Running in loops

Running one large loop is no problem. Once you get half-way around, there's no point in turning back because, obviously, you would still have to go the same distance as you would by completing the circle.

Running smaller loops is a different matter. Unless you are in a rhythm, or unless you are extremely disciplined, you might be tempted, every time you come around to your starting point, to call it a day.

It presents advantages and challenges to people who are either starting fresh or who, like me, are trying to start again after a break due to illness, injury or some other reason. It's good that you have a place to stop and go back home if you just don't feel up to it, but not so good if you stop because you can't give yourself the extra push needed to keep going.

Beginning, or beginning again, is sometimes rewarding and sometimes just plain no fun. I guess it's like running, or life for that matter, in general. You have to slog through the bad days to get to the good ones.

I thought of this today after deciding to get up early and go for a run. I've been doing other things, but I haven't run in the heat. After healing from my stress fracture, I had built back up and set three miles as my basic run to build on after I felt comfortable with it. Obviously not a long distance, but long enough for me at this point.

Many people run to music, but I never did. I like listening to the sounds around me and letting my mind wander.

With so much to look at, running in New York or Boston is easier. But there's always something, first and foremost, of course, the sound and feel of your own footsteps and the rhythm of your breath.

Today the first loop around the lake (one mile) was fine, but as I neared my starting point I thought, "It's getting hot already, I did enough, I'm going home." But then I did a systems check. Feeling OK? Yes. Feet hurt? No. Out of breath? No.

So? Your excuse? Um, nothing. OK then.

I passed by my starting point and distracted myself by paying attention, exchanging greetings, and picking up bits of conversation.

Sun on leaves. Water rippling. Birds calling.

A couple comes around in the other direction. I say, "Getting hot already."

"At least you're wearing the right hat," he says, acknowledging my Red Sox hat.

Two college-age women speed past me.

"Oh my god," I mutter.

Correction: "Hey, you never ran that fast, anyway."

Behind me, a man tells a woman, "Somebody really hates me."

The students pass again.

They are laughing. One says, "...when I was running three hours a day..."

An older guy running about my speed comes along in the opposite direction. He gives me a big hello.

That's more like it.

The second loop done, I head back, past the bushes that smell like the beach, around the Mount Holyoke Campus a little, up some small hills. I have something left for the incline leading to my house and even  speed up, which is probably like my old slowest pace or even slower, but, again, that was then and this is now.

Home sweet home.

I drink water and eat a little watermelon, and then it's coffee time.

Running after tennis balls

I still haven't gotten back into any running routine. I'm waiting for the heat wave to pass...whenever that will be.

But over the weekend I ran as much on the tennis court as I might have done around the lake.

On Saturday I played with Donna on the beautiful clay courts at the Field Club in Longmeadow. Our doubles game fell through, so we decided to hit together. After a while we decided to play some singles.

Way back in the day, I was a speedy singles player, but this is now. Still, it went really well. We both had fun and actually had some real singles points.

Running to the net on clay is so much easier. You hardly feel the stress on your feet. I surprised myself by how easily I got up there.

So there we were playing singles. When we stopped, we talked about how Donna had helped me come back on these very courts. At first she repeatedly reminded me to take only one step in each direction (so I would not fall.) Next time I was allowed to take two steps. And so on and so forth, until this past Saturday, there were no "rules" except to enjoy myself.

Once or twice I glanced over to the next court and watched the yellow ball float against the blue sky. I just loved the sight. Later we talked about how lucky we are to love this game so much. Of course, I said, I should have been looking at the ball on our court, but what can you do.

Yesterday I hit on the hard courts at Mount Holyoke College with a 21-year-old college student and former high school player who was nice enough to put up with me. Seth, my friend Nancy's son (they live in Syracuse, N.Y.) is working at Mount Holyoke for the summer. He's a really nice kid.

We hit for almost two hours. He was out of my league, but I think I gave him some good rallies and practice hitting overheads and serves.

I was getting pretty tired by the end, getting to the point when I should stop already. But I wanted to finish with a good rally. Most of us are like that, but there was an added layer here.

"Do you really need to exhaust yourself trying to impress your friend's 21-year-old son?" I asked myself.

The answer: Yes.

When I got home, I lay down on the floor.

2 houses, 1 driveway and an exiled Russian poet

The Sycamores, front, with a black and white sign

announcing the Joseph Brodsky photo exhibit.

In rear, across a driveway not visible here, is my house.

You can see the two stone posts between which the driveway passes.

My troubled relationship with the South Hadley Historical Society took a big turn for the better on Friday.

As the owner of a historic house myself, I never thought I would have any issues with the local historical society, but I did, which is a long story that I will sketch below. Fences have long since been mended, but still, I can't erase the fact that it happened.

The interesting turn of events began when a police officer stopped traffic for me on Woodbridge Street when I crossed after my mini bike ride. My very own crossing guard!

Then I noticed he was there to help the nicely dressed crowd who had parked in the Skinner Museum parking lot across from The Sycamores, a historic house across the driveway from me.

