The Space-Time Continuum

Adventures in Nonlinearity

Sunset Avenue, Wanamassa, N.J.

One day in March, I was standing in our bedroom on the third floor of our house in Philadelphia, looking down into the garden. It was still raining.

I thought of a day in Paris. I was standing looking out of one of the French windows in the living room of an apartment a friend had lent us. It was raining. I was in love with Paris in the rain.

But, back in Philadelphia, I was tired of the rain. I went downstairs and mentioned to my wife that I wouldn't be tired of the rain if we were in Paris. She said she was tired of the rain, and would be tired of it in Paris too.

We had just gotten back from Asbury Park, where we have a small apartment near the beach. It had rained a lot, and we had snuggled in quite happily.

During a break in the weather we had run our errands, including putting gas in the car at our favorite gas station, in Lois's hometown of Wanamassa, which is next to Asbury Park. That's where we saw the man in the leather suit, getting gas for his car.

Time travel in Wanamassa.

When I saw the car, I thought of time warps. The guy and his car probably belonged in the Indianapolis 500 around 1920, and yet here they were. (I assume that the engine cowling was hanging in the garage at home, perhaps awaiting some minor adjustments. And on second thought, this may be too small to be an Indy car - perhaps a sprint racer of the same era.)

Things like this happen - to me at least - quite a lot in Asbury Park. You're walking along, minding your own business, and then you notice that you've slipped into a slightly parallel universe. You're in a different place, at a different time.

It's not always a guy in a leather suit trying to gas up an antique race car. Sometimes it's a little girl in the Batman car on the boardwalk. If only we could get the carousel back. Or sometimes I'm just watching a sailboat catch the light out on the Atlantic Ocean, a few feet from where I'm standing in the sand. Something punctures the surface of prosaic reality, revealing surprise and delight, and perhaps wonder.

Reality is a shape-shifter. People spend a lot of time ignoring this fact. I used to do that too. Then I took up running marathons, and I got a lot more comfortable with my ride on the space-time continuum.

In Paris the rain stopped, and I found myself standing by the Arc de Triomphe, waiting for the race to start. We would run down the Champs d'Elysees, the Rue de Rivoli, through the Place de la Bastille (the refreshment table handed out figs, among other things), up to the Bois de Vincennes with its fabulous medieval castle, and then turn and run through the park back towards the town. And then we would go around a curve and find ourselves at the top of a hill, looking out over the City of Paris. I hadn't noticed the gradual climb up, and the unexpected and spectacular view took my breath away.

There was another refreshment station. There were no refreshments, not even figs - one of the penalties of being a back-of-the-pack runner. "Ils ont pille tout," said the nice lady behind the table, apologetically. I didn't mind. We ran down to the Seine, and up to the Bois de Boulogne, and along the Avenue Foch, and back to the Arc de Triomphe, where we finished in pain and euphoria.

Through this I was also in Philadelphia, out on the Wissahickon, doing my long training runs through the woods, battling injuries and sadness. One day I noticed that my knees were better and I could attack, both uphill and down. On one downhill turn on the way home, running on a muddy surface, I noticed the ghostly forms of my mother and father, and Socrates. They were cheering me on from the inside of the curve. I was very tired, but because I am a child of the twentieth century and not the fourteenth century, I knew right away they weren't real. Still I was happy to see them. I guess what I'm trying to say is you don't have to go to Paris to enjoy the rain.

There are a bunch of magical places in Philly. The Wissahickon is only one of them. And yet the moments where we pierce the veil of everyday reality seem harder to come by in Philly than they do in Paris, or Asbury Park. I've been trying for years to help "improve" Philly's public spaces, and it occurs to me that I've only recently started to be honest with myself about the reasons why, and our path to what I think would be a better city. Yes, we need to kill fewer people on our streets, and we need to design public spaces where people feel - and actually are - safe. But we, as a city, also need to stop denying our potential for the magical. I hope we're up to it.

Near Convention Hall, Asbury Park.

See also Lafayette: We Were There, A Cure for Anger, No Fear, Rush Hour at the Endorphin Factory, Runners Are Different, On Breathing.

Reimagining Our Streets: Bikes Will Lead, But They Will Not Be Alone

Bikes are a disruptive force on our streets. Thank God. I've spent my life watching a frozen standoff between cars and pedestrians, and it was well past time to start moving in a better direction.

Our streets have an interesting history. The pedestrians were there first. The cars arrived around World War I, and they hit this country like a tsunami, rearranging our built environment, our laws, and our minds. (To read more about all this, see Peter Norton's book Fighting Traffic.)

Before the cars came, the streets were open to all who wished to come and go - pedestrians, beer wagons, hansom cabs, horse-drawn trolleys, the occasional coach and four (that would be four horses). Things could be a bit chaotic, but when it came to getting killed, people seem to have been more worried about Typhoid Mary and other carriers of infectious disease.

When cars showed up, they had a number of advantages - they were big, and heavy, and fast. Before then, the occupants of the street had largely all gone about the same speed. Cars were also very popular. People loved their cars. Now that we're jaded, and overwhelmed by the sheer number of cars on our streets, it's a bit hard to imagine what it was like.

Cars came to own the streets in the 1920s. They basically muscled their way in, and they literally marginalized the pedestrians, pushing them over the curb and confining them to the sidewalk. (Sidewalks date back at least to Roman times, but until the car arrived, they were an amenity, not a ghetto.)

