Day 17 Plodding Onward

Day 16 April 9, 2008

 

     This morning I'm not going to cover much new ground.  I'm headed to the track again to prove empirically that I'm getting older and slower.  I haven't been there in over a week.  The workouts are daunting and my self-imposed schedule calls for me to up the effort each month.  So I've had track block, as well as a little runner's block after a bit of illness.  A close reader will notice that my entries are almost never done on the same day as the run is completed.  This is my writer's block, or should I now call it blogger's block?

 

    The track goes as I feared.  Only my first lap is fast.  Then time, length and gravity, all the fundamental physical values in the universe, start working against me.  I can't turn back the clock, lengthen my stride or lighten my step.  I do what I can: plod onward.

 

     The early morning streets, which had been bare on my arrival, are now teeming with high school students doing their plodding to homeroom.  They look less refreshed than weary me.  How can you be young and strong and not smile every morning?  They'll learn that lesson too late.  I pass through packs of them all around the busy State and Lansdowne intersection.  I go left on State then take the first left onto Highland.  This is a three block neighborhood tucked into this corner of the huge tract containing Arlington Cemetery.  A phalanx of high evergreens at the corner of the cul-de-sac shrouds the graveyard from my view.  Lower down all along the boundary between the living and the dead forsythia are having their golden yellow Mardi Gras.  The brick rowhome blocks are neatly maintained.  Several homeowners walking their dogs greet me genially.  I'm used to initiating contact while running.  They contrast the sullen students streaming by a block away.  When I leave the neighborhood, the student rush has passed.  Only a few stragglers make up the cohort's long tail.  Just as they passed through this neighborhood every morning, so will they pass through life.  My cohort passed this way years ago, oblivious to the wealth we held on our bones.  I'd like to run after them and shake them awake.  But I'm old and slow, and I never listened when I was their age. 

 

Distance:   2.87 miles Time:   27 min 59 sec   Pace:   9:44 min/mile

Weblink:  http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=1775018

Day 16 Sellers Hall

Day 16     April 2, 2008

     Today's route is rather simple: transverse the long blocks south of Walnut Street between Shirley and 69th Street, just north of Marshall Road.  Running from my house the first curiosity I see is a small, wedge shaped park formed by Sanford and Springton Roads.  It is an island of trees nestled among row homes.  There isn't a speck of trash.  Some good soul has recently picked the place clean.  The canopy is thick, but the grove is stark except for a couple of odd, long slatted wood pieces of outdoor furniture.  They are a little high and wide for benches, but a little short and narrow for tables.  I recall a scene from a horror movie about human sacrifice and hurry on without investigating further.  There is another wedge shaped block formed by Wingate and Springton with no park, only a barren grassy lot at its peak. 

     I run a half mile along Shirley before I start my switchbacks: Shirley, Long, Ashby, Copley, up one block and down the next, rowhomes and twins.  

 

     Running north on Glendale Road, I come out at Walnut across the street from Sellers Hall.  Built in 1684 this was the home of the township's first registered resident, Samuel Sellers.  He first lived in a cave nearby, but its location has been lost so this house got the Historical Society marker.  Dozens of Swedes had already been living out by Darby Creek for fifty years, but they apparently didn't know enough to apply for residency.  

 

     The Sellers were a prominent local family for four generations.  Sam's son, John, who was born in the house, founded the American Philosophical Society in 1743 along with Benjamin Franklin and some other early American eggheads.  This was America's first think tank and started our proud talking heads legacy.   After arguing amongst themselves for a few decades and convinced that they were the new land's best and brightest minds,  they got the country involved in a couple of international wars.

 

     The structure is now part of the St. Alice block of buildings.  The old stuccoed stone house has become a bit rundown and is now shuttered.  Like all the old Quaker houses in the county, it is claimed to have been part of the Underground Railroad helping escaped slaves fleeing northward.  Of course, like all buildings that see enough history, it is now haunted. 

 

     Only a block away at the corner of Hampden and Locust I run past a small church that contrasts sharply with the large, stone St. Alice Parish complex beckoning from its hilltop.  What looks like a small, brick country chapel is tucked away under some old trees.  The only way it can compete is by the length of its name: Prayer Chapel Church of Christ in God.  I head for home pondering the difference in ecclesiastical styles and what it means to the congregants, to God and to us who only pass by.

