He’d also fly to New York, where he could buy merchandise for his store, Max Blumenfeld Jewelers, and go to games at Yankee or Dodger Stadiums or boxing matches at Madison Square Garden and St. Nicholas Arena (aka “the Bucket of Blood.”) Max would take me to big, local sporting events, such as when Joe Louis boxed an exhibition nearby, when Willie Pep did the same, or when Satchel Paige pitched a game in our area. I must have been awfully young when I saw Paige because I exclaimed, “He cheated, Dad!” when in his first time at bat Satchel laid down a bunt and Max had to explain to me what a bunt is.

To appreciate just how much Max loved sports and betting on games, consider this. No one I have ever known disliked cold weather more than my dad. He’d do anything to avoid it, including staying inside as much as possible during the mean northern Indiana winters. Yet he always had season tickets on the 50-yard line for the Bears football games, many of which were played in freezing rain or on snowy, windy Chicago days and nights. Despite the occasional subzero weather, there was Max shivering on the 50-yard line, packed up in a Parka, sheepskin gloves, heavy wool sweater, and — underneath it all — long winter underwear. While watching the Bears, Max would have a radio to his ear listening to another game, on which he also had a bet. Once, I seem to recall his having two radios, one to each ear. (Can this be true? Memory is a poor historian but that’s what I recall.) Potsy Pearl would sometimes be at his side, ready to take yet another bet, if necessary. When I was in high school, Max told me with an earnest look and resolute voice, that although he occasionally had more than one bet going at a time (“occasionally” ha!), he never bet a lot and never, never more than he could afford. I’m not sure why he told me this: I had no problem with his gambling and didn’t regard it as any of my business. I assumed his little speech was advice on prudence and rectitude for me. It wasn’t long thereafter that Max had a lesson on prudence and rectitude himself.

A lot of my father’s buddies bet on sports and a couple of them had accounts with Potsy Pearl. A few others patronized Hymie “The Black Jew” Lazar, so named for his faith and his exceptionally dark skin. (Hymie was aptly named since his skin was considerably darker than that of many of my African-American classmates.) But quite a few of Max’s pals were reluctant to deal with a bookie directly, and they began asking him if he would mind placing a bet or two on their behalf. Because he was a good guy, and probably also because he liked being the center of the action, he obliged. In time, Max became the intermediary between a lot of his bookie-shy acquaintances and Potsy. Max would place the bets in his own name and pay off or collect from Potsy as if those bets were his own; my dad’s friends would then pay him back or collect their winnings from him, depending on how they had fared. Eventually, given the bets he placed for himself and his friends, Max became one of Potsy’s bigger accounts. This had some favorable and some unfavorable consequences.

First, the good news. At least a couple of times a year, Potsy would make a trip to Las Vegas to do some gambling of his own, taking a few of his biggest clients with him as his guests, covering their airfare and hotel expenses. Max was Potsy’s guest on several of these junkets, which is how my dad made friends with Louis Prima, Keely Smith, and Sam Butera. On one of these trips, Max was shooting craps next to Potsy, who was a “high roller.” That is, Potsy would make a large initial bet and if he won, he’d let it all ride on the next six, seven, or even eight tosses of the dice, thereby doubling his winnings each time and making a fortune or losing everything on a single toss. Max, by contrast, was betting small amounts and playing conservatively. When it was Potsy’s turn to throw the dice, a casino attendant told Max he had a phone call at the desk. As he left to take the call, Max glanced at the couple of hundred dollars he had on the table and, without thinking about it, said, “Potsy: play my chips for me while I take this call, will you?” The call was brief but when Max returned to the craps table, Potsy was still rolling the dice and Max was dumbfounded: at his place next to Potsy where a couple of hundred had been only a few minutes earlier was a cool five thousand dollars in chips, the equivalent of nearly $55,000 today. Potsy had played Max’s chips the way he played his own, letting the winnings ride over and over again in what had been a really hot hand. Max didn’t say whether Potsy’s lucky streak continued or whether he eventually “crapped out” and lost everything. Maybe it didn’t matter that much to Potsy either way: he was a major Chicago bookie who was in town to be seen as a high roller, and the excitement his hot hand caused achieved that goal win or lose. But whatever Potsy did — continue pushing his luck or stop while he was ahead — Max swore to me that he took his chips off the betting line immediately and didn’t gamble another cent the rest of the trip. Probably true, I thought, though the spiel was starting to sound like one of those set-the-right-example-for-son-David lectures. Or maybe that’s how Max got that dark green Cadillac Coupe Deville with those neat little fishtail lights a few weeks later.

Now for the bad news. At the time Max was booking bets for his friends, the Feds were looking into bookmaking in the Chicago area. With the aid of wiretaps, they had compiled a list of the names and addresses of some of the bigger clients of bookies like Potsy. Of course, the name Max Blumenfeld was on the list. One afternoon, to my father’s eternal mortification, federal agents entered Max Blumenfeld Jewelers at 3514 Main Street in East Chicago, Indiana, and took one Max Blumenfeld out of his store in handcuffs. Fortunately, I was away at college since the last thing I would have wanted to see or that Max would have wanted me to witness was him being taken from his own store by the Feds. In front of his employees and customers. And in handcuffs to boot! I only learned about the incident later from one of my dad’s salesmen who was present at the time. Max never mentioned it to me, and I never asked him about it.

