Excerpt from “It’s Only Temporary...The Good News and the Bad News of Being Alive” u  It’s Only Temporary the good news and the bad news of being alive c Evan Handler, 2006 Due out from Riverhead/Penguin in 2007 Remember Richard Burr I’ve taken up running. But I can’t call myself “a runner”. In fact, I can’t really even claim that I run. What I do is trudge. Every second or third day I walk swiftly from my home near the Hudson River into Central Park. I pass the seemingly homeless men who occupy the benches on my way to the reservoir. One of the men – a muscular African-American -- has recently taken to calling out greetings to me when I pass. “Hey, lookin’ good,” he told me once. “He looks better than me,” is what I thought. I’m the slowest man on the track. I’m also slower than the vast majority of the women. This includes, for the most part, the overweight and the elderly. I move at a speed that’s hard to describe, because it’s so slow it’s hard to imagine. I’ve begun to wonder if the speed at which I walk to the park is greater than the speed at which I jog around the reservoir. It might be. I’ve also wondered if moving so slowly might actually use more energy than it would take to go faster. I have wondered, that is, until I try to speed up. I make it just once around the track – one point six or so miles, I’m told – in utter agony, pleading with myself to stop, to keep going, to stop, to keep going, the whole way. It’s a problem, because I’m an extremely competitive person. In fact, I’m so competitive that it’s rendered me unable to compete. Even way back in Little League, as a prepubescent baseball fanatic, my desire to excel was so strong that it created insurmountable anxiety. At practice I was a phenom. During games, I’d alternate between occasionally sensational plays and uncountable errors. I was Chuck Knobloch before he was even born. Now, when I go for my run, I can’t stop comparing myself to everyone else on the track. About a quarter of the way in, I’ll hear plodding footsteps from behind, see the shadow of a lumbering figure approaching, and watch as a heavy-set man makes his way into my field of vision. I’ll privately mock the physical condition of this jogger, wondering how anyone could classify such a lethargic pace as cardiovascular conditioning, even as the person pulls astride and, eventually, passes me. “God, he runs so slow,” I’ll think, as I watch him pull ahead into the distance. I run so slowly because I’m pacing myself. When it comes to physical exertion, I haven’t got that good old-fashioned stamina. I have inner dialogues in which I tell myself that I’m now past forty, and for my age, I’m not doing so badly. After all, many of the people speeding by are under twenty-five. Except for the sixty-year-olds. That works a bit. Or I’ll remind myself of where I’ve been: “How many of them have had bone marrow transplants?” I’ll ask. “See how fast they run after that. See if they’re standing upright.” I remember, even way back in junior high school, sixth through eighth grade, twice a year in gym class we’d do a timed six-hundred-yard dash. A third of a mile. I could never understand why it was called a “dash”, because, for me, it certainly wasn’t. I was a decent athlete. I played tennis, baseball, basketball, you name it. But the run was hard for me, a dreaded event. It was usually announced the day before, which gave me twenty-four full hours to anticipate the pain and humiliation. It’s not that I was consistently consumed by thoughts of the next day’s run. No, I’d go about my business, doing homework or playing basketball. But every once in a while, intermittently, the stored information of the next day’s activity would come barging back into my awareness. Like the feeling I’d later come to know, of waking up to remember my lover had just left me, it triggered nervousness I had to push back to whatever dark corner of my brain I was able to ignore, hoping not to remember until the time came when there was no use in denying it any more. The next morning, dressed in my permanently mildewed gym clothes and shivering in the post-dawn chill, I’d set off in the dewy grass, desperately trying to balance my desire to divorce myself from the hopelessly feeble class members with the limitations of my lungs. It would only be a matter of moments before they were burning, screaming at me to stop. My proficiency in “the six hundred”, as Mr. Cammaro, the gym teacher, called it, was poor. I usually finished two thirds of the way down, time wise. Right on the border between the last of those who thought it mattered, and the ones who didn’t give a shit. Or, at least they acted as if they didn’t. Who knows, maybe each and every one of them had dreams of athletic glory. One kid I remember is Richard Burr, an utterly ostracized boy who walked the whole way. He’d stare off into the sky, brushing his hand along the tops of the soft weeds that lined the trail, singing indecipherable tunes to himself as he drifted along. Some of the faster kids – the sadistic Nordic heartthrob Paul Nyberg, or the prematurely acne-infested but athletically gorgeous Billy Parkhurst - who passed Richard on their second lap before he’d finished his first, would lightly smack the back of his head as they galloped by. Richard would make no move to evade their assaults. He’d stroll along, his face betraying nothing other than an assumption that some natural force had caused his head to snap forward every twelve seconds or so. Only when he’d fallen behind everyone would Richard now and then scamper a few paces. The gait would be better classified as a skip than a sprint, and it wasn’t to increase his speed. It wasn’t because the gym teacher was watching. No, Richard fluttered along like a butterfly, his pace determined by nothing other than how much the wind and sun inspired him. Did this mean that Richard Burr didn’t dream of victory? Just because he’d given up all hope of excelling doesn’t mean he didn’t want to win. Or at least to avoid coming in last. But Richard was unreadable. Any shame he might have had as he ambled toward the finish line was invisible. Mr. Cammaro, on the other hand, was clearly insulted. He took his responsibility seriously, keeping time even through the extra sixty or ninety seconds until Richard had rejoined the rest of the class. He’d issue Richard’s time as a futile rebuke: “Six minutes, Richard!” Richard would simply collapse himself like a folding chair into the grass, just beyond the finish line. And when Mr. Cammaro blew his whistle (the gym teacher’s equivalent to the Kapo’s sidearm) to begin the next activity, Richard always remained at a distance, tugging at weeds like an orphaned lamb feeding off to the side of the rest of the herd. Me, I was the anti-Richard. I couldn’t bear the scorn of the other kids any more than I could stand Mr. Cammaro’s