Distance:   4.35 miles Time:   39 min 55 sec   Pace:   9:10 min/mile

Weblink:  http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=1752718

Day 15 Terminal Square, Mews, Sycamores

Day 15  April 1, 2008

     This morning's run takes me past the Upper Darby Post Office to the lumpy triangle shaped, block formed by Fairfield Avenue, Terminal Square Boulevard and the last block of Garrett Road.  This is our township's ethnic business garden of delights.  In this one block there are a Korean Realtor, a Korean computer store and a new huge Korean supermarket called H-Mart.  Also there are an Asian boutique,  an Asian DVD store and an Asian gift store.  When it comes to a good meal, one can choose among a Vietnamese restaurant named Little Saigon, a  luncheonette called Sol Del Peru, or two Mexican restaurants: La Marqueza and Sabor Latino.  

   

     In past decades I can remember a host of businesses that failed on this block including:  a dance hall, a gym, a model car racing center and a self defense studio.  For years a shoe repair and typewriter repair store stood guard on the block unflinchingly.  I remember getting my school shoes resoled at the former at the end of every summer.  These days people throw away worn shoes.  The tops don't last like they did when they were made in Boston or Hanover.  Typewriters too have gone the way of the dodo.  Slowly the two repair stores gathered dust in their front windows and aches in the joints of their craftsmen.  Their skills outlasted their trades.  Only the Pipe Store still smolders.

  

     There was a convenience store here that met a more abrupt end though.  On the south side of the block when I was a kid there was a store with a soda fountain style counter.  It was the first "restaurant" that I went to without my parents.  A hamburger, fries and a drink cost $1.25.  I first learned to tip here, rounding out my meal to $1.50.  My buddies and I would go to the library in the municipal building then there for lunch on Saturday.  We loved the burgers.  They were big and greasy, and tasted better than those at home.  We were stepping out!  One weekend the place was shut.  There was a notice from the Health Department on the door.  They never reopened.  We were heart broken, and hungry.  About a week later the rumor spread that they were closed for serving uninspected meat...from Australia...from kangaroos.  To this day I am still looking forward to a trip Down Under...for the hot, jumping food.

       

     I criss and cross the blocks just south of the 69th Street Terminal.  On Richfield Road between Chestnut and Samson is one of the township's few examples of courtyard houses called mews.  This term has a royal heritage.  It came from a French word, muer, for the moulting of falcons.   The English king kept his hunting birds at the stables at Charing Cross, which became known as the King's Mews.  These buildings were clustered around a courtyard and, when they were converted to living quarters, the name stayed with the building style. I'm sure that this architectural terminology was started by a quick thinking Elizabethan realtor.

  

     Further south on Richfield I run into a draft of colder air emanating from the Sears parking garage.  This three story structure is half buried in the hillside and is so big that it acts like a cavern.  Hampden, Glendale, Copley, Ashby Roads, I run back and forth, up and down.  These blocks are most distinguished by those with sycamores and those without.  These peeling bark trees look diseased at first glance, but it is just their healthy growing trunks needing to exfoliate their outgrown bark, like garter snakes shedding their skin.  They also grow curiously in another way.  Rather than heaving the sidewalk upward, their trunks grow out over the sidewalk like the exploding tops of baking muffins.  The blocks with sycamores, even without their foliage, seem close and comfortable; those without, elemental and exposed. 

 

Distance:   5.15 miles Time:   49 min 9 sec   Pace:   9:33 min/mile

Weblink:  http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=1748610

Day 14 Friends, Greeks and Cardington

Day 14 March 26, 2008

     This dawn's run is back to the eastern edge of the township where its border with Philadelphia is the valley cut by Cobbs Creek.  I cross the trolley tracks by the site of the old synagogue at the corner of Bywood and Walnut.  The township bought the tidy brick temple after its congregation moved or aged away.  Attempts to turn it into a community center have been frustrated.

     I run down Samson Street to the back of the Sears Auto Center.  Turning left on Wiltshire, then right on Chestnut, I cross 69th Street and get back on Samson for a block before cutting over to Walnut.  I'm headed for the Friends South-Western Burial Ground.  This 19th Century cemetery sprouts only the modest, ankle-high grave markers favored by the Quakers.  One can see clear across its expanse where only a few majestic trees guard the inhabitants.  It was founded in 1860 after the Philadelphia Friends graveyards became overcrowded.  In 1915 burials from Philly's oldest Friends graveyard at 4th and Arch were disinterred and reburied here.  Some had been resting more than two hundred years, since William Penn had granted that land in 1701.  Few people still living remember that zombies were the vanguard of the flight to suburbia. 