The arrest understandably scared the life out of my dad. Although he certainly rubbed shoulders with some shady characters, he himself was a legitimate businessman who made his living legally.[1] To be whisked off like that by federal agents was the most humiliating thing that ever happened to him. Luckily, the matter didn’t go very far. The Feds questioned him but didn’t press charges and released him fairly quickly. I never discovered exactly what transpired but it seems likely that they weren’t interested in ordinary citizen gamblers but merely wanted to put the squeeze on them to see what they might reveal about their bookies. I’m sure Max didn’t reveal anything incriminating because he never got a visit from “Maish,” the 350-pound baseball-bat-carrying enforcer who took care of welchers or others in the area who ratted on the mob. My dad also remained fast friends with Potsy. But Max definitely learned a lesson from the experience: the handcuff incident marked the last time he ever booked bets for his friends. Despite Max’s diminished betting transactions, Potsy took him for one more trip to Las Vegas, not as thanks for his current bets but for the ordeal he had endured and for old time’s sake. And possibly because Max didn’t “sing.”

 

Uncle Itch’s Lesson and Mine
Uncle Itch’s lesson and mine were twins, or mirror images, of each other. We learned them together. Some background about our relationship will underscore the poignancy of those lessons.

Itch’s real name was Gene Fink. His family’s surname in the Old Country had been Finkelstein, which they shortened to Fink when they came to America, long before the term “fink” acquired negative connotations. But Finkelstein, Fink or whatever name with which Uncle Itch had been graced would not have mattered. He was a dynamic personality and nothing, least of all a name, could have held him back. He had the drive, the personality, and the charm to succeed under almost any circumstances.

Uncle Itch wasn’t physically attractive. He had a long, flat, bulbous nose with a point at the end, and a broad, flat face. But his looks, like his name, didn’t matter. He knew how to make everyone feel as though they were the most important person in the room, or anywhere else for that matter. Take me for example. For a seventh-grade writing assignment, I interviewed him about his World War II experiences in the tank core, where he was his unit’s cook. I listened raptly to his stories about advancing across Europe in those cramped Sherman tanks that were like hot tin cans, likely to break down or explode at any minute, if not from Nazi shells, then from their own defects. At the end of the interview, he gave me his tank corps insignia, which I kept for years, clutching it now and then as a kind of talisman to remind me of how Uncle Itch and his army buddies had fought their way to Berlin to defeat Adolf Hitler.

Even after Uncle Itch had children, he continued to treat me like a son and always had some surprise or gift for me. One day when I was home from my freshman year at Northwestern University, he came into my father’s jewelry store wearing a beautiful pink and black silk tie, which I admired. “What a good-looking tie, Uncle Itch,” I said. Off came the tie, which he gave me on the spot. A few minutes later he left for a business meeting in a suit and dress shirt but no tie. There’s the old saw about the good friend who would give you the shirt off his back. Uncle Itch gave me the tie from his neck. That same year, I learned to like cigars and would smoke one after dinner, dipping it first in Drambuie or Grand Marnier and savoring the taste and aroma of the sweetened tobacco. Itch was a cigar smoker too and when he saw me do this on an evening out together, he thought it was the funniest thing he had ever seen. Thereafter, he’d hand me a fine cigar whenever he’d see me.

I’m sure that everyone called Gene Fink Itch because he was always itching for something to do, somewhere to go, some scheme to hatch, some deal to make. On returning from the service without a nickel in his pocket, he was itching to make a buck. When he began selling insurance, Max switched all of his insurance business to him and introduced him to several other people who did the same. Like my father, Gene Fink was a born salesman and in surprisingly short order, he became extremely successful. In 1954 or so, Max told me that Itch had written more policies for one of the major U.S. insurance companies than any other salesman in the United States.

Our lessons came on June 20, 1960, when I was 22 and old enough to know better than to do what I did. A group of us went to a movie theater in Hammond to see the live TV broadcast of the return heavyweight title match between Floyd Patterson and Ingemar Johansson. In the previous fight, Johansson had stunned boxing fans by dealing Patterson a humiliating defeat. The fight was stopped in the fifth round after Johansson had knocked Patterson down an astonishing seven times. Many believed that Patterson was the better fighter and had simply taken Johansson too lightly. Now, knowing to stay away from Johansson’s right hand, Floyd would be sure to vindicate himself in the next go-around, they thought. Itch agreed. When we all discussed the question in the car on the way to the fight, he said he planned to make a big bet on Patterson. I piped up and took issue with that idea. Speaking in a confident tone, I asked: “How can you bet on Patterson, Itch? Johansson’s right is lethal. He knocked Floyd down seven times. One Johannsson right and it could be curtains. It’s crazy to risk your money on Patterson.” Itch changed his mind and placed a big bet on Johansson.

At first, it seemed that my judgment would be confirmed. In the second round, Johansson connected with a hammering right hand that staggered Patterson. I thought the fight would soon be over and congratulated myself on saving Uncle Itch a lot of money. What would he do without me? Instead of going down, though, Patterson shook the punch off and recovered his composure. Later, at about two minutes into the fifth round, Floyd unleashed a tremendous, leaping left hook. Some say it was the best punch he ever threw. It landed on Johansson’s neck, and it was all over. Ingemar Johansson landed on his back, out “cold as a cucumber.” Floyd was champ again and due to my sage advice Uncle Itch had lost his bet. But I had yet to find out how much he lost.

When we left the theater, Itch met Hymie “The Black Jew” in the parking lot to pay off. I was standing near enough to witness the transaction. Pulling a large wad out of his pocket, Uncle Itch peeled off seventeen one-hundred-dollar bills and handed them to Hymie, who folded them neatly, put them in his pocket, and was off. My confident little speech had cost my uncle $1,700, the equivalent of over $16,000 in 2022 currency. Even as I sit here now over 60 years later, my stomach turns to think about it.

