Crossing Bellevue
I am running again.
I am running slow miles, fourteen-minute miles, one mile every day I can manage, which usually means days I don't go to the city.
I pulled something in the vicinity of my ankle, probably running to catch a train – I had a series of very tight connections coming home from Hearth Gods last weekend and I wasn't wearing the best shoes – so I had to pause again soon after starting up, but I'm back now.
It's been over a year, almost two years since I last tried running.
This time I got rid of my self-imposed requirement that I would run on the track in Brookdale Park, because that means crossing Bellevue using the honor system crosswalk, and let's face it Jersey drivers have no honor, and it takes so much willpower for me to face that crossing.
Instead I run on the warren of residential streets near our house, watching my feet because the sidewalks are buckled.
Some lawns feature those partial skeletons arranged to look as if they are emerging from the ground: the skull, the hands, maybe the knees. They remind me of how I sleep: in an oversized hoodie from San Jose, washed a thousand times, string long gone, and both blankets pulled high to my nose.
And when Bobina comes around to check on me, hind paws on my stomach, front paws on my chest, a monument to herself, I reach one hand out, offer it to her to sniff. And sometimes she settles for a while, and then I love the flatness of her hind feet against my body. And other times she bounds off, to attend to other things.
I need to work my way up to two miles and then three-ish, I'm signed up for a 5k on December 6th, and it's around here, which means it's hilly. Not like the Prospect Park hill, up and done, but up and down and up again the whole way.
Obviously nothing is at stake, they give you the donut beanie with the pom-pom with your race number the day before the race, you don't even have to finish, but I want to, I want to be a runner. I want to get back to five or six or seven miles. Even at one mile I feel the shift in my brain, but when you get to fix or six or seven, it's really something, I remember that, I miss it.
There are training plans, I know, couch to 5k, etc., but if I have a plan I won't do it. I need to keep the stakes very low: fourteen minutes looking for cats in windows, guessing if they are real or just for decoration, startling squirrels, setting off dogs more accustomed to cars than people.
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A magician came to our Halloween party at work, he did a whole show for us, I was skeptical, some might even say cynical, dreading it, and as it turned out, I have not laughed so hard from surprise, disbelief, joy, as I did that evening. I don't know how he did what he did, I don't know what to make of it, and this not-knowing brought me closer to my colleagues, I think.
The magician talked about how memory is a function of attention, and running, and how it helps him focus, nothing revolutionary, things I already knew, but clearly needed to hear again from a man who could solve a Rubik's cube blind-folded, and read people by the micro movements in their faces, their hands, their shoulders and their stances.
For forty minutes or so on Thursday, he held us in his thrall, while the light drained from the sky. How many of us noticed that rose gold, that civil twilight?
NEWSY STUFF
The aforementioned magician is Max Davidson, if you have an event budget, book him! You won't regret it.
Warm congrats to friends who have books out now or imminently! Laura Kolbe for "The Decadent Movement" (out now), Helen Rubinstein for "Feels Like Trouble: Provocations on Writing, Teaching, and Power" (pre-order here), and "Diane Zinna for Letting Grief Speak" (order here). Matt Jakubowski for his chapbook, "Ghost in the Rain" (order here), and Rachel King for "The Red Heads" (pre-order here).
Read my story, "Junco and Wolf," in A Public Space No. 33! If the cost is an obstacle, let's meet up and I'll lend you my extra copy that I ordered for just this purpose XO
Divinity School • a letter every Sunday at sunset • if you’re always looking, after some time you’ll have seen
