From the None issue of Runner's World
There have been two revolutions in my adult life. The first was running; the second was recorded books.
I was 28 before I discovered that there is such a thing as a sport without hate. My theory up until then had been that sport was just like fighting only with expensive equipment and ridiculous rules. If you want to humiliate somebody, then just humiliate him. Forget the tennis court.
In a fight you have two options: 1. You hurt the other guy. 2. He hurts you. Then I began to race. Long-distance running isn't about hurting the other guy. Seven miles into my second race--a 10-miler--I found myself bracketed between two competitors. I liked the man I was pulling ahead of. More importantly, I liked the man who was pulling ahead of me. If this was sport, I was hooked.
I hadn't been an athlete as a child, nor, alas, had I been a scholar. Which, in our household, was like being in a hammerlock. I'd speculate about religion. "You only say that because you haven't read The Seven Storey Mountain." I'd talk about the spirit of a tree. "Oh, Bengie, you're too ignorant to be a pagan. You must read Bullfinch's Mythology."
This was a race I was certain to lose. My mother was 30 when I was born. How could I possibly catch up?
And I was that most wretched of creatures, a slow reader in a bookish household. Even while reading, I was falling behind. That's why I loved being read to. If my father was reading to me, or my mother was reading to me, then--for those long minutes--I was neck and neck. As a child I negotiated endlessly for another chapter, another story at bedtime. And when I mastered the phonograph, I treasured the few spoken-word albums we owned.
Like a baby chimp making his own mother out of a towel, a hot-water bottle, and a ticking clock, I would settle down alone in the dining room to listen. I remember Mel Brooks's and Carl Reiner's The 2,000 Year Old Man, and still admire the work and the subsequent editions despite the attack on my sport: "never run for a bus." We had Dylan Thomas reading "A Child's Christmas in Wales" and "Fern Hill."
Solitary reading seemed--well, solitary. And vaguely undemocratic. Plus, it always reminded me of how far behind I was. Everybody roots for the underdog, but nobody likes a loser.
I was working at The Reader's Digest when the Walkman was invented and audio books took off. Mama corporation--then losing 300,000 magazine subscribers a year to failed eyesight--had purchased or otherwise obtained a small mountain of the two-cassette retail offerings then produced by Listen for Pleasure.
