Many of you may know that I am a sound editor for motion pictures, that I live in Fort Greene Brooklyn and that for the past five years my day job has been as a professor of film at the University of Miami. Along with racking up frequent flier miles this provides me with four running environs: Brooklyn, which we still call home, North Carolina where we will go monthly to visit Robbin’s 90 year old mom, Pennsylvania were Robbin works and Miami or Coral Gables, to be precise, were I teach. All are very different running environments. Of the four, Miami (sorry ’Canes) is my least favorite. Running in Miami can be summed up in three words: hot, muggy, flat. Hills are a bump in the road or a pass over a roadway. Thankfully, I’m not there in the summer. But it’s mid-August and school has begun and exterior exertion is best described as a hybrid of running and swimming.
If I go out in the morning my run is the perimeter of a small open golf course in the center of town. Evenings I enjoy the longer meandering golf course behind the Biltmore Hotel. I wasn’t sure of the golf course’s policy on runners and, except for one late afternoon, would always go out in the evening when it was too dark for anyone to still be playing. On that one afternoon, the golf cart patrol came swooping down within minutes of my run and escorted me off. It seems in the past some poor slob running the course had been hit in the face with a golf ball.
Contemplating his encounter with a golf ball consumed my thoughts for a while. A golf ball is perhaps one and a quarter cubic inches. What are the chances that that tiny sphere should occupy the exact one and a quarter cubic inches of space at the exact moment in time that the unfortunate runner’s face entered it. I’d never thought that fate, or luck good or bad, had any validity as a life philosophy. I’m also not one to go out of my way to test these unknowns. I’ll run the course after dusk and enjoy it.
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