As
day passes day, week passes week, and, yes, even as the hours slip by, I am
running into persistent evidence that there is something wonky going on in my
head.
Let me explain. For many years I have
had a strange compulsion to count things as I am walking around. For example,
when I was visiting Dubrovnik, Croatia, I used to be very proud that I could
walk up 287 steep steps every day and back into the town, just for a morning constitutional. The friend I was staying with had lived in
her apartment for 47 years without ever
knowing, until I drew her attention to it, that she had to climb 55 steps up from the street every time
she came back from a shopping trip, but she thought nothing of it, was able to
handle the steps with aplomb, until, a month or two after I told her how many
steps there were, she began to find them difficult to climb. Back home in
Montreal from that visit, I snapped my Achilles tendon while mounting my bicycle,
which I blame on my false Dubrovnik pride. I have never been the same since.
Until about a month ago, having
contracted an infection in addition to my lung cancer, I was unable to walk
more than down to the nearest corner, a mere 200 yards, from which I would return
exhausted. But since I shook that off with the help of some antibiotics, I am
once again able to walk over to the corner of Peel and Sherbrooke for my
favoured morning coffee. By dint of counting every fourth step, I have worked
out roughly how far it is.
Though it is always hard to maintain
one’s concentration on counting for a 25-minute walk, I have figured the customary
count at about 450. Multiply that by four, and my total steps amount to about
1800. Multiply that by 2.5, which is the number of feet I figure I cover with
every stride, and I come to the magic figure of 1500, which for reasons I will
explain, I prefer to regard as meters rather than yards.
You see, 1500 meters is the distance
covered at the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936
by Jack Lovelock, the New Zealand middle distance runner, who breezed
home in record time, leaving the Americans and all others in his wake.
Lovelock, from the previously unheard of, tiny country of New Zealand, thus became one of the athletes, headed by Jesse
Owens, who poked a stick in Hitler’s eye, destroying his Aryan propaganda, in
foiled celebration of which he had staged the most elaborate and nationalistic
Olympics of all time.
In 1936 I was eight, and Lovelock
became my boyhood hero, of course. He
later became a doctor, after serving in the war, and in 1949, at the age of 39,
while on the staff of the Manhattan hospital, suffered a dizzy spell while
waiting in the New York subway, fell on to the track, and was killed by an
advancing train.
Lovelock’s win in the Olympics was
for several years regarded internationally as the greatest 1500 metre race
ever, largely because the years from 1932 to 1936 are regarded as the first great years for mile runners, and the field
was of the highest class. Lovelock had placed seventh in the 1932 Olympic
final, and, a slight figure weighing no more than 134 pounds, he realized
thereafter that he had the strength for only one major effort per season, so
his Olympic victory was prepared and planned over the previous few years.
Lovelock’s Victory Oak from the
Olympics was planted at the high school he attended, and is to this day
considered a nationally protected landmark (when I was in high school we used
to play Rugby against them every year). I grew up in a world in which streets,
playing fields, sports bars had been named after Lovelock, and books, a stage
play, a film, and a statue were devoted to him.
My devotion to his memory may have had
an influence on me in that I developed some skill as a middle distance runner:
but although like him in 1932 I came well back in the pack in the 1949 final of
the New Zealand half mile championship --- I figured I came ninth, actually ---
unlike him I never had what it took to go on to the Olympics. They were just
beginning to get into the years of scientific training in 1949, which demanded
a dedication of which I was quite incapable, and a devotion to a single goal
that was far out of my ken. Besides which, I had sense enough to realize that I
would never be able, no matter how much training I undertook, to run fast
enough. I just didn’t have it in me.
To get back to my theme: I walk towards
my coffee shop on Sherbrooke along
either Hutchison, Durocher or Aylmer streets, on which there are some handsome
stone residential buildings, three or four stories high, running along a good
part of each block, the front doors of
which are reached up stairs of ten or so
steps. A good while ago, on Aylmer street, I counted the number of habitations
to be found in one such building, at 10. Not content with having counted them
once, I keep recounting them, and every day I come to a slightly different conclusion. In almost every case I counted a door below
the main stairs as the entrance to a separate residence, probably in the
basement, but only some of them were marked with a different street number, so
my count could never be described as exactly precise.
But yesterday, as I walked past this
same building I found myself counting 26
habitations. Suddenly I told myself, whoa, there, old man, something seems out
of whack. How could I have made such a
grievous error?
Today I decided to count the habitations
again, and on the way to the corner of Milton street I counted 36, an even more
wildly out-of-context number. I wondered
if perhaps I had counted the habitations in two buildings, and determined to make
a more accurate count on the way home.
Sure enough, I had counted two
buildings, assuming them to be one, having passed without noticing the break
between them. But on the homeward trek
my count was such as to give me no more
certainty than before. Each of the two buildings at my latest count house 16
habitations, far beyond the 10 I had originally credited one of them with months
before. But is my count of 16 really reliable or is there something wonky in my
head?
I doubt if I will ever be able to
decide the answer to that question: for one thing, I can never be certain,
without actually going up, knocking on the door, and asking, that the lower
door beneath each of the stairways is the door to a separate basement habitation,
or just the lower door of the upper house.
So where does that leave me? Readers
will not be surprised to learn the answer to that.
“Wot the hell, wot the hell, toujours
gai, toujours gai!”
As I suspect, something wonky seems
to be happening.
No comments:
Post a Comment