The trip back from Hammond to East Chicago was quiet. I didn’t say a word but sat sheepishly and guiltily in the back seat. Itch neither reprimanded me nor mentioned my ill-starred advice. He wouldn’t have. He was an adult, he knew boxing, and it was his decision what bet to make. He never mentioned the incident to me and even kept giving me cigars and treating me like a son. I, on the other hand, learned a lesson I would never forget: if someone else has a lot to lose and you have no skin in the game, keep your big mouth shut. Uncle Itch surely learned a lesson too: if you are confident in your own judgment, don’t let some punk kid who shoots his mouth off change your mind.

I went on to graduate school at Berkeley, studied a lot of famous authors, and eventually became a philosophy professor. Now, even after more than 30 years as a student and 40 more as a teacher or higher education administrator, in my reveries, I occasionally still hear Max repeating a tired adage that used to get my goat when he’d say it: “There are some things you just can’t learn from books.” That old bromide still annoys me. But when I think about the incidents I’ve just described, I’m also forced to admit that it’s true.

[1] Actually, Max did a little more than rub shoulders with some shady characters. Among his good friends were Sonny Sheetz, Al Capone’s chief lieutenant in the African-American community, and my “uncle” Freddie Brenman, prison-mate of John Dillinger and Dillinger’s bagman. At his first business, The Island Queen, an early-1930s speakeasy on Chicago’s South Side, Max unwittingly became John Dillinger’s host and even took a sightseeing trip around Chicago with him.

David Blumenfeld, professor emeritus of philosophy, taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz; University of Illinois at Chicago; Southwestern University, where he held the McManis Chair in Philosophy and Religion; and Georgia State University, where he was philosophy chairperson and associate dean for the humanities. In retirement, he has returned to an old interest, writing nonfiction and children’s literature (under the pen name, Dean Flowerfield). Recent publications include Best New True Crime Stories: Well-Mannered Crooks, Rogues & Criminals, Mono., Balloons Lit. Journal, The Caterpillar, Beyond Words, and more. He and his wife (an artist/photographer) live on the Georgia coast, where they do much of their work on a small, semi-wilderness island accessible only by boat.

 

No Man’s Land

by Anthony D’Aries

“I’m 36 years old, I have a wife, a child and a mortgage and I’m scared to death I’m turning into my father.”

I press pause and lock eyes with Kevin Costner. A tiny ball of thorns forms in my throat. My ears are ringing. My face is hot. Though I haven’t seen Field of Dreams in nearly 15 years, I can still quote entire scenes. But after learning that the 25^th anniversary of the film falls on the exact day my first child is due to be born, this line is new to me.

Three sleepless hours later, it’s almost five a.m., and my father is everywhere: The coffee, the streetlights, the men in work trucks idling in driveways, the classic car show I’ll attend alone today. A Dad kind of day. But he wouldn’t call the Starbucks Instant I’m drinking “coffee,” and my streetlights illuminate cracked concrete, not dew-glistening grass, and he still owns his ’67 Chevy pickup, while my ’66 Dodge Coronet has long been replaced by an ’09 Honda Fit.

Five years, 30 interviews, 72,000 words later and I’m still writing about my father. When I finished my first book, The Language of Men, a memoir about Full Metal Jacket, Bob Seger, taxidermy, The Swimsuit Issue, and all the other filters my male-dominated family used to communicate, I was relieved. I had a lot questions for him: his lurid tales of young Vietnamese prostitutes, his 40 years as a deli manager, his elusive father who always appeared half-shadowed in photographs. My father never complained — at least not to me — about my curiosity or my writing, though he occasionally offered a few clipped comments when my questions violated an unspoken code, pressed too firmly on bruises of work or love or dreams: You off in No Man’s Land now, boy.

I covered a lot of ground in my book. My wife Vanessa and I traveled to Vietnam, where she led sexual health and reproductive rights classes for former sex workers, while I searched for my bored and horny nineteen-year-old father; to Maine and Boston, Texas and San Francisco, returning with old letters and photographs like souvenirs; but ultimately back to Northport, the little fishing village on Long Island where I grew up, armed with a tape recorder and a list of questions.

“I never forgave him for getting old,” Kevin Costner says, in a tone that makes his statement sound more like a question to his younger self. “He must have had dreams, right?”

As I crawl toward fatherhood, what frightens me, what I think is the reason I had to pause and replay several of Costner’s lines, is the word “dreams.” The question that left me stranded in No Man’s Land wasn’t racy or voyeuristic; I had asked my father what he wanted to be when he was my age. The question every adult had asked me since I was six years old. My father shrugged and chewed the inside of his lip as if no one had ever asked him that.

No Man’s Land was flat, desolate country. Wind blew across shallow canyons like breath over empty beer bottles. The more questions I asked, the deeper I traveled into No Man’s Land, until I reached that cold-sweat moment in a long hike when you realize the end is far away, but the beginning is even farther.

