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The Trails

The trails ran out behind West 1st Street in West Tulsa, Oklahoma.  To get to them on foot or bike you had to wiggle in between the fence separating the Parrish and Ogle houses.  Invariably the Parrish’s dog would bark up a storm, day or night, when threading through, which made the trip (short though it was) more of an adventure than it had to be.  The Trails, as neighborhood kids referred to them, consisted of a southwest to northeast gash in the earth running alongside the barely used, by the summer of 1978, Kansas-Texas railroad tracks.  Running through and down and back up again were well-worn bike and motorcycles paths, under a thoroughly concealing canopy of trees.

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Thank You. For Whatever Comes.

I ran upstairs because I’d heard the fight was already over.  As part of my ongoing effort to get my friend James into sports I had jotted this down on a post-it before I hit the project-concrete stairs of our dorm room at Willoughby:

“Tyson knocked him out in 93 seconds!  93!”

OK it was really 91.  But I’d been listening to WFAN and they were apparently pretty excited about it too.  I made it the 6 floors up (not trusting the “hellavator”) and stuck the note to James’ door, under the 804 number.  None of us had TVs except for Lewis Greene and Myra Rivera, and he only let us watch Redskins games (including the Super Bowl); and unfortunately this didn’t happen often because we all lived in Brooklyn.

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