     Skirting the edge of the dead zone, I pass St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church.  This saint was a military man, one of the earliest Christian chaplains in the Roman Army.  Alas he was too ahead of his time, as the Emperor Maximian and his legions were still pagans. One man's sanctity is another's subversion and the Emperor had him tortured and speared for spreading the Word in the ranks.  In this unfunny situation God got the last laugh by anointing the ground where Demetrios' blood spilled with the eternal scent of myrrh.  

     This Upper Darby congregation is more fondly known for a different  odor.  Each May they host the wonderful Upper Darby Greek Festival.  The smell of souvlaki and  shiskabob, mousaka  and gyros wafts the surrounding streets.  Traditional Greek music fills the air.  Bring an empty stomach.  I still remember my introduction to this Hellenistic holiday.  One of my buddies from the Drexel Hill section had gone the previous year and regaled us with tales of the delicious foreign fare.  As a sheltered 1960's Irish Catholic boy, used to meatloaf and fish sticks, anything beyond spaghetti was very exotic.  Also in the pre-Vatican II days, I'd been taught to never step foot in any church other than a Catholic one.  However by some mysterious papal dispensation Greek Orthodox were okay.  They were some distant branch of the apostolic family that never learned the new modern language, Latin.  Feeling guilty that I was committing heresy, I lied to my parents that we were taking the trolley to the library in the municipal building by 69th Street.  With my comic book money I stuffed myself on weird wonders like grape leaves, eggplants and flaky phyllo.  Baklava, of course, was my favorite.  I was still licking honey from my fingers when my friend suggested the unthinkable: "You've got to check out their church."  Fearing a divine thunderbolt I crept into the cool, welcoming sanctuary and was dazzled by what I saw.  Nobody does religious decor more ornately.  It made my home parish, St. Andrew's, look like a Quaker meeting house.  It would be another decade, while traveling in Europe,  before I suffered a more severe case of icon envy.

     Crossing onto Marshall Road I run toward the city but turn right on Church Street just before the bridge spanning Cobbs Creek.  There was once a thriving small community here centered on the mills which tapped the creek with a series of dams for power in the days before engines.  The village was called Cardington.  Nathan and David Gray built the first cotton mill in 1798.  Nathan had served in the Revolutionary War and printed some of the young country's first currency in 1776.  For the next century  Cardington and Hillside Mills pumped out cotton and woolen goods.  The village had its own post office as late as 1925 before it was subsumed into the growing township.  On Old Marshall Road just off the floodplain there is half a block of old, stuccoed over, brick rowhomes once built for the mill workers.  Between the creek and busy Marshall Road this isolated neighborhood still has a quiet, small town feeling.  Cardington Fire Company occupies the Harrison Avenue edge of the long triangular block formed by Perry and Montgomery Avenues.  A banner out front proclaims that the firemen "Support Our Troops" and has the uncommon, unswerving addition: "& President."  At the far vertex of the triangle there is a full size, faux outhouse complete with half-moon door nestled up against the hillside retaining wall.  I'm sure that there is a neighborhood controversy on whether this is crude, charming or comical.  It gave me a smile. 

     On my way home I pass through some of the township's densest rowhome neighborhoods along Locust Street, Bradford and Margate Avenues.  A hundred people live on each block here.  Just where Margate terminates, between Garrett Road and the SEPTA tracks and between the auto and allergy shops, there is an urban anomaly.  Emerging from under the trolley line for a fifteen foot run in the light of day flows an incongruous babbling brook.  A couple of yards wide and half a foot deep it supports a lush, stream side microenvironment despite being bounded on four sides by man's lifeless constructions.  An old map shows that it once sourced from springs on the hillside nearby.  It quickly disappears back to its subterranean realm under the bustling street.  I lean over the concrete traffic barrier to see if there are any minnows in the oasis, but I can't tarry too long.  It is dangerous here.  There is no sidewalk and one shouldn't peer too long into the River Styx.