***

When I was in elementary school, my family and a few of my aunts and uncles and cousins rented an RV and drove from New York to Georgia to visit my Uncle Richard. HBO had recently run a National Lampoon’s Vacation marathon, and as we geared up for our trip, we referred to my Uncle Richard as Cousin Eddie. Cousin Eddie is Randy Quaid’s character in the movie, an obnoxious redneck who owns a worm farm, has a pack of kids (one born without a tongue), and serves up a barbecue of processed seasonings and condiments: I don’t know why they call this stuff Hamburger Helper; it does just fine by itself. Our Cousin Eddie, my Uncle Richard, bore a certain resemblance – an overgrown plot of land outside Atlanta pock-marked with rusty cars on cement blocks, ATV engines, and a crippled swing set. He shot Roman Candles at his neighbor’s house, ate SPAM, drank Royal Cola, and loved his kids. My uncle shared Eddie’s perverted sense of humor, his punch lines often hinging on a particular sex act or female body part. Not that I understood what he was talking about at the time. The men would laugh and the women would shake their heads and the kids would stare. I preferred the part of his act when he leaned to one side of his chair at the dinner table, bit his lip, and asked if somebody stepped on a duck.

The thought of being in an RV for several days with no television was enough for me to convince Dad to pack a tiny black and white portable TV that was more gray plastic than screen. I hooked our VHS video camera (the size of a Ghostbuster’s proton pack) up to the portable TV so I could watch movies. While everyone else was packing sunscreen and tank tops, I scanned our movie collection. We had an eighteen-hour drive, so I divided that by two, and determined I’d need nine movies for each leg of the trip. I packed Goodfellas and The Untouchables, Willow and Caddyshack, Back to the Future and Lethal Weapon, Tango and Cash and Easy Money — all the movies I knew by heart. I didn’t want to watch anything new. I wanted a steady dose of the familiar, the expected, the lines and scenes I could predict and reenact. And I packed Field of Dreams.

Field of Dreams was one of the rare movies we purchased brand new – the rest were recorded off HBO and labeled in Dad’s chicken-scratch handwriting. On the box for Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner stands before an emerald corn field in sun-bleached jeans, white t-shirt, and worn brown leather jacket, hands on his hips, a slight grin on his face. Over the corn, a massive full moon rises, almost touching the movie’s tagline: If you believe the impossible, the incredible can come true.

Dad chewed a cherry cigar and drove us over the George Washington Bridge. Mom sat in the passenger seat swiping an emery board across her nails in quick, scratchy strokes. With his palm resting on top of the steering wheel, Dad played air piano to Seger’s “Katmandu.” My mother sang along. Sarah and Shannon, my teenage cousins, wore headphones and braided each other’s hair; my older brother, Don, a freshman in high school, slept. For the first hour or so, I tried to make tractor trailers blow their horns, but I eventually got bored and started watching movies. Robert De Niro, then Rodney Dangerfield, then Sylvester Stallone ran across the screen like extras in a Charlie Chaplin film, their voices squealing like The Chipmunks. Each tape seemed to be stuck on fast-forward. I soon realized that there was an issue with the play-back speed on our video camera. The only movie that played at the correct speed was Field of Dreams. Eighteen hours, divided by two. Lots of fields. Lots of dreams.

Though Dad and I played catch from time to time — and I joined Little League for a season or two in elementary school — I didn’t care about baseball. It was no different than basketball or football or street hockey or any of the other sports I played with mediocre skill and mild enthusiasm. I couldn’t name a single professional baseball player, I’d seen Billy Joel play more times at Shea Stadium than the Mets, and given how rarely we ventured into New York City, Yankee Stadium might as well have been a desert island. Dad didn’t listen to games on the radio or watch them on TV, except when ESPN re-ran old World Series games. Then he watched them as if they were a Clint Eastwood western, jabbing me in the ribs before a home run the way he would when a burlesque dancer jiggled across the saloon stage or an outlaw was about to get pumped full of lead.

***

I park my ‘09 Honda Fit next to a jacked-up Hummer with pink plastic testicles dangling from the tow hitch. Across the parking lot is a baseball field full of muscle cars. A few Cub Scouts walk by carrying boxes of raffle tickets. A heavy-set man in a train conductor’s cap uses a stainless steel spatula to push a pile of sausage and peppers onto a grill. GTOs and Road Runners, Camaros and Thunderbirds, 442s and Corvettes roll up to the registration booth. They idle for a moment, as if the rumbling exhaust were haggling over the admission price, then roll through the gate and onto the field. They add themselves to the necklace of cars in the outfield, snarling like wild cats as they approach each other, before the drivers kill their engines. I smell exhaust from across the field, coffee brewing in tall stainless-steel canisters, Armor-All and cigarettes, Windex and leather and aftershave. I unclip the keys from my belt loop, partly to avoid scratching any of the cars, but mostly to hide my bulky black Honda key.

Vanessa likes car shows, but this one is too early for her. I’m glad I’m alone today, wandering from car to car in a quiet Massachusetts suburb not far from the prison where I teach men older than my father how to read, a town not unlike Northport: million dollar horse farms sloping to weathered ranches or capes, then farther down to the faceless brick apartments behind Main Street. On my morning drives to work, the farms and apartments seem abandoned, as if I were a laborer arriving too early at a massive job site.

The early morning reminds me of Costner rising at dawn to tend his corn. After watching Field of Dreams the night before the car show, I’m surprised by how much of the film is about identity and purpose, how we expect work to define us. I’ve always admired the outcasts, the underdogs, the square pegs. The high school stoner athlete, the female race car driver, the professor in scuffed work boots. Or Costner and his wife, the young married couple whom the town considers crazy for plowing under their corn and building a baseball field, cashing in their crop for what W.P. Kinsella calls “dream currency.”

