Frances

by Amy White
June 16, 2000
(www.slowtwitch.com)

Not long ago, having the fit overhauled on my bike in an attempt to fix my injury-rocked season, I was asked whether I had played sports in college. Nope, I said, somewhat chagrined—but, feeling for some reason like the whole truth was needed, I added this little note: Nope, I said, I drank beer.

Well, this was a little embarrassing to admit. But it got me thinking about the person who helped me reclaim a healthy lifestyle—Frances, my best buddy from college. She took me running for the first time in my life. In high school, and before, I had been a swimmer. Swimming, swimming, swimming. And, because I was tall, one year I decided I should play basketball, more out of a sense of duty than anything else—we were a small school and had few tall girls. I reeked, but it was OK. I learned about the game and how important it is that benches be kept warm.

But I was never much of a runner.

Not long after we graduated from college, Frances and I moved into an apartment in Brooklyn—you know, a "real" place. Although it was a small railroad apartment owned by a landlord who thought plaster really was just the ticket for smoothing out irritating architectural quirks like turn-of-the-century slate fireplaces, it had many charms. Chief among them was its proximity to Prospect Park, a gorgeous chunk of greenery in the midst of Brooklyn’s brownstones and neighborhood businesses.

Well, at some point during college (long about the middle, I recall) I had picked up another nasty habit: smoking. Which was good, in a way, because there really was nothing like the combination of a meaty cigarette and a vodka-cranberry. I told myself I would quit come graduation, and Frances held me to it by making our apartment a smoke-free zone.

To drive the point home, she then took me running. One sunny Saturday morning, we got up and laced up our shoes. Wheezing, gasping and beet-red, I circled the park oh-so-slowly behind Frances, who had played field hockey in high school. Lots of running in field hockey. Not very much running in my swimming.

But, as the story goes for so many, after that I never looked back. Come Monday morning, I was still really sore. I was walking like the Tin Man before he found some oil. At the time, I was working in the bookshop at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a job that might sound plush but was really so only in its surroundings. We had a lot of floor space to cover and frequently went downstairs to retrieve armfuls of books. My co-workers thought my pain was endlessly amusing and asked if I planned to continue since I clearly hurt so bad.

Oh, yeah.

For the next two years, my evening or morning runs (and, later, rides) in Prospect Park came to be something I treasured. I ran alone or with Frances, or with other friends Frances had converted. There were some classics in there, like the time we got caught in a late-summer downpour in the dead middle of our run—forward or backward, it made no difference, so we kept on running toward home. Of course we had grocery money for the stop at the supermarket afterward. Of course the rain had stopped by then.

Some of my most vivid memories of those years are associated with running in the park: cool-down stretches in the twilight as traffic sped past the Civil War monument that marks one end of the park. One elderly neighbor sitting on his stoop, waiting to make sure I’d got home safe when my run was solo—always with a kind word, always with a smile.

I’ve told Frances a few times how much it meant that she took me running and made me keep that promise to myself. Now I get to tell her in public. Hey, Frances: That was the greatest gift a friend could give.

TO LANTERNE ROUGE HOME

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