And so there things stood, until a few years ago, with pedestrians pinned to the sidewalk and cars owning the cartway - the street space between the curbs. Pedestrians were allowed to cross at the corner, but it was best to look both ways.

Then along came the bicyclists, and all of a sudden we are reimagining our streets.

I live in Philadelphia, and recently I attended the city's first Vision Zero conference, which was organized, not surprisingly, by the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia. Bikes are going to lead the reimagining of our public spaces. But they will need some help - and I think they will get it.

Runners, for instance, have been doing Open Streets for years - they call their events races. The Broad Street Run has shut down the full length of Broad Street in Philadelphia on the first Sunday in May every year for decades.

Children used to play in the street. News flash: In Philadelphia, they still do, on the many little side streets of our town. Now, I live on Lombard Street, which is an access road for the Schuylkill Expressway, and I don't expect to see children in short pants and floppy hats shooting marbles in the middle of Lombard Street anytime soon. But one block away, on Addison Street, children often draw with chalk and play ball in the good weather as their parents sit on stoops, watching over their little ones and socializing with one another.

Restaurants are also getting more aggressive about pushing out on to the sidewalks and even into the streets. Special props to the bagel shop Spread on 20th Street, for figuring out what to do when the pope visited, and vehicular movement was greatly restricted in a large part of the downtown. Spread took the lane, with tables. And very happy customers.

Bikes will lead these groups, because bikes have organization, focus, and even a little bit of money. And because, for bikes, the issue is not optional.

We need bike lanes. We need a network of bike lanes that will allow people to get around town safely. This network will make the streets better for everybody. It will calm traffic, and it will make the streets safer for pedestrians to cross. (See, for instance,  the New York City Department of Transportation's 2014 report Protected Bicycle Lanes in NYC.)

And yes, this means that motorists will need to learn to share the road with the many other groups that have legitimate claims on the space.

Twice I have run down the middle of the Champs Elysees in Paris. And I was not alone. It was called the Paris Marathon.

Of Parisian Marathons, and Many Other Things

I just spent a week in Paris. It may have been the best week of my life, and I've had some pretty good weeks.

It all started innocently enough. I was looking for a spring marathon, and I thought, why not Paris? Why not indeed.

Things snowballed from there. My son's girlfriend is Parisian, and shortly after I mentioned the marathon I found myself on a team running for a wonderful French charity, Autour des Williams.

So many parts of this trip were like a movie that I hardly know where to begin. Walking from the Arc de Triomphe over to the Rue Balzac before the start of the marathon. Saying bonjour to the policewoman watching quietly from a doorway, then turning a corner and walking into a crowd of people wearing the same jersey I was wearing. They were from a variety of European countries - I was the only American. They took pity on my French, and we mainly spoke English.

The connections came at odd angles, and were forceful. Williams syndrome involves being born without approximately 26 genes. As I read online about the characteristic elfin features and the "cocktail party" personality, I remembered being in College Park, Maryland, a few weeks earlier. We were eating supper in a parish house during the walk from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. This was part of my work for healthcare reform, and there, I understood in retrospect, I had probably met someone with Williams syndrome. He was very nice. Just a little off, and without the trip to Paris I'd never have had a clue as to why.

Christophe, at the morning meeting (we took a group photo), called it serendipity.

The team totaled 71. I, of course, was one of the slowest, but who cares? Not me. The weather was nearly perfect - sunny, in the 50s, and I had a great run. At kilometer 37.2 (out of 42.2) there was a cheering section for Autour des Williams. My family had gotten a bit turned around, and almost didn't make it. But then I heard, "Bill, Bill!" and running up behind me was Marie, my son's girlfriend, and then Ben, my son. You have to be 23 miles into a marathon, on a beautiful day, to know what that meant.

After the marathon, there was a lovely party in an apartment about a block from President Sarkozy's house. As Marie's parents were walking with us to the bus home, two of the police officers guarding the palace - one man, one woman - inquired about the medal on my neck, and with help from Marie's mother I managed to stammer through a very pleasant conversation. It was a bonding moment.

Did I mention that we ate very well? Marie's mother organized my personal pasta dinner the night before the marathon. And a few days later we had a superb dinner at a restaurant near their apartment, called Le Bouclard. Meanwhile, Ben and Marie steered us to several restaurants we'd never have found on our own.

Lois and I stayed at the apartment of Marie's sister, Loulou, and most mornings my daughter, Alicia, and her boyfriend, Alex, would come over for breakfast. They were staying at Marie's apartment. Did I mention that Parisian hospitality is astounding?

To round things out, yes, we saw the sights. The Venus de Milo at the Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay, the Rodin Museum, Napoleon's tomb at Les Invalides. And simpler, less expected, things. Running along the Seine in the marathon, and looking left, and seeing the Eiffel Tower. It was so large I felt I could reach out my left elbow and touch it.

Or walking with Alex in the Jardin du Luxembourg. We had momentarily lost Alicia and Lois, and I suggested that he look for two brunette women wearing black jackets and sunglasses. And, he said, "Bill, you've just described half the people in this park."

How to end? Oh yes, the volcano in Iceland. We left Thursday morning, and didn't even know it had happened. Alicia and Alex left that evening. There's a rumor they were on the last flight out before Paris - Charles de Gaulle shut down. I don't know about that, but I do know that Ben was supposed to fly out Sunday, and instead wound up running his own marathon of sorts, finally getting home on Thursday, four days later than he intended.

Oh well. He was in Paris. Not a bad place to be stranded, really.