As I walk from car to car, I see a young woman pushing a boy in a stroller back and forth beside a blood-red ’68 Cobra. The boy runs a Matchbox car along the stroller’s railing, flipping and twisting, then landing the car smoothly on his plastic seat belt. The woman talks to a man spraying wax onto a rag and polishing the Cobra, as the Everly Brothers sing about how much time can do. I never paid much attention to this song, but it’s hard not to when the speakers are the size of box trucks. Is it optimistic or pessimistic? Does time allow us to sand and prime rusted metal, give it a glossy coat? Or is time the rust itself, the deterioration, the cement shoes on the Buicks and Toyotas on my uncle’s front lawn?

Sixteen years ago, when I followed my father’s ’67 Chevy pickup in my ’66 Dodge Coronet to the fairgrounds on Sunday afternoons, the cars and music and people we saw were the same I see now. Leather-bound ‘Nam vets with hats stabbed full of pins; obese food vendors wheezing over sausage and pepper heroes, skinny rat-faced and sunburned bikers telling loud stories in front of their chromed-out Harleys; teenagers smoking mentholated cigarettes, boasting about their Civics’ new sound systems; mahogany-skinned Indian or Middle Eastern men with gold hidden in furry wrists posing next to Lamborghinis or Teslas; baby-faced professionals in new leather jackets eyeing For Sale signs; Cub Scouts bragging about their fathers, like the one today: “Oh yeah? Well, my dad’s gotten carbon monoxide poisoning twice this year!”; the brittle Elk’s Club members in full regalia collecting admissions, stamping the backs of hands, and drumming up business for the 50/50 raffle. All of them pinned to the same evolutionary line like overalls in the breeze.

My father is retired now, no longer bound to the one-day-off-a-week schedule he had for forty years. When I was a kid, I was fascinated with his job. On Sundays, he’d wake me at 4:45 in the morning. Time to make the donuts, boy. Then 7-Eleven and coffee and the black shimmering asphalt leading us to Great Neck. Not Gatsby’s Great Neck – my father’s Great Neck was owned by Waldbaum’s supermarket. On a good day, he’d stop along the way and scrape a raccoon or rabbit off the highway, store it in the supermarket’s walk-in refrigerator, and bring it home to work on alone in his taxidermy workshop in our basement. I remember stepping through the supermarket’s glass doorway and wandering the empty, dimly-lit aisles. We were alone in a giant warehouse of shiny, colorful food. As we made our way to the deli counter, my father let me choose any box of cereal I wanted – just grab it off the shelf and open the box. I always hesitated because it never seemed right. Relax, will ya? Delivery guy’ll get credit for it. I decided I wanted to be a cereal delivery man when I grew up.

Now, whenever I visit my parents, I still hear him making his coffee at 4:45. The sliding glass door, the Winstons in the garage, the razor and Artic Blue aftershave. Take the job out of the routine, and the routine remains. I’ve inherited his routine – the mornings, the coffee, the quiet. Like the Roadrunners and Cougars and Stingrays in the outfield, my father and I are solitary animals.

***

“Not Field of Dreams, again,” my cousin Sarah said, holding onto the walls of the RV. We were somewhere outside of Washington D.C.; I was on my third viewing.

“It’s the only one that works,” I said.

“There needs to be a rule for how many times we watch that,” Sarah said, and as the word “rule” came out of her mouth, Dad shouted from the driver’s seat like James Earl Jones: “There are rules here? No, there are no rules here.” And I was Kevin Costner, stumbling backwards, as if Jones were right in front of me delivering his lines. Dad laughed. Sarah shook her head and joined her sister in the RV’s cramped bathroom.

As the cars and trucks zoomed around our oil-burning RV, I walked through corn fields, wondering how far I’d get before I disappeared like Shoeless Joe Jackson. I only knew Shoeless Joe because Dad and I had watched Eight Men Out a bunch of times, not because I knew anything about the real Joe Jackson. But the Hollywood version was enough for me to feel like I knew all about Joe and the 1919 White Sox World Series scandal. I wasn’t concerned if Joe was a hero or a thief or if one man couldn’t be both; I was lost in the magical realism of Field of Dreams — one moment Costner and his wife are unpacking groceries, the next dead baseball players are standing on their front lawn. I wanted a farm, a VW bus, and a magic corn field. I wanted a voice to tell me what to do.

***

Since I’m alone and have no car to show, I only stay for a few hours, unlike the full days my father and I spent wandering the field of cars and rummaging through the swap meet. I toss my empty coffee cup into the garbage and walk across Main Street. I keep walking, past my Honda, past the Hummer’s plastic balls and follow a narrow street through a quiet neighborhood and instead of cars I’m thinking about how the hell Vanessa and I will ever afford a house and if we even want one and what’s so bad about raising a family in an apartment? Field of Dreams is still stuck in my head, but not the scenes of Shoeless Joe side-stepping in left field or Costner’s VW bus cruising to the Doobie Brothers. Instead, I see Costner at the kitchen table with his glasses balanced on the tip of his nose, him and his wife staring at a stack of bills, as if more money money might suddenly appear. I see his pushy brother-in-law telling Costner the bank is ready to foreclose. I see Costner’s little girl choking on a hot dog.

When I told my father Vanessa and I were having a baby, he took a step back and sat down. I thought I’d given him a second heart attack. He was thrilled, but surprised.

“To be honest, I thought it was off the table for you two,” he said.

“Really? Why?”

“I don’t know. I thought you were both into your careers and that was that.”

I was surprised to hear him say this — Vanessa and I had been together for ten years, married for five. Later, I thought about my father’s reaction. He was twenty-three when my brother Don was born, only a few years home from Vietnam, back slicing cold cuts at Waldbaum’s where he’d worked before he was drafted. College was off his table. I used to think he missed out on something, or that war and work restricted him from doing the one thing he always wanted to do, but perhaps these thoughts were less about him, more about me.

