Racing. I wrote about “racing” several times. There was the heart-breaking scene based on John when he was a cubscout and the pine box Derby. Was he ever eight years old? Was he ever alive? I called the story “Pine Box Derby,” but the ending isn’t right. I didn’t know how to “end” something that was based so closely on reality.
Everything is based on reality in some way.
I can’t invent chickens who talk each other and race (there would have to be a moral) or a race car driver who loses (I know nothing of them) or an adolescent who, having lost races, loses weight instead and voila! This time she does it. I couldn’t engage long enough to finish such a story.
I wrote about a racetrack in Florida where the husband of the friend of the woman (guess who?) feels her up, makes sexual advances, and she is so sex-starved she accepts them and then learns her friend is being a friend and is offering the husband’s “service.” The character wins a few dollars at the race track too. Actually, I like that story and, I will boast here, I made it up based on a sort of wishful thinking at the time.
I never wrote about the horrible “Field Day” races I was forced to participate in in grade school. Talk about boring! I remember being such an outsider—not wanting Field Day at all because it was all outside and one had to play ball and run run run and listen to screaming and breathe dust and what the hell was the point of all that? My repulsion for it all was no doubt based on the fact that I was never good at any of that. I probably would have cared if I were. Or, to reverse, been better at it if I liked it.
On the eve of my first marriage —in Elkton, Maryland, where we had to go to get it done quickly back then—we went to a racetrack. Now I remember. I probably gave him the money to lose. I was “racing myself” then, but didn’t know it, didn’t know I’d be supplying the steady money not only that evening (I think I bought my wedding ring too) but pretty much thereafter. I was twenty-one; he was twenty-six. Was I ever twenty-one?
I wanted to “race” Bruce from our house here to the Bay Bridge. He endorsed one way; I, another. His way avoided the freeway which often became gridlocked, but not always; he liked the city streets, which to me took forever with their red lights and pedestrians. It would be stupid to race that way, though. Think of it. We might arrive at the Bay Bridge at the same time, or a minute more or less ahead of each other—but where would we be to know? Five lanes —seven?—feed into that bridge and what are the chances we’d find each other, let alone acknowledge who got there first? And then we’d have two cars! Where would we be going in two cars? Well, of course we didn’t do that, ever. We could have timed it. But days and times matter too. The issue was dropped, of course.
And now. Am I racing myself against what? Old age? Boredom? Accomplishment? Rejection? What is the prize? Health. Symphonies and ballets. A new book.
Is there still a race going on? What happened to the people on either side of me? I’m still running, like some inane tin toy, looking around, seeing nothing, not winding down.