.

 

Clean Paths

Watching, walking, in Prospect Park, under the airplanes.

I couldn't deal with the Y. Not tonight. All that vanity and body-image stuff under fluorescent light, externalized as sweat. Through the upstairs windows I could see women huffing on the ellipticals, pistoning their legs (1000-2000 times every ten minutes), and downstairs, men in the weight room, milling and waiting for their turn at agony and pride. I just kept walking.

On to Prospect Park, a few blocks farther up the slope. I found a baseball dugout at the edge of the Long Meadow and changed. After I pulled off my jeans, before I pulled on my sweatpants, I sat still for a moment, feeling the night on my bare legs. The voices of the out-of-sight drifted around, snatches of conversation in English and Spanish.

Then, my bag flopping at my side, I sprinted, looking down at my white sneakers, until it hurt to sprint. Not long. A blocksworth, or two.

I used to housesit for these people upstate. They had 50 acres and paid me in marijuana, which I didn't smoke, but I appreciated the sentiment. When I stayed at their place, I had to run their two year-old German Shepherd puppies up and down a hill twice a day. After a few of these runs, a half-mile from any living soul, I began to do it naked. I'd drink a glass of water, strip to my sneakers, and run the dogs.

From 50 acres to 200 square feet, from running nude along a dirt path, pulled by half-wild German Shepherd pups, to riding an exercise bike in “hill mode.”

I walked to the middle of the Long Meadow and stretched under the airplanes. A roar came from the cars passing nearby. Situps, and leg lifts, and pushups. The voices still drifted to me, people walking past, but no one close enough to see. The air was sweet with green things, and the clouds were long and sharply ridged, like they'd been cut out with pinking shears and pasted to the sky.

I stretched for a moment, then walked back to the dugout to get a drink of water. Two people were on the same bench where I'd changed, a woman on the lap of a man, facing him. Her shoulders were moving in silence, as she lifted her body up and down. They were making love. I walked past them, 20 feet away, and waited for the prim, middle-aged aspect of my reactive self to feel censorious—but that never came. Because they didn't intend to offend me; they just didn't expect anyone else to exist in the middle of their critical moment. And despite the hopes of health teachers, ministers, and fathers of daughters, that seems to be how we form new life, finding each other in the dark. I got my drink, a strong, wide arc of water coming from the fountain.

I was going to leave Brooklyn in August, for Cambridge, MA, but now my plans to leave are on hold, ambiguous, stopped by conflicts of desire, ambition, and distance. I am not sure what to do next. I must live here until I do know, so I pick up the four Gatorade bottles I find on the ground and throw them in the trash, clearing the path.

When it's over, their bodies will settle and she will take one leg away, then another, shifting her weight, and they will button their clothes and wipe their brows, then rise, and walk back to the street, close, laughing in relief. In the post-coital moment, when the short term feels eternal, they'll leave the park and go back to the buses and stoplights, taking their clean paths for granted.

.  .  .  .  .  

This piece is sponsored by two people: Christian Crumlish, whose X-POLLEN has some fine photos of New Orleans (and Ornette Coleman in particular), all sandwiched between music-loving words, and Magdalen Powers, whose book, Hand Over Fist, is worth your consideration.


[Top]

Ftrain.com

PEEK

Ftrain.com is the website of Paul Ford and his pseudonyms. It is showing its age. I'm rewriting the code but it's taking some time.

FACEBOOK

There is a Facebook group.

TWITTER

You will regret following me on Twitter here.

EMAIL

Enter your email address:

A TinyLetter Email Newsletter

About the author: I've been running this website from 1997. For a living I write stories and essays, program computers, edit things, and help people launch online publications. (LinkedIn). I wrote a novel. I was an editor at Harper's Magazine for five years; then I was a Contributing Editor; now I am a free agent. I was also on NPR's All Things Considered for a while. I still write for The Morning News, and some other places.

If you have any questions for me, I am very accessible by email. You can email me at ford@ftrain.com and ask me things and I will try to answer. Especially if you want to clarify something or write something critical. I am glad to clarify things so that you can disagree more effectively.

POKE


Syndicate: RSS1.0, RSS2.0
Links: RSS1.0, RSS2.0

Contact

© 1974-2011 Paul Ford

Recent

@20, by Paul Ford. Not any kind of eulogy, thanks. And no header image, either. (October 15)

Recent Offsite Work: Code and Prose. As a hobby I write. (January 14)

Rotary Dial. (August 21)

10 Timeframes. (June 20)

Facebook and Instagram: When Your Favorite App Sells Out. (April 10)

Why I Am Leaving the People of the Red Valley. (April 7)

Welcome to the Company. (September 21)

“Facebook and the Epiphanator: An End to Endings?”. Forgot to tell you about this. (July 20)

“The Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. An essay for TheMorningNews.org. (July 11)

Woods+. People call me a lot and say: What is this new thing? You're a nerd. Explain it immediately. (July 10)

Reading Tonight. Reading! (May 25)

Recorded Entertainment #2, by Paul Ford. (May 18)

Recorded Entertainment #1, by Paul Ford. (May 17)

Nanolaw with Daughter. Why privacy mattered. (May 16)

0h30m w/Photoshop, by Paul Ford. It's immediately clear to me now that I'm writing again that I need to come up with some new forms in order to have fun here—so that I can get a rhythm and know what I'm doing. One thing that works for me are time limits; pencils up, pencils down. So: Fridays, write for 30 minutes; edit for 20 minutes max; and go whip up some images if necessary, like the big crappy hand below that's all meaningful and evocative because it's retro and zoomed-in. Post it, and leave it alone. Can I do that every Friday? Yes! Will I? Maybe! But I crave that simple continuity. For today, for absolutely no reason other than that it came unbidden into my brain, the subject will be Photoshop. (Do we have a process? We have a process. It is 11:39 and...) (May 13)

That Shaggy Feeling. Soon, orphans. (May 12)

Antilunchism, by Paul Ford. Snack trams. (May 11)

Tickler File Forever, by Paul Ford. I'll have no one to blame but future me. (May 10)

Time's Inverted Index, by Paul Ford. (1) When robots write history we can get in trouble with our past selves. (2) Search-generated, "false" chrestomathies and the historical fallacy. (May 9)

Bantha Tracks. (May 5)

More...
Tables of Contents