My parents did well for themselves, for me and my brother; a housecleaner-receptionist-accountant and a deli manager would be hard pressed to build a similar life on Long Island today. One summer, as Don and I floated on giant packages of Oscar Meyer hotdogs or wheels of Carlsberg cheese in our above-ground pool — promotional items companies gave to all the deli managers — my father and his father re-landscaped our backyard. At the time, my grandparents were caretakers on a farm in Mattituck, a small town at the east end of Long Island, on the north fork. I remember afternoons sitting on the cold tractor in the barn, listening to what I thought were Army helicopters passing overhead. I later learned that the helicopters carried people from Manhattan to the Hamptons on the opposite shore of the island.

The farm job arrived a few months after Grumman told my grandfather they no longer needed airplane mechanics. The sun and the corn and the animals coaxed him off the couch and away from his Budweiser; the cool nights and crickets and lingering scent of soil on his hands lulled him to sleep.

That summer, for a week or so, my father stopped at a construction site near Waldbaum’s each day and brought home piles of large stones. Don and I watched Dad and Grandpa unload stone after stone from a rusty wheelbarrow. I don’t remember why we didn’t lend a hand – normally my father would have told us to get our asses out of the pool – but instead we watched them pour soil along the fence. Grandpa brought large hedges from the farm; he and Dad transplanted them from black plastic pots into the new soil, their roots dangling like dirt-caked tentacles. Then they edged the yard in white and gray stones, some smooth and round, others rough and jagged. Before dinner, they sat on the steps of the deck sipping iced tea, pointing and nodding like fans in the bleachers.

***

During my interviews with my father, I wanted him to articulate his dreams, but if he had asked me the same question, I wouldn’t have been able to answer either. My grandfather didn’t know he wanted to be a farmer — he became one and it gave him a purpose again – so perhaps he wouldn’t have been able to answer my question either. My dreams seemed to change daily – cereal delivery man became mechanic became archeologist became writer. I wanted my dream and my job to be the same, or to at least find a way to create a life where work and dreams were not mutually exclusive. Maybe that’s what I was asking my father to do – to tell me what to dream. Perhaps explaining a dream is like telling someone your wish while smoke twists from your birthday candle.

Was I asking for too much? Are my father’s dreams a crop better left unattended? Is “No Man’s Land” barren, or had I only visited during planting season?

***

Dad pulled the RV into Uncle Richard’s pot-holed driveway. By this point, my brain was a cookie jar of Field of Dreams quotes. I took one look at my uncle working on his shed and whispered: If you build it, he will come, as if some dead shed-building lumberjack, ostracized from his union decades ago for throwing the World Series of Log Rolling, would emerge from the tall weeds edging my uncle’s property and ask him if this was heaven. When my uncle started yelling at his neighbors and threatening to fire his nail gun, I wanted to ease his pain. And when we took a long drive to an amusement park, I thought not about my uncle’s giddiness for a laser-light show, but about the length of the drive: Go the distance.

After we settled in, Dad and Uncle Richard walked around the yard, checking out the cars on Richard’s lawn. He owned several acres of land and nearly a dozen cars, most of them without wheels or an engine, their bodies like Sonny Corleone’s ’41 Lincoln at the end of The Godfather. Grass and weeds grew through bullet holes that Richard or neighborhood kids had blasted into doors and fenders. His lawn was like time-lapse photography of the car shows. If all the Cobras and Mustangs and Broncos broke down in the outfield and never ran again, in fifty years the show would look like my uncle’s front lawn.

Dad and Uncle Richard both shared a love for anything done in a garage. “Putzin’ around,” Dad called it. Anything with tools. But when they worked on houses together, Richard was the demolition man and Dad built walls. Dad was a preservationist — his ducks and owls and rabbits perched on the mantel, his Chevy pickup rebuilt from scratch. While Uncle Richard gazed at the stripped and rusted frames on his lawn like a full man proud of the bones on his plate, Dad saw them as skeletons no one bothered to bury.

***

I stop for lunch after the car show and by the time I get home, the sun is setting. I park my Honda in the driveway and walk inside. Our two cats sit in the fading sun. They see me, arch their backs, and cry for food. Vanessa opens our bedroom door, a nap lingering on her face like morning mist.

“I didn’t even hear you leave this morning,” she says.

“I couldn’t sleep,” I say. Perhaps my body is preparing for the late nights and early mornings we’ll face seven months from now, but I know that’s not entirely true.

“Any Broncos?” Vanessa asks.

“There was one you would’ve loved. ’71. Convertible. Sky blue. It was for sale, too.”

She grins and raises her eyebrows, then pours a glass of water and walks back into the bedroom. I stand in the kitchen, not sure what to do next. Our cheap wall clock above the stove trembles with each tick. It’s too early for dinner and I’m not hungry. My window of time for coffee has closed. I decide to join Vanessa in the bedroom. I grab my book off the nightstand, lie beside her and stare at the first paragraph for what feels like half an hour. Vanessa’s book slips from her hands and startles her out of sleep. Her eyes open for a moment, then close. I turn to her, place my hand on her stomach, and watch it rise and fall.

At the end of Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner discovers that he didn’t build the field to reincarnate Shoeless Joe, but rather his father. The day before they shot the final scene, Dwier Brown, the actor who played Costner’s father, attended his own father’s funeral. He drove all night to make it to the set, threw on his costume, stood in front of directors, cinematographers, sound men, dozens of extras, and pretended to be a dead father.

