Watermelon Sugar High

(If you’re new here, I’m mostly right now writing about Harry Styles and running. This makes no sense, maybe (though did you know Harry ran a 2:59:13 at the Berlin Marathon and I have never broken three hours but am trying to??); but making no sense, fucking around and having some fun, is a good amount of what writing should feel like, I think?)

The past couple weeks, I commuted every morning with our older kid to camp at 22^nd Street and 2^nd Avenue in Manhattan. This means we take the 5 train to 14^th street and then walk the eight blocks to 22^nd through Gramercy and talk. Our older kid is thirteen and could commute by themself but it’s nice to start the day this way. We talk. I like them very much. I can see—they’re about to start ninth grade—how quickly all of this is turning into something else, being a parent, being the person who takes the kid to all the places, always knows where they are, can sometimes help, can sometimes still talk them through what to do when they’re unsure.

Once our kid is dropped, I run home. One of my favorite things about living in the city is that it reveals itself to you anew so many times; like loving people, maybe, it’s endless in the way that it re-forms and unfolds. You go on blocks you’ve run a thousand times and then blocks you’ve never run and then routes that look so different from the last time you ran them that they might as well be somewhere else. Of course, this can be consternating. Everything both new and strange, so familiar you feel it in your bones, and also tinged with grief—like having an almost fourteen-year-old, like middle age.

Monday, last week, 15 miles. I went to Central Park, twisty, stilted. With the grid and having to go west almost as much as I did north, I could mostly not stop. The park is 59^th and 5^th , which means I had thirty-seven blocks to run north and four avenue blocks west. If I had a stoplight going north, I could go west. I could go west if and when I had a light going north.

My little sister used to live in Murray Hill, on 36th, and this is always Murray Hill for me. She didn’t love it; loved that she could walk to work. Lots of twenty-somethings who practiced law and worked finance, who kept the party going another decade after college and who, since she moved in when she was 26 and I was 28, and already pregnant with our now-thirteen-year-old, made me feel a thousand years old and annoyed. The bad restaurants, the fratty bars. But also, glimpses of my little sister who I love a lot—who lives in London now and I miss constantly—so it is lots of things at the same time.

Once I ran out of westerly blocks and could only go north, I sometimes had to stop and wait. I don’t like to stop and wait and so went further west than planned and hit Times Square. Like most people who live in New York, I hate Times Square, except once, early Covid, dawn-ish, I did a long run through the city and Times Square was empty, silent; and now every time I’m there I think about that day.

I entered the park at Columbus Circle, which also makes me think about my sister, the years I waited tables on the Upper West Side and was broke and tired all the time. My sister was at NYU and used to meet me at the Columbus Circle Whole Foods and buy me food on my parents’ credit card.

I couldn’t cook, still can’t, and often went to work on days I didn’t have a shift to eat the family meal. My sister bought me hot food from the prepared food section, Bing cherries in summer, berries, pre-cut watermelon, fancy frozen mac and cheese (this feels now oxymoronic; but this is what it felt like, something besides Stouffer’s, delicious, many cheeses; I spent weeks eating only this).

From Columbus Circle, I ran the park loop with two separate loops around the reservoir. My mom loves the reservoir. I sent her a picture. Once, after a family trip to The Guggenheim, we took the kids up to the reservoir. We’ve taken the kids up to the reservoir lots of times, but that time is the time I always think of, them so little, three and four-ish, but big enough to look and think and talk and tell us what they thought and saw and this sort of thrill between my shoulders, in my belly, that we get to watch them grow up in this place.

The reservoir is a nice break because Central Park is hilly and the reservoir is flat. When I taught at the place I taught a long time uptown I used to sneak out and run after class. This involved so many kindnesses from administrative assistants and students. I worked at that place 11 years and never had an office, so I had to find a place to change and store my stuff, sneak out quickly in my tights or too short shorts before too many students saw, but then always worth it to get to do Harlem Hill once a week.

I miss a lot of things about that job, the students most of all, but I also miss the excuse to sneak out like that, after the too-high feeling I get sometimes after a three-hour class and go hard and long on that eight-mile loop. Often, after teaching, I get a sort of rush of terror, what stupid thing did I say that the students now remember, in what ways did I fail to say the things I’d planned to say before class started. What was that face that student made and why at that moment two thirds of the way through class and what can I do differently so that they not make that face again next week.

My favorite hill besides Harlem Hill is on the east side and ends at the statue of a lion on a rock. It’s less steep but longer. Once, my friend—one of the few friends I have that lives in Manhattan—posted a photo of her dog staring down this lion and I always think of my friend and her dog when I pass this part.

I entered the reservoir the first time on the east side; that much flat, after that much hill, can feel strange and I sped up too much and my app got fussy. This was miles five and a half to seven. I then went down the back of Harlem Hill, then in this gorgeous little offshoot they’ve built with a pool and lake on the Northeast side of the park that added another mile, 8-9, up Harlem Hill, then around the Reservoir again for the end of mile 10, all of 11.

The lower half of the west side of the park is where the marathon ends. My marathon end last year was awful. I had the flu, as mentioned here. I thought I’d die for parts of it, but by the end I’d begun to run again at a pace that almost felt like running. My body had entered some other phase. It had broken down, strange pains and muscles clenching, bile in my throat, all that. But that part had passed and I was rested from those miles of clenching so hard I almost stopped. I’d put in my air pods, though I’m opposed in general to air pods during races, and was listening to Swann’s Way to try to sort of leave my body, think of other things—Marcel was talking about his Hawthorns—and so my memory of the finish is not nearly as muddled and frantic as my memory of miles 19-21.

I had to add an out and back at the bottom of the park to get to fifteen miles, and sprint the last little bit past the vendors at Columbus Circle, all the carriages with horses, the pedicab guys, the pigeons, sweaty tourists in their sneakers and their baseball caps and oddly fitting jeans. I took the Q train home and bought a large watermelon at the grocery store on the walk from the train and ate almost the whole thing by myself.

When I lived in New York when I was twenty-one, exactly half my life ago, only seven years older than the age my kid’s about to be, I bought watermelon just like this after long runs. There were no grocery stores close to my apartment. I lived on tenth street between Avenues C and D and there was a bodega close by that sold quartered and halved watermelons and I’d pick one up on my way home and eat it, still cold, on my lap, skin sweat and sugar sticky, as I sat in my un-air conditioned, always hot apartment, in front of the open window with the fan and watched bad TV or read a book.

A reminder that the new yearlong novel class is starting on September 16. Applications due August 20. We’ve got lots of novels publishing soon or having recently been published. For all the ways that time is also a great gift, there’s nothing quite like this extended period with this small group on one project. Please reach out for details.