The reason: Part of a two-day celebration, "Joseph Brodsky: A Poet and his Place," at Mount Holyoke and Amherst Colleges and at Rawson House, where the exiled Russian poet lived and wrote for the 15 years he taught at Mount Holyoke until his death, at 55, in 1996.

Rawson House, the oldest house in South Hadley, is now attached to The Sycamores after being moved from another lot just down the street. Brodsky, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature and a MacArthur "genius award," would have been 70 on Friday.

The Sycamores, built in 1788 and originally the home of Col. Ruggles Woodbridge, was later a dormitory for Mount Holyoke College students and, after that, a home for inner city school-girls attending South Hadley High School through the A Better Chance program. After that it provided accommodation for male guests of Mount Holyoke students (don't know how much use it got in that department) and after that was a warehouse until 1996. After that it was empty.

It looked pretty bad until the South Hadley Historical Society purchased it from Mount Holyoke College in 1999 and began renovating it.

My house, built in 1848, is new by comparison.

On Friday, a balmy night, I stood in my driveway watching a crowd gathering in the courtyard. Someone was speaking into a microphone, to much applause. Photographers took pictures.

This was something new. They often have sparsely-attended open houses and meetings. I hesitated to investigate, partly because I was in my sweats and partially because I just don't wander over there too much.

My problems started on Oct. 19, 2004, when the historical society had Rawson house moved down the street after it was donated by the new owner of a larger house to which Rawson House was attached. I was as interested as the next person in watching it arrive on wheels on a rainy muddy day. Unfortunately, the house got stuck in the mud at the end of the driveway. It stood there for about a week while workers got it the rest of the way in.

If people sought directions to my place, I said, "It's the one next to a house stuck in the mud."

Ha ha. Actually it wasn't that funny. I was still recovering from my first stem cell transplant a year earlier, and I didn't always feel great. Workmen kept me awake making noise at crazy hours of the night. Once I went over there in the dark and asked them to stop. They said they had a deadline and refused to stop. I went back to bed and put my head under the pillow.

After that came the start of what I called the Driveway War. Mount Holyoke College, which owned the Sycamores when we bought our house, owned a small triangle of land including the foot of our driveway. They would not sell it to us or to the previous owner. When the historical society took over, they didn't want to sell it either. When they renovated, instead of using the gravel driveway leading directly to The Sycamores or putting one in on the other side of their house as I had been led to expect, they planned to run the new driveway cutting through the entryway of my driveway.

Lawyers got involved. Hackles went up. I could not believe I was wasting so much energy fighting about a driveway. Hey, I'm from New York. There are cars and commotion all over the place. But when you live in a small town, you don't expect to have to worry that your children might get hit by wayward cars coming too far into your own driveway.

In the end, I lost the battle because they owned the land. They promised that they would limit the number of cars parked in their driveway.

At first it was chaotic. Cars backed up trying to get into their parking lot and occasionally ended up on my part of the driveway. Katie was a little girl, and it drove me crazy that cars were coming near her when she was outside playing. Occasionally someone left a car blocking my way in or out. I strode across the driveway and found a meeting in which the offending party was participating; I was totally polite but inwardly fuming.

"I knew this would happen," I harumpphed to the kids. The Sycamores finally got the idea to direct cars across the street to the Skinner Museum. Problem fixed, except for the straggling driver who still doesn't get it.

So it was that on Friday night I was surveying the crowd and feeling irresistibly drawn across the driveway. I wandered over and heard a woman speaking in Russian, followed by a translator. People around me murmured in Russian. For non-cosmopolitan South Hadley, this indeed had turned into quite the affair. Mount Holyoke president Lynn Pasquerella was among those attending.

The gist of the speeches were thank-you's all around for the collaboration between the Anna Akhmatova Museum in St. Petersburg, which owns the contents of Rawson House along with some 2,000 items of "Brodskiana" (who knew?), and Mount Holyoke College and the South Hadley Historical Society, which arranged for photos from Brodsky's life to be displayed on the walls of the otherwise empty Rawson House.

The exhibit also includes photos of the space while Brodsky's possessions still occupied it.

Ken Williamson, chair of the Sycamores Committee of the Historical Society, also spoke. He saw me in the crowd and came over afterwards, smiling a big smile. He explained that about 30 people from St. Petersburg had come for the Brodsky celebration. Then he invited me in for a drink and refreshments that were being served at the opening.

I said I needed to go back home and put on proper clothes. He said that one of the earlier speakers had been wearing jeans, and that I shouldn't hesitate to go right in.

I went inside the main building and admired the braided dining room rug that I had donated before the "war." I got a Sam Adams and walked into the attached Rawson House, helping myself to a piece of fried shrimp and some concoction of roast beef and carmelized onions on crackers. The photos were interesting, as were the guests.

I had had my own crossing guard, an interesting evening, a drink and hors d'oeuvres, and I had gained a new respect for the South Hadley Historical Society.

It's probably time to let bygones be bygones.

From fall to summer and back again

It's summer in one part of Massachusetts, but it's autumn in another.

I just returned from another lovely weekend in Wellfleet, where the gardens were colorful, the trees were green and the air was warm. Back home in Western Massachusetts, the leaves have begun to change and drift to the ground, and there's a chill in the air.