Is the authentic acting the only reason the movie hits me so hard? If so, then why was I on the verge of tears before anyone even appeared on screen, the opening credits and soundtrack taking the wind out of me? My father’s not dead, though his heart attacks and strokes and Winstons stashed in the garage aren’t easing anyone’s pain. I’d ventured into No Man’s Land with my book, lived to tell the tale, and he and I are both still here. For now.

Perhaps it’s not the word “dream” that pulls at me, but “time.” I’m on the brink. I’m James Earl Jones at the edge of the cornfield, giggling nervously as I push through the tall stalks. I’m Kevin Costner demanding like a child that Joe explain the magic to me.  I’m one of the many thousands of drivers lined up on the highway, headlights twinkling, hunched over steering wheels like old men listening for a whisper.

Anthony D’Aries is the author of The Language of Men: A Memoir (Hudson Whitman Press, 2012), which received the PEN/New England Discovery Prize and Foreword’s Memoir-of-the-Year Award. His work has appeared in Boston Magazine, Solstice, The Good Men Project, Shelf Awareness, The Literary Review, Memoir Magazine, and elsewhere. He currently directs the low-residency MFA in Creative and Professional Writing at Western Connecticut State University.

The List

by Todd Morgan

Sam and I were having lunch at the kitchen table. His baseball cap shielded his eyes as he leaned over a piece of paper, pencil grasped in his small hand, his PB&J partly eaten.

“What’s that?” I said.
He didn’t look up.
“Coach said if he was going to war, he’d take some of the guys with him, but some of us he wouldn’t.”

I put down my newspaper and peered across the table. I saw a partial listing of his teammates’ names: Matt, Ricky, …. My nine-year-old was trying to figure out which group he fell in. Go to war or be left at home?

I felt a sudden urge to shield him.

The young coach who said this, Nick, had a swagger about him, one that was either contagious or obnoxious depending on whether you were associated with his team or the opposition. A star high school athlete just a few years earlier, he wore mirrored sunglasses and shaved his head. The kids idolized him.

Like most coaches, Nick had a deep competitive streak. But unlike most coaches, he seemed to know how to fully embrace competition while keeping things in perspective. Time after time he steeled the team to rally from a deficit. He would build up the confidence of each batter, one pitch at a time. For a boy intent on driving in a run, he’d call out, “Just make contact.” To boost a kid battling deep in the count, he’d yell, “Good at bat.” If a pitcher challenged a baserunner’s lead, well then, on the next pitch Nick would shout to the boy to take an even bigger lead. It was a master class in pitting one’s will against the opponent.

Then, once the game ended and he had talked to the team about lessons learned, his intensity vanished. Lighthearted and matter-of-fact behind the mirrored shades, he would crank up the volume on his car stereo and head off into the afternoon blasting “We Like to Party! (The Vengabus).”

Why was this good coach challenging these young boys with a misguided war analogy? Might one of them quietly conclude at nine or ten years old that he was a coward? Was I over reacting?

Sam loved sports, and I wanted to help him be successful. We enjoyed tossing the ball back and forth. I bought him an expensive aluminum bat. Sometimes I pitched to him, or we went to the batting cages and then got hot dogs afterward. Occasionally I cleaned caked mud off his cleats at night after he was asleep and wondered if I was too invested. But there were plenty of other parents like my wife and me, who went to every game and followed each pitch.

When I was Sam’s age, my brother Greg enlisted in an intelligence branch of the army. The enlistment officer told him that because he’d be schooled in top secret codes, he’d never be sent to a combat zone, so he’d never be in jeopardy of revealing secrets if captured and tortured. Greg was pleased and thought he had sidestepped Vietnam. The officer’s story, while plausible and correct in the small details, was a stunning lie.

I often studied the photo that sat on top of the TV while Greg was gone: my parents and him standing next to each other at the airport, my mom with red eyes, my dad wearing a suit and a grim expression, my brother frowning in his dress uniform with its few ribbon medals. Before the army, Greg wore oxford cloth shirts, drank Pepsi, smoked a pipe, read Playboy, and listened to Dave Brubeck. When he came home, he drank beer, smoked pot, worked ‘fuck’ and its variations into almost every conversation, and listened to The Band, Dylan, and Jimi Hendrix.

He told me a story about a highly decorated soldier who did something violent and obscene to a cat. He taught me I could solve life’s problems just by saying “fuck it.” From all of this I understood war was a kind of betrayal or, as Greg would have put it, a complete fucking mess.

There’s a photo I love of Greg taken in Saigon in 1968. It’s a head shot of him in jungle fatigues. He’s wearing a boonie hat and standard issue glasses. The freckles across the bridge of his nose remind me of Sam. His blue eyes stare with childlike determination as he sticks out his tongue at the camera.

I had never considered Sam going to war until Nick’s comment triggered me like an unexpected muscle memory. I doubt I could’ve tempered my response to Sam if I’d known that ultimately Greg would die of ALS. It’s a brutal disease that progressively weakens the muscles, including ones you didn’t know you had. Near the end, Greg couldn’t even close his eyes. The causes of ALS are unknown but veterans are twice as likely to get it as the general population. The US government presumes there’s a service connection when a vet gets the disease.

To try to convey my attitude to a nine-year-old focused on baseball would have been foolish. At the same time, it was insidiously easy to challenge a kid to jump on the war bandwagon and thereby plant seeds of moral confusion about what war is – and isn’t. I also feared one day Sam might have a life-changing conversation with an army recruiter, possibly a charismatic young man with a shaved head and sunglasses.