  

Distance:  4.68 miles Time:   47min 40 sec   Pace:   10:11 min/mile

Weblink:  http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=1734701

Day 13 Headwinds and Hospitals

Day 13 March 21, 2008

     Heading for the track today I swing toward Beverly Boulevard to pick up one block that I keep missing, the single block long Lukens Avenue.  This street bears the name of one of the oldest families in Upper Darby.  Levi Lukens was a tanner and owned a 100 acre tract here as far back as the late 1700's.  (I mentioned the old Lukens Mansion in Day 6.)  The 1800 census shows he and his wife living here with three boys and five girls.  Two signs at either end of this block are all that remain of the proud family name.

     There is a bush sculpted into a face at the corner of Highland and Beverly.  Now it is hard to discern, but in a few weeks it will look like the moai on Easter Island.

     There is a stiff wind blowing across the high school fields.  I slog a few laps much slower than my previous times this year.  Circling the track, the wind is in your face half the time and half at your back.  Just as in the rest of life, I complain about undeserved headwinds, but don't thank God when I'm being helped along.

     Leaving the high school I run a quick three blocks of Drexel Park and then cross Lansdowne Avenue to run the Keystone and Huey Avenue loop around Delaware County Memorial Hospital.  I have quite a few memories of this facility.  After a few childhood accidents I got stitches in the emergency room.  Half my family made the same trip, and were sewn up or had bones reset there.  Much later I had several occasions to bring both my sons through the same doors, only now as the worried parent.  We all recovered to go on and reinjure ourselves in other foolish endeavors.   

     One night though two decades ago my mother made a one way trip.  She had a stroke at our family home on Riverview Avenue, but by the time she was rushed here less than a mile away, her soul had moved on.  While the medical staff kept her body breathing by machine, my family paced and argued in the hallways for two weeks.  The doctors and nurses tried but they do medicine, not miracles.  One by one we realized she was gone and there was no bringing her back.

     On the way home down Garrett Road I glance into Naylor's Run Park.  Behind the guardhouse you can see a statue of a dolphin.  Its supporting pillar rusted through long ago and it has been lying on its side, beached, for years.  I can remember sitting on its curved back with my younger siblings in front, my older ones behind, while my parents looked on and smiled.  That was before things broke that couldn't be fixed. 

  

Distance:   3.48 miles Time:   33min 46 sec   Pace:   9:42 min/mile

Weblink:  http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=1717581

Day 12 High Waters

Day 12 March 15, 2008

     Today before I swing by the high school track, I want to cover one block within a half mile of my house that I’ve still missed on all these trips.  Highland Avenue is only one block long but is notable for the hugh cylindrical water tank visible from State Road that occupies a township high point.  Its nearest neighboring house is cutely painted sunflower yellow and a mix of white and red accents.  These colors brightly contrast the drab tank.  The expansive sides of the tank would make a good site for a mural.  Philadelphia has a world renowned mural project, which paints dozens of walls each year.  Havertown to our north also boasts a big wall mural at West Chester Pike and Darby Road.  Our infrastructural eyesore should at least be swabbed light blue so that it would blend in with the sky.  A grove of trees painted around the perimeter would also make good camouflage.   But if you are going to go to that much trouble, why not paint a a dramatic scene?  I prefer naturalistic ones.  There’s an artist named Wyland who paints whale murals.  A whole pod of them could cavort around this tank.  This one-name celebrity wants to paint 100 whale murals by 2011 and he has 95 completed.  We better ask him quick.  Maybe this could be his century.

     After  the track workout I pass through Drexel Park on Brookfield and Owen Avenue, then cross Lansdowne and zigzag on Lincoln, Congress and Clearbrook Avenues.  I start thinking about street names again.  Who was Owen?  Why did he or she get a street named after them?  I notice that on the Upper Darby side of Marshall Road the power and phone lines are strung behind the houses on Owen Avenue; on the Lansdowne side they revert to the much more common street placement.  The view downhill from Garrett is  distinctly grander without the poles and wires obscuring the vista.  What did Owen do to deserve such special treatment?  Naming a street after Lincoln requires no explanation.  There must be thousands of avenues named in honor of our great president across our country.  Why would anyone ever name a street after Congress though?

 

     Clearbrook and Brookfield appear to have had their names switched at birth (or is that at paving?).  A map from 1870 shows that, where Clearbrook Avenue is now, was once an estate called Brookfield belonging to David Sellers.  Where Brookfield Avenue is today, on the same old map there is a stream which has since been built over by Drexel Park homes.  You can probably still trace its course by mapping flooded basements during April.

