Out here in the sticks, it’s easy to forget about the city. New England is easier to get to, for crying out loud. This was corrected, in my case, my focus redirected, by a recent spate of trips — campus tours, three of them, as various as the city itself, supplemented by a return to the Bronx’s thousand-plus-acre Van Cortlandt Park for one of its storied, nay, eternal high school cross-country meets, when the perimeter of the parade ground is set up with tents as if by encamped armies.
Forty-one races in a day? Yes, but that’s not why it’s eternal. It’s more the recurring nature of the thing, the way the meets are a rite of passage: Our youngest daughter, a high school freshman, just retraced the steps of her older sister, now off at college upstate, who preceded her younger brother at Van Cortlandt by a year, and the other day he completed his third and final traversing of the course.
Hell, even I ran there while at Bridgehampton High, the railroad ties and hillocks among the very few things I have any recollection of whatsoever from those days.
And then there’s the kids’ grandfather on my side, who did well in some sizable Northeast regional meet at Van Cortlandt as a Brown freshman in 1957, hitting the showers afterward with the great, and apparently rail-thin, Irish runner Ron Delaney of Villanova, the seventh man to break the four-minute mile. Turned out it was my father’s last collegiate competition, as after that he marshaled all his energies toward what he calls his “B.A. in Humility.”
Manhattan College, a Catholic institution, Lasallian (emphasizing social uplift, they say, and I notice that Rudy Giuliani has been expunged from their list of prominent alumni), is the host of these vast invitationals. It wasn’t in our plans to tour, although as it’s one of those fortress-like campuses on a hill I certainly wouldn’t have minded.
It could still happen. I figure I’ll have three more chances before the youngest is done with high school.