“Sam…. Nick doesn’t know you well enough to say something like that.”

The baseball cap tipped up and Sam looked out for a moment. It seemed he registered what I said though there was a distant look in his eyes. Then, he returned to pondering the list.

Watching Sam hunkered down, I faced the fact that I would be on guard but he would make his own choices.

I pretended to resume reading my newspaper and we sat together.

Todd Morgan’s stories have appeared in Split Lip Magazine and Every Day Fiction. He was born in Indiana and grew up in Kentucky and New Jersey. He lives with his wife in Oak Park, Illinois.

Mrs. Talbot and a Field

by Kent Jacobson

Life comes with indelible loss: lost innocence, lost
loved ones, broken bonds, broken hearts, faulty choices . . .
Bob Hohler

I remember a woman crossing her lawn, the doctor’s wife, Mrs. Talbot, a slim woman in a dark faded shirtwaist, striding with this-is-my-world certainty, chin out, spine straight. She’d shot from her weathered-shingle second home on Winnapaug salt pond: the sharp smell, the squawking gulls, the jays, the blackbirds, low-hanging limbs heavy with apples. I was 12.

We played baseball in the summer twilight on Mrs. Talbot’s field with its chicken-wired backstop and dirt bases, the sloping left field and the too deep right. Nobody ever hit a home run to right. Nobody. One kid was the son of a double-amputee chicken farmer, and another, the son of his foreman. A third was a string bean with a future in basketball; his dad sold insurance. Another’s cousin would play in the baseball All-Star game, his father a state trooper. My nearest neighbors and buddies, the Crandalls and the Smiths, came from families where mom and dad worked the factory lines. And me, I was the kid who lived on the lone hill, Mom at the University, Dad head of the state forest service. We boys were a mixed collection, just enough of us, we always said, “for a decent game.”

We scrapped and recited. “Who forgot the first baseman’s glove?” “Get the damn ball over the plate. Arm needs a tune-up.” “Where’s the good bat?” “You didn’t tag ‘im, you didn’t tag ‘im.” “Overthrow first and you go find it in the high grass.” We were that kind of family. Each night we bickered for the good of the game. Ball fired to the plate, crack of a bat against beat-up ball, “In the air, in the air, Go back, go back,” runner streaks, “Second, he’s at second,” ball in Mike Smith’s glove in left and a bad throw to third, ball wide, runner scores, “Missed a base, he missed a base.” The game was like a song shout with Chuck Berry and the Yankees’ World War II marine outfielder Hank Bauer, revered for grit and a face “like a clenched fist.”

But then there was Mrs. Talbot. She had an underground, fresh-water spring that poured cold into the marsh, steps from her shingled home. In the August heat, t-shirts sopped, jeans stuck to our thighs, we threw our gloves down to hold our spot and howled across her lawn like we owned the place, the salt smell sharper, and gulped at her spring, the water clean, the water clear . . . and whooped our way back past the lilac and summersweet, the rhododendron and hydrangea, back over her green wide lush lawn to our field.

Mrs. Talbot complained. She said we were too many. There was noise. We wore a path. No water, she said, no more use of the spring.
What’d she say?
We weren’t certain the verdict was final. It couldn’t be. Adults said piles of things, much of which we tried to ignore.
I headed for the spring. That’s when Mrs. T appeared, that stride. I froze.

Adults talked to kids when we needed a correction and I sensed mine was coming now.
She spoke in a whisper without a hint of hesitation. “It’s alright if you come here for water. I won’t allow anyone else.”
Wha . . .?

The boys could see us. I should have gone back to the field right then, told them, Forget it. Verdict’s final. She’s serious. No water.
Mrs. Talbot retreated to the house. I stood there. I watched her go. I turned for the spring.
Why? Why did I do that? Why wasn’t I wiser?

Mrs. T, I thought, is looking after me. She’s singled me out. One boy’s okay. I’m not the army of the 11 of us. I’m quiet, though how does she know?

And sure, my older sister was smart and Mrs. Talbot’s sister, my new English teacher for the college-bound, gave A’s to my soaked-in-books sister. That counted for something. Mrs. Talbot and my family were nearest neighbors (even if we didn’t speak), us up on the hill, 25 rooms, a stone porch and fountain, Japanese maples and an ocean view. On nights and weekends Dad and Mom had transformed a three-story derelict mansion into a summer inn (Winnapaug House) to pay for sis and my college.

I was different from the other boys, Mrs. Talbot’s permission said. I was special. I could be trusted. They couldn’t. I was flattered.
I swallowed the message whole.
I must have told the boys, though I can’t remember. I don’t want to remember. No water except for me. Did I appear smug and pleased?
No one protested, not openly.

Their dads may have said: Live with it. He isn’t like us. He’s like Mrs. Talbot. Though some boys had to balk: Why him? What’s wrong with me? He’s just a kid like us.

All the boys would slip from my life and never see me as older men except that time on a New Haven train when Randy and Kenny Crandall passed and didn’t speak. We didn’t forget, none of us could forget, because we’d had a glimpse early of the way the world would likely work.

You can betray your friends and simultaneously betray who you are and who you have been, and spend much of your life from that point on finding your way back, all the way back… to one isolated abandoned field off the main road.

Kent Jacobson has taught in prisons and a foundering inner-city for 30 years. His writing appears (or will soon appear) in The Dewdrop, Hobart, Talking Writing, Backchannels, Punctuate, Lucky Jefferson, BULL, and elsewhere. He lives in Massachusetts, two hours from Mrs. Talbot’s field.