     Naylor’s Run meanders on the old map much more freely than it does today.  Except in the municipal park north of Garrett Road it has been confined to a most unnatural culvert or buried completely on its journey to join up with Cobbs Creek.  One time as a kid I caught a large diamond-backed terrapin in its waters.  I'm sure that someone had released it after a trip back from the shore.  Normally a gentle brook this creek, pronounced “crick” by locals, can be deceptive.  Naylor’s Run has not gone gently into oblivion.  Several times after heavy rainfalls it has overflowed its dungeon and deluged lower 69th Street, thereby thwarting all previous efforts to insure that it never flooded again.  At such times its flow can be deadly.  Fifteen years ago it swept a young neighbor to her death.  I know that my boys had been similarly tempted to play in such a novel episodic torrent.  They ignored their parent’s warnings as had I as a child.  We’d been lucky.  The pretty teenage girl was an only child, and every time afterwards that I’d see her mother, my heart would break again.

Distance:   3.90 miles Time:   36 min 50 sec                  Pace:   9:27 min/mile

Weblink:  http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=1701214

Day 11 Small Changes

Day 11 March 12, 2008

     Today it is back to the neighborhoods just east of 69th Street.  I avoid the traffic on Garrett Road and Market Street by taking the much quieter parallels of Shelbourne Road and Ludlow Streets.  In the predawn hour I pass The Tower Theater closed and quiet, compared to its vibrant nightlife.  The SEPTA buses discharging hurrying commuters on 69th Street contrast the tour buses of  headlining rock groups often seen parked around the corner on Ludlow.

     Ludlow dead ends and I come out to Market Street.  I run east and turn right again to the wide boulevard of Wellington Road.   It is a shame that the center median of this quiet street has not been gardened.  It is a blank canvas waiting for a horticultural artist.  For three blocks I run the long straightaway and then turn back and zigzag Marlboro, Overhill, Chatham and Kent Roads.

 

     These are neighborhoods of neat post-WWII stone twins.  Once the houses were nearly identical, but now you can fathom our interesting cultural evolution.  In at least half the original stonewalls have been covered by stucco or siding.  The skill to repoint masonry has proven too rare or expensive in the interim.  The parking of cars seems to have been relocated from the designed back alleys or side driveways to curbside.  Entire streets are closely parallel parked, more like parallel packed, while alley and driveways are empty.  It must take too long to get underway otherwise.  Most disconcertedly it is evident that all the homes once had open front porches.  Now every one has been enclosed.  Once people had a place to sit out front and wave to their passing neighbors.  There were eyes to watch the kids in the street.  Over time one after another shut their house off from the public sphere.  Everyone had a good reason.  They needed just one more room for their growing families in the 1950’s and 60’s, but the overall effect has been alienating.  The streets look colder and less friendly, more like a city, less like a village.  Not a few of the enclosed porches now sprout satellite dishes.  Today we are more connected to the world than we are to the people next door. 

     

Distance:   4.97 miles Time:   47 min 0 sec   Pace:   9:27 min/mile

Weblink:  http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=1694550

Day 10 A Grave Disappearance

Day 10 March 11, 2008

     Today starts with a quick trip back to the high school track for my biweekly speed workout (see Day 8).  Biweekly is ambiguous.  It can mean either twice a week or every two weeks.  Bimonthly has same the double definition (bi-finition?).  But biannual only means twice a year.  The spelling is changed to biennial to mean every other year.  My second speed workout here this week leaves me bye-weakly.

     Trying to pick up a few new blocks on my way home, I run down Argyle Road and cut over to Windermere Avenue and cross Garrett Road.  I turn left onto Marshall Road.  This street is the border with East Landsdowne borough, which has a great oak tree logo.  On the wall of neat little Mar-Win supermarket, it is proudly displayed on a welcome mural .  I have logo envy.

     Across from the Mar-Win is a row of shops.  The Tai Sheng has great chinese takeout.  I put “tai sheng” into three different online translators and they all say that  in English it means “tai sheng”.  I never knew that I could speak Chinese.  At the end of the row is the Soji Zen Center.  I go to yoga class and meditation here.  I always say that I’m a bad but loyal member of every group that I join.  I’m still stiff, physically and mentally, so my truism also holds here.

