The newspaper celebrated the way my dad-smoker, beer drinker, etc.-transformed from couch potato to Boston in only a year. Six pages long, color photos, and the framework for the story that now lives in my head. The same year he ran Boston for the first time, the Boston Globe Sunday magazine published a huge feature on him. I was eight years old when he pulled this off. Within one year of his first step as a jogger, he qualified for and ran the Boston Marathon, finishing the greatest road race in the world in less than three hours. And a Chrysler New Yorker that he was terribly proud of. He took up jogging with the same zeal that led him to acquire, by the time he was my age, a wife and four kids and a house on a golf course. My dad, who set out only to lose some weight, attacked jogging with the same focus with which he approached his work, the same focus that enabled him to rise-completely on his own, seemingly through sheer will-from a working-class assignment in Milwaukee to a station atop the upper middle class. The American Frank Shorter had won gold and silver medals in two successive Olympic marathons, igniting a running boom. When he was my age, my dad decided to take up jogging to drop some of those excess pounds. He drank a couple of beers every evening after work, and never exercised. It goes like this: When my dad was my age, thirty-nine years old, he smoked three packs of cigarettes a day. We never talk about the story rattling around my head, the story haunting me. Gingerly, we dance around what I call my career, and what he once called my permanent vacation. We talk about the Chicago Cubs and his golf game and whether he’s added any beer cans to his collection. A female friend, upon being introduced to him, reports that my dad “still has it going on.” He and I talk on the phone at least once a week. He’s retired now, finally, from one of those vague business-type jobs-management consultant in his case-that paid him enough money to support a wife, to shepherd four kids through graduate schools, to care for his mother, and to take vacations now and then. Alive for more than seventy years, he’s spent the last thirty in a Midwestern suburb, in a four-story house overlooking a small sylvan lake. He’s never been arrested, was never late with a bill, and he sits through five p.m.
A little shorter than he used to be, which was never exactly tall. How does a ghost story start? How about with an old man? The one I’m thinking about is unexceptional on the surface.
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