My friend Deb came with me to Diane and David's house on Cape Cod. (They weren't there, graciously giving us the place for the weekend.) On the drive back, Deb pointed out the difference in the scenery.

We felt like time travelers. I'd have preferred staying in summer, but hey, what can you do?

We had ambled to the Cape on Friday, taking a detour at Chatham to drive through the town and get out at the beach across from the grand old Chatham Bars Inn. The fog drifted in just as a wedding party gathered on a sloping lawn across from the water. To the sound of violin music, the guests, dressed mostly in black, got seated, creating a surreal tableau.

Once in Wellfleet, we managed to squeeze a lot into one-and-a-half days. The weather was mostly sunny, so it was nice for walking on the beach. I thought we might go swimming, but the water in the pond that we went to was already too cold. We toodled around town a little and had two excellent meals there: Dinner at Mac's Seafood and brunch at the Wicked Oyster.

I got up and down the steep steps to the pond and the path down to the beach with no problem.

There was also time for a drive to the bay at sunset and a visit and dinner (at the Lobster Pot) in Provincetown. It was too hectic there, with tourists crowding the streets. (I know, I guess we're tourists too.) It was nice to return to calm Wellfleet.

My re-entry was better than after the last weekend that I was away, but the house still feels strangely empty. At least I didn't feel like crying.

I got Maddie from Jim and Jane's and walked her just as it was getting dark, my feet crunching leaves instead of digging into the sand. I'm sure I'll feel better about fall when we get some of those glorious days, but it was just damp and gray, as is today also. I wasn't too happy about being back.

I launched into one of my little trots, managing to get up a couple of small hills on the Mount Holyoke campus. Then I switched to a brisk (for me) walk. We passed the greenhouse, where not too long ago I fell because my legs were too weak to keep me up.

I reminded myself to be grateful that I was taking big strides now.

The ball bounces on

Bounce, hit. Bounce hit.

Occasionally, I hit the sweet spot. What a rush. My goal of course is just to get them over. I do better than last time. My serve even goes in (sometimes).

Chip and I are hitting at Mount Holyoke College, on courts that abut the lake where I walk Maddie. The only sounds are of the wind rustling through the trees, the waterfall flowing, and, since this is not serious tennis, of us chatting and alternating cries of "Oy!"

That was this morning. We didn't hit for long, but it felt great. The humidity has dropped, making me perk up considerably. I had to leave Maddie behind, so I will take her for a walk soon.

I have one more session left in physical therapy. Rob, my therapist, re-evaluated me yesterday. I've made good progress with balance and strengthening my legs, but I still can't go up a big step unattended. If I get down on the floor, I can only get up by turning onto my hands and knees, putting my hands down and rear-end up (like downward facing dog), and then walking my hands and feet together.

He put in for a few more sessions so I can work on that weakness. Also there is the small matter of falling twice within about three months. He gave me exercises to do at home, but most everyone knows we're more likely to follow through if we actually go someplace.

Meanwhile I will try to set up a doubles game with some of my old teammates. We've done this before when I'm getting back into it (sigh...again) and they are very patient. My partner knows to do the running. Today even though there were only two of us, I practiced keeping my returns away from the spot where Chip's partner would be.

I wasn't always successful, but at least I'm at the point where I can think about strategy.

Registering as bone marrow donor could save a life

If you live in Western Massachusetts, you could potentially save a life by taking a short amount of time out of your day on Nov. 19 to attend a drive to register as a bone marrow donor. This does not mean that you have to become a donor; it simply means that you will join the approximately 11 million people who have signed up with the National Marrow Donor Program to possibly donate in the future.

I know how important this is, because I am alive today thanks to a generous donor whom I've yet to meet. I just know that he is a 54-year-old man who lives far enough away that his cells needed to be flown to Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston when I received my first transplant a year ago, and again on June 10 when the first graft failed.

The drive will be at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley. It will be preceeded by an educational event this coming Wednesday (Nov. 12). Also please note that if you are between the ages of 18 and 60, there are various ways to become a donor -- either on-line, at a donor drive like the one at Mount Holyoke, or at registration sites throughout the country. The National Marrow Donor Program website has all the information.

Here is the press release about the Mount Holyoke donor drive:

"On any given day, more than 6000 men, women and children are searching the National Marrow donor Program Registry for a life-saving donor like you. For many of them who have leukemia, lymphoma, and other life-threatening diseases, a transplant may be their best and only hope.

The simple act of joining the Registry adds to the possibility of a life being saved. Come to our educational event on Wednesday, November 12th in Hooker, 5-6pm, to hear the real stories of donors and patients, more about the science behind a donation, and what being a donor entails.

The most important thing is to come to MHC’s donor drive and join the Bone Marrow Registry by simply having a cheek swab taken, and filling out your contact information. The Drive is Wednesday, November 19, 11am to 5pm in Chapin.

The Registry needs all donors but is especially looking for minority donors. Many minority people who are in need of a donation, cannot get one, due to the shortage of minority donors. Donations to the Registry can be paid by your MA insurance."