     I run down the township border on Marshall Road for almost a mile and turn left onto Sherbrook Boulevard.  At the corner of the bus pullout there is a flight of concrete stairs that goes uphill between the back of West Lumber Company and an apartment building.  At the top is a small, triangular shaped field.  My wife and I were once trying to figure out where an old photograph was taken in Upper Darby.  It showed an old towering gravestone with a view of Beverly Hills Middle School from the rear.  After driving around and searching fruitlessly in the Marshall Road athletic fields, we discovered this patch of ground.  An old man walking his dog confirmed that he had witnessed the relocation of a cemetery in 1965.  A web search revealed that here once stood a New Jerusalem Church with a Swedenborgian graveyard.  The gentleman remembered seeing the coffins lifted by a crane out of the ground and loaded onto a truck.  Although the bodies have been moved, a vague uneasiness lingers about the rectangular depressions still visible in the ground.  I wouldn’t visit here at night, certainly not when there is a full moon, and never on Halloween.

Distance:   3.97 miles Time:   38 min 20 sec   Pace:   9:40 min/mile

Weblink:  http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=1690357

Day 9 Terminal and Edge

Day 9 March 7, 2008

     The edge of town is today’s destination.  I run down Bywood Avenue for almost a mile until I reach Market Street and then head eastward.  The Southeastern Transportation Authority’s (SEPTA) rail and bus hub sprawls along the north side for a few blocks.  Dozens of public transportation routes servicing Delaware County and West Philly terminate here.  I have to dodge three buses entering from the west as I pass.

     When I was a kid, the “Terminal” was the edge of my known world.  We could take the trolley from our neighborhood to this endpoint and spend the day shopping in the stores which stretch up the 69th Street hill.  In the sixties my family did all our back-to-school shopping at the J.C. Penney’s at the summit.  In those pre-credit card days my parents with eight kids “had an account” there.  There was a Gimbel’s department store lower on the hill, but that was the fancy store where you bought gifts, not staples.

     There is a pedestrian walkway over Market Street that was built around the time they refurbished the terminal building a dozen years ago.  A hugh blue “69” sign beacons visitors ambiguously from either direction.  The old terminal was a miniature version of Philadelphia’s downtown historic Reading Terminal.  When I was young there were several eateries, a drug store, two markets with piles of fresh fruit and a large four sided newsstand.  The new, improved version is not so vibrant.  The newsstand was shoved in a corner and now has much less charm.  Its old position boasts only benches for transients.  There are a few small stores: a pretzel stand, a coffee shop and a small gift shop.  There’s no place to buy milk on your way home.

     At one time the area had three movie houses: The 69th Street, The Tower and The Terminal Theaters.   The 69th Street was a Warner Brothers outlet.  It closed first and is now the office building across from the west side of the terminal at the corner of Garrett Road and West Chester Pike.  The Tower is still open a half block away at the corner of 69th and Ludlow.  It is slightly world famous as a concert house for music and comedy acts.  The Terminal Theater was actually in the terminal building and was the best of the three in my opinion.  In what other theater could you hear a John Wayne gunfight drowned out by  trolley wheels steely screeching from the tight turnaround loop?  One day I hobbled down on crutches to see The Exorcist.  I think that I screamed louder than the trolleys.

     Still headed eastward on Market Street I pass the entire diminutive borough of Millbourne, Pennsylvania nestled between Market Street and the elevated rail line.  This vestigle political entity hangs on Upper Darby like an appendix.  It only encompasses eight blocks, one tenth square mile, and its biggest claim to fame has long been a stop on the elevated line, now closed for construction.  More than half the population hail from South Asia.  It has the greatest percentage of Indians of anywhere in the U.S., which should increase its international prestige more than the el stop.  No one quite knows why it still exists independently.  Its kids go to Upper Darby schools and UD’s police and firemen have to backup its squads.  It started as a one company town, Millbourne Mills, which produced King Midas Flour.   When that closed in 1927, the golden touch for the borough tax coffers was replaced by a Sears store.  Even that has relocated to 69th Street.  Millbourne’s residents now have to shoulder the second highest tax burden in PA for their independence.  Freedom isn’t free.

     I turn right on South Millbourne Avenue.  Cobbs Creek Park is now on my left.  A thicket of trees blocks the view of the wide valley that the little creek has cut.  This is the edge of my town.  I can’t see the big city lying on the other side. Trees and trails on my left, blocks of my hometown on my right, I skirt the forested border a little and then turn my journey home.