disapproval. I had no ability, but I was determined to show heart. When I realized I had none of that either, I just tried to avoid utter abasement. I’d stumble across the finish line, consumed with pain, aching for the two minutes or so to pass before my gasping would stop, and life would return to a relatively agony-free existence. Until the next semester’s run, of course. At any rate, my status in the six hundred depended on how you looked at it. I was either the very best of the worst, or among the decent, but dead last. And what was my time? How long would I be required to withstand the discomfort of exertion on that six hundred yard run? Two minutes twenty seconds? I don’t remember if that was my time, or the time of the winners. Two-twenty? Four-forty? Who knows? But how incongruous when compared with my success in the super marathon I found myself running in my mid-twenties. Having never before thought of myself as a physically strong man, and having still never demonstrated any of the stamina I’d lacked in gym class as a kid, I then somehow managed to be one of the few left standing in the grueling hospital survival race. I suppose there are many different types of endurance. I’ve glanced at the bicycle racer Lance Armstrong’s book about his surviving testicular cancer that had spread to his lungs and brain, only to race and win the Tour de France for the second, and now third, forth, fifth, sixth and seventh times after his recovery. I haven’t bought the book and read it – I’m much too competitive for that – but I have glanced through it. Lance attributes his survival, as well as his racing success, not to any innate ability or talent other than one: The willingness to endure more pain for a longer period of time than any of his competitors. It’s why he believes his training is more effective, and why he’s able to outlast opponents on the road. He claims not to particularly enjoy bicycle riding, or even physical exertion, but to derive a certain enjoyment from exercising his ability to withstand pain. And, apparently, he believes it’s why he was able to absorb such large doses of the toxic chemicals that eradicated his cancer. I guess I must have had some of that same talent, but I’d never been aware of it before, and I really haven’t felt confident in it in all the years since then, that I’ve been well. Because my memory of the six-hundred-yard dash, at twelve and thirteen years old, was that it hurt like hell. It either didn’t hurt the others as much as it hurt me, or, even back then, two thirds of them were more able to endure that pain than I was. And now, though I’m up to three thousand yards or so, it still hurts just as much. And not just physically. Even though there’s no Mr. Cammaro there to scold those who might have walked part of the way, no Paul Nyberg or Billy Parkhurst to feel jealous of for effortlessly whipping along at speeds I couldn’t have maintained for one sixth the distance, I’m dragging myself around that reservoir feeling as if the whole of my self esteem depends on how I do. As if everyone else out there - the entire island of Manhattan - is watching and judging. Not that it improves my performance. But I shuffle home feeling failure if I had to stop and rest anywhere along the way. And I know that competition isn’t what it’s about. I mean, I run for two reasons: to improve, hopefully, my health, and because it makes me feel better. You know, after I’m done. I get an endorphin rush and it alleviates, for a while, my tendency toward depression. Yet the comparisons continue. The competition. And, when I look closely at all, I have to question with whom I’m contending. After all, the punishment, the scolding, isn’t coming from some small town guy trying to make a living wrangling seventh graders through meaningless physical fitness tests anymore. Now it’s coming from me. Because the other New Yorkers, they don’t even know I’m out there. Maybe that’s what makes me so uneasy, that no one’s taking notice. I mean, I survived the eighth grade. I wasn’t destroyed by Paul Nyberg or Mr. Cammaro. I made it through high school, have ventured out into the world, earned a living where they tell you no one does, beat the odds on a terminal illness, reached my forties and I’m moving one foot in front of the other, working my way down that track. Who cares if everyone else does it quicker and has an easier time? How come no one has offered me a prize? I guess what I’ve still got to learn is that it isn’t about being given an ovation by the audience, or surpassing my own minimum requirements. After all this time, I still haven’t quite gotten that it’s about enjoying the run. The precious moments are the ones spent on the track, not the ones analyzing how quickly I got back off. It’s funny, of all the kids I remember, the one who had it right was Richard Burr. He didn’t let the clock, or the other kids, get in his way. He wasn’t affected by Mr. Cammaro’s ministrations. He looked at the sky, felt the sun on his cheek; picked a dandelion and blew the seeds, watched them scatter through the air and mingle with the bees. Richard wasn’t in the game, as we knew it. He refused to play, except on his own. I always thought he must have been tortured, Richard Burr, to always finish last. To have no chance at all of ever being the best, or even to count himself among them. I’d thought, for Richard, gym must have been hell. Looking back at eighth grade, or even last week, I wonder if that isn’t where I’ve kept myself. I don’t know if Richard’s wandering quite so freely today, or if his disinterest was completely unfeigned. But for me, as I enter the thirty-ninth grade, I’m going to try to strike a balance between pleasing myself and letting myself off the hook. Between wanting to push myself toward new and better things, and leaving myself completely free to wander through time as if the rest of humanity had no interest in me at all. That’s the freedom of giving up hope, I think. I’ve always looked at that kind of giving up hope as the end of life, and, considering where I’ve been, I suppose that makes sense. But, what if that’s when life begins? When you become ready to release it. More of a Buddhist way of thinking about things, no? The freedom of no expectations. The joy of no desire. Of course, I don’t know anything about Buddhism, so I don’t know what I’m talking about. But I have a hunch it would be a good thing if I could get to a place where it doesn’t matter if I run all the way around the park, or never even make it there. Where it doesn’t matter if I go faster than the two-hundred-pound woman, or drop dead on the track. Where it’s the journey that’s important. Where the only thing that matters is whether I knew the sun loved me along the way. It’s Only Temporary...The Good News and the Bad News of Being Alive Available from Riverhead/Penguin, Fall 2007