A Sweet, Searing Pain

Countdown time for the Hamptons Marathon: it is now less than two weeks away. To get in the mood, I’ve been watching the “Barefoot Contessa,” Ina Garten, on the Food Network, as she visits farms, markets, and beaches around East Hampton (that’s where I’m headed!). She searches for fresh cheese or produce, or in the beach episode, she joins Elmo on a play date for a cooking-with-children theme, and she wears a windbreaker while she unpacks frozen fruit smoothies she whipped up for the Muppet. Fortunately, Muppets never get cold. All that fur, you know.

So it’s the Hamptons, but I can’t really see anything. I’m not going to remember that shop where Ina’s husband, Jeffrey, stopped to pick up wine and bread, or the name of the farm where they make cheese. And anyway, perhaps there’s not much in common between a cooking show and a marathon, in spite of the location. And then again, perhaps there’s a reason they are playing on the same channel in my mind.

It’s not just Ina—there’s also Giada, dicing up green apples and goat cheese and tossing around cinnamon and dried cranberries, and Paula and Ree and plenty of others with their skillets and food processors and zucchini and cumin. It’s words (“crostini,” “tartelette,” “pancetta”—never mind that I wouldn’t eat the meat … or touch it); it’s colors (green, red, purple, orange, green, did I mention lush, lush green?); it’s impressions (beauty, life, sun, friends, art, playing and then resting, feeling happy-tired). It’s memories. One of my grandmas used to serve me apple slices topped with cheddar cheese as a snack. I haven’t had that combination since I was a child. But suddenly I could taste it, and I knew for a moment it was the only food in the world I wanted. I could see her kitchen again, and the family room that opened right off it, where I’d sit in the rocker with the footstool and watch TV.

It’s a sweet, searing pain: a fleeting image, a moment of beauty you can’t capture or hold onto. You can’t close your fist around it and press it against your heart for later.

Last year, when the pumpkins came out for Halloween and the fall harvest spilled into grocery stores and roadside markets and the high school fundraiser down the street, I whirled into my usual tizzy of excitement, wanting … wanting … I don’t know, to rush out and purchase school supplies (ah, how I loved the fresh clean notebooks in the old days). Acting purely on my whims, I could have bought up a carload of pumpkins and various fall-themed decorations, not to mention jars of preserves with fetching labels, so quaint and so, frankly, un-useful to me. My practical side reigned. “Buy a pumpkin?” I scoffed at myself. “For what?”

“Well,” I might have answered myself, staring at the ground and poking a toe at the pavement, “I could carve a jack-o-lantern.”

 “Hah!” Guffaw.

“Well …”

“Come on.”

“Well, I could.” Only I wouldn’t. And I knew it. I sighed, but I left the parking lot at the pumpkin patch with my wallet unopened. Ultimately, I felt relieved at the ability of my common sense to adhere to the budget, but I was filled too with something like … like a sweet, searing pain.

Finally I realized I couldn’t “have” all the beauties and wonders of fall around me, but I could photograph them. That helped. I didn’t buy up produce that wasted away while I contemplated what to do with it. Still, maybe because I was paying more attention to the world around me, I kept seeing beautiful things that pricked at me even as I enjoyed them. They were ephemeral. I couldn’t bottle them up or take them home. I wanted to fill myself up with them, but I knew their moment would pass and leave me empty again.

Passing moments: that’s all a marathon is. I remember the glimmer of water during the Richmond Marathon. Running through a cheering crowd in Dublin and seeing the one spectator pointing out the mile marker in the midst of the chaos. Catching my breath—from exertion and awe—as I crested a hill and burst into a field lit with the rising sun outside Charlottesville. Passing a boy wearing a giant red claw at a water station in the Haunted Hustle Marathon in Wisconsin. Hearing the rhythm of my feet on the slats of a wooden bridge in a forest … somewhere. Huddling inside a port-a-potty while the wind howled outside, summoning me back to the course in Stockholm, Sweden.

You run for a long time in a marathon, but it’s just a series of moments. Some of them are brutal. Some of them make me shudder to relive them. Some are amazing. All seem to be elevated by the sense of an epic undertaking. To succeed in that undertaking brings a thrill that can’t be strung onto a ribbon or emblazoned on a T-shirt. You can’t touch it or hold it. Time passes, carrying your moment away. Leaving perhaps a sweet, searing pain.

Here it is autumn again, and the pumpkins are appearing. The light is shifting, taking on its golden tinge that strikes me as poignant, because winter is coming. I look forward to the joys of sweaters and candles, chilly mornings, maybe even a jack-o-lantern this year. Beautiful moments to store up in my memory against the darker season that follows.

Because all those moments we remember aren’t really gone—they’ve become part of us. When I think about past marathons and past trips, the moments that stay with me always seem inevitable, as if I can’t imagine not having been to Norway or Dublin, I can’t imagine the Stockholm Marathon of 2012 working out any other way (than bitterly cold and grueling and triumphant).

Sometimes I wish I could freeze time, or I wish I could string all my good memories onto ribbons and hang them with my marathon medals; I wish in looking at pictures I could recreate rather than merely remember, and knowing that I can’t—that I can never again sit in my grandma’s family room eating apple slices with cheese while she dances around in the kitchen, that I am never again going to stand on a stool at my other grandma’s kitchen sink to help her wash dishes while her bread dough rises—it lends sweetness, I think, as well as pain.

If I could have the past with me, could I look to the future? Last year’s autumn is gone, and this one is just arriving. Moments have floated away, and new ones have yet to be lived. I am craving that marathon feeling. It’s time to do more than remember what it’s like to cross the finish line. It is time to go out and cross one again.

Whatever happens on September 29th, I expect I’ll find myself watching the “Barefoot Contessa” again in the future, and it may occur to me that once upon a time I had never been to the Hamptons. What?! I had never been to the Hamptons? (Just as I had never been to Iceland or the Netherlands, way back when.) How odd. How almost unimaginable. I may not recognize any of the places Ina goes, and if I want to experience her food, I don’t think I will find it among the postrace refreshments. But I do think her art gives me other moments to look forward to … and future moments, perhaps, of sweet, searing pain.

Some charmers to admire, if not to possess: