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
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