     The edge of town,  of the forest, the edge of the sea, of the world, the edge of reason, of music, of art.  Edges, boundaries and borders all promise thrills and danger just beyond where you comfortably stand.  Terminals, endings, finishes and finales all promise resolution, some final climax, good or bad, which ends the journey.  Life is full of edges and terminations.  Make sure, before you reach “The” Terminal, that you have spent enough time on the edge, and once or twice danced on the other side.

Distance:   4.04 miles Time:   38 min 8 sec Pace:   9:26 min/mile

Weblink:  http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=1680687

Day 8 The Short and Long of the Track

Day 8 March 4, 2008

     March has come in like a lamb this year.  The temperature is almost to the fifties and climbing, even though it is still before 7 AM.  I have spring on my mind and this premature seasonal exuberance  determines where I’ll be running this morning.  I won’t be covering very many new blocks.  I’m headed to Upper Darby’s High School track.  For years when I was growing up, the high school’s track was nearly unusable.  It was an old cinder track.  Cinder tracks used the unburned detritus of coal powered boilers.  The friable material was used because it was dirt cheap, actually cheaper than dirt, since places would pay to have it removed.  Athletic tracks were a perfect disposal solution since the material packed well, absorbed some water and contained no nutrients for plants.  But the high school’s track had poor drainage and runoff from the slopes on two sides brought soil into the cinders so that mud could form.  The surface rutted easily and pools of water would often stand at one end days after storms.  Except for the captive track team most runners learned to avoid it.  It was only good for steeplechases.

     Fortunately the track got an extreme makeover in 2000 thanks to an environmental grant from the state.  It seems that old car tires are now more of a disposal problem than old coal cinders.  Used car tires stored outdoors are breeding grounds for West Nile virus mosquitoes.   The mound of hollows make a much more fertile crescent  than the puddles on the old track’s southeast curve.  Somebody has figured out a way to chop up the tires and reuse the rubber.  The new track has an Olympic caliber look and feel.  It has permanent lane lines and markers.  Now the surface is good for my old knees.  It isn’t as hard as when the old track was dry, or as slippery as when it was mud. 

     I run up the “back way” off State Road between State Road Builder’s Supply and the construction site for a new set of stores.  If you are as old as I am, you will remember the Geno’s, a pre-McDonald’s fast food restaurant, that once stood here.  The “back way” is a treacherous short steep rocky trail that I’ve climbed a hundred times.  It takes you past a monstrous cell phone tower at the corner of the softball field.  The football bleachers are now under reconstruction so there is a detour to get down to the track.  In the morning it glows invitingly.

     Once a year I run a one mile race.  It comes in June just after Father’s Day.  Becoming a father hasn’t aged me as much as this race has.  There are about a dozen of us who compete.  The guy who usually wins is now over 60, but then he doesn’t weigh much more than that.  Running four, five or six miles for exercise does not train you for competing in the mile.  The formula for success has not changed since I was high school 40 years ago.  You have to go to a track and run once around or twice around as fast as you can, as though a howling pit-bull was just two steps behind you.  You have to run hard until your heart is pounding, your lungs are gasping and your thighs are burning.  Then you have to stop and catch your breath, let your legs stop wobbling and let your heart climb back into your chest.  Then you have to do it again, and then again, maybe four of five such “intervals.” They are called this because they mimic the  excruciating interval between living and dying.  They are not fun.  They don’t make you feel better.  They make you feel old, because you time them to the fraction of a second.  And every year you get slower.  

     When I was in high school, we ran intervals almost every day.  Now I can only do half as many, 50% slower, maybe once a week.  The track was a quarter mile, 440 yards, in my day.  Now it is a metric 400 meters, which is only 433 yards.  The track has gotten shorter, but I’m not going to tell anyone.  My stride has gotten shorter in the intervening decades.  My heart heart can’t beat as fast.  Its stroke has gotten shorter.  My wind is shorter as my lungs can’t suck oxygen from the air like they used to.  I’m even two inches shorter in height than I was then.  But if I do these one of these workouts a week for the next few months, I can toe that starting line with those old men, and when the gun goes off, we can hold onto our youth just a little bit longer.

Distance:   3.37 miles Time:   33 min 13 sec Pace:   9:51 min/mile (minus track time)

Weblink:  http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=1673042

Day 7 Around the Police Station

Day 7 February 28, 2008

     Our house thermometer reads 10F  making today the coldest run yet of the year.  A stiff wind adds even more wintry ambiance.

     I run northeast down State Road and cross West Chester Pike.  A toll house stood at this corner according to a map from 1892.  On the same map less than a dozen buildings stand in the area between this intersection and the next eastward toll booth, now the 69th Street Terminal.  I will pass hundreds on this morning’s run. The first hundred are in the neighborhood squeezed between the Pike and the Route 100 regional rail line, known to us longtime residents as the P&W tracks.  In my more than four decades of residency I’ve never ventured through these half dozen streets.  A karate studio and a small playground are tucked back among this cluster of rowhomes.

     Looping around Victory Lane, I wonder which victory this commemorates.  WWII?  WWI?  I head west out the Pike and pass Upper Darby’s Police Headquarters.  This building looks like a school, which it once was.  The Keystone Public School shows on the late 19th century maps but this building is the “New” Keystone School, built in 1909.  I’m tempted to make an aside about how my old grade school teachers were tougher than today’s cops, but it will only get me in trouble, both in this world and the next one.

     Lots of short blocks weave southward of the Pike.  There is a one block loop of stately old homes on Merwood that forms an island of tranquility a stone’s throw from busy Route 3.  A large infestation of bamboo forms a towering wall at a corner on Winfield.  Despite the freezing temperature this invasive grass glows bright green and is watched alarmingly by the surrounding brown lawns.  

     I zigzag up Samson and Spruce Streets.  Are these the terminal blocks of the city streets that connect across Cobbs Creek going all the way across Philly to the Delaware River?  I loop back and forth across blocks of Beverly Hills until I reach home.  When I plot my route and calculate my pace, it is my fastest yet.  I have unknowingly been speeding, just to stay warm.

     

Distance:   6.40 miles Time:   58 min 49 sec                Pace:   9:11 min/mile

Weblink:  http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=1659958

Day 6 One Down, Fourteen To Go

Day 6 February 27, 2008

     When I sum my total mileage for the first five legs of my thru-run of Upper Darby, I see that I have already completed the equivalent of a marathon (26.2 miles).  Since the running was spread over a couple of weeks, I have suffered none of the debilitating aftereffects, but it serves as another measure of what it will take to complete this endeavor.  Since I’m coloring a map after each run with a highlighter, I make a quick visual calculation.  The estimate of my final total makes me grimace: fifteen marathons.  This isn’t the first time that I have set out with a simple, romantic  plan that grows quickly into an arduous task.  This journey may not be of Herculean or Promethean proportions but I predict that there will be slogging later.

     Running down the three blocks of South Madison Avenue that I had missed (see Day 5), I’m noticing trees this morning.  A few old evergreens in front lawns make me imagine that they were once live Christmas trees, planted in the new year and staying long after the celebrants have moved on, or passed on.  A huge old sycamore with a central trunk more than a yard thick splits into four sub-trunks, each of which would be a formidable tree.  A soaring tulip tree that I see while approaching West Chester Pike is bristling with vines high above the three story houses.  This fountain of vines still carries deep green leaves while the tree’s branches poking out of the tangle are bare.  Crossing the Pike I run between two eight foot stumps of shorn pine trees.  Why were they left there limbless in the median, their wounds still oozing sap?

     A wide loop to run three missed, short blocks takes me again past Observatory Field, then west on the Pike and down South Kirklyn Avenue.  I come out at Lansdowne Avenue and run the Harwood and Brighton one block, loop neighborhood.  I cross in front of Har Jehuda Cemetery and run another small, three block neighborhood that is sandwiched between Lansdowne and Naylor’s Run.  I cross over again to run the Saints’ Loop (Anthony and Joseph) around the old Lukens Mansion.  This 19th century building was once a large estate, then an inn, then a restaurant which failed, and now houses a computer services company.  The business’s huge sign mars the stately old facade while the surrounding parking lot and townhouses encroach on its remaining dignity.

     In my final mile as I run down Beverly Boulevard, I hear behind me the ominous sound of rapidly approaching, jangling dog tags.  In my twenty years of running this is always an adrenaline pumping moment.  Apprehensively I swivel to meet my canine opponent, but the road is empty.  I look down at what seems to be a moving oil stain on the pavement.  It is a “squog,” a dog the size of a squirrel.  He is smaller than my shoe.  These are the only dogs I could ever outrun and I show him that I still can.

Distance:   4.84 miles Time:   47 min 57 sec Pace:   9:54 min/mile

Weblink:  http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=1657564