Scenes from a Run

Running is my repetition. It is my practice. It is what I do to reset my mind, body and soul. When I walk out the front door, running shoes, shorts, t-shirt, skull cap to keep my cheap ear buds in my ears, tunes on the phone in my hand, I both know what to expect and have no idea what I will find. My daylight runs generally start on the rail trail near our house.

It's a foot bridge now, but at some point, trains crossed over this stretch of stream. They were faster than I am and I can remember them. I am running, so I keep running, but I fight the urge to stand in the middle of the bridge and watch and listen to the wind.

When I turn off Rails to Trails, I am a ghost. My shadow is the only proof that I was here. But if you look for it, you won't find it. Shadows are slick like that.

Speaking of ghosts, it's Memorial Day. That's why I have time on a Monday for a daylight run. It's a day to remember, to hold in our memory those that have died for our country. Those that have died so that I can go for a run; so that I can drink coffee in the morning; take the girls paddleboarding in the afternoon; hit the grocery store; grill steaks out back; feed my family; and then sit on the front steps sipping Jameson's while watching our younger daughter ride her bike around "the loop" in our neighborhood. I owe it to those who have died, to make my life, and theirs, count for something.

Jack White's "Freedom in the 21st Century" is playing as I run by the church. Stone churches and wooden barns are sacred architecture to me, just as forms, even stripped away from what goes on inside them. They elevate my thoughts.

Back on Rails to Trails, I run hard, to feel my heart, to feel sweat pour down me, to make the run count. This run was the same and different from every other. Running is my repetition. Repeat.

Cheshire Cat Moons and Something

Ava and I are lying on the trampoline, watching the clouds run fast by an early daylight moon.

"Look Dad, it's a Cheshire Cat moon!" That's what we call the crescent moons that look like the Cheshire Cat's smile floating in the sky.

Ava is convinced that the moon is moving toward the clouds. People thought for centuries that the sun revolved around the earth, so who am I to tell her she is wrong? We look closer and I show her the clouds moving. And fast.

"What did you say about air, Dad? That it grows up to become wind?"

"You mean what did I write? I wrote that wind is air that has learned to speak. But how did you know that?"

"Grammy told me at the bus stop. Wind is air that learned to speak, that's right."

Her nine-year-old mind contains the wind and the sky and the moon.

Twenty-five or so years ago, someone changed the word "stuff" for me forever. What are you thinking about? "Oh, stuff." And later, stuff was explained in a handwritten and doodled letter in the mail. And that word has made me smile ever since.

My mind has been on the changing nature of words, language, how different words can mean different things to people. Like stuff. Like geraniums, which for us mean my grandmother Shoey, who spent as much time as she could in her gardens and greenhouse in Towson, and then Easton. Who planted geraniums. So we hear "geranium" and Shoey is there.

"Something" is a word with that kind of loadedness. "Remind me to tell you something later." "What are you thinking about?" "Something." "He/She's really something." "I've got something on my mind."

Blue is loaded. Tattoos are loaded. Cutting the grass is loaded. Running, cutting the grass, and the shower are the three places I do my most creative thinking.

Loaded words. A personal lexicon or vocabulary. Words imbued with personal meaning. That would really be something.

On Air

Air is possibility. We don't even notice it until it adds voice and motion as wind. When air becomes active. When I run I can't drink in enough air, filling my lungs, clearing them, repeat. When the big shit in our lives happen, when heavy or tense or anger or sad happen, we instinctively take deep breaths, looking for air, but not naming it.

Before we got too smart, the ancient Greeks, pre-Socrates, had the Universe broken down into air, water, earth and fire. The elements. Now we've named everything so fancily, we can't even get our minds around it. But we can breathe.

I'm being bird stalked when I run these days. Mostly by male cardinals. For a couple months now, every time I run, I get swooped by one. Almost always when I've forgotten they are watching me, and a fastball of red, or maybe it's a sinker, I don't have a batter's eye anymore, swings by, standing out against green trees and air. Once one lit for a second on a fence right next to the rail trail, nodding as I went by, and I smiled at him. Birds have air figured out.

Air is part of what my heron tattoo is about. The heron inhabits both air and water. Maybe he looks at home in both, or maybe not quite in either. I wanted to make sure both elements were part of the design. Herons inhabit and invoke both.

Wind is air at its most vocal. Air that says, don't fu** with me. The big bad wolf has nothing on wind. I lie in bed and I can hear the wind talking to the trees, unsure who speaks louder in that conversation. I drive over the Bay Bridge to work and feel wind push the car, which when you're that high above the water, that slight reminder says enough. Be kind wind. Be kind.

Brenda Hillman writes the elements. She is working through books on each. Her "Pieces of Air in the Epic," moves through air. She reminds us how cut off, out of sync we are with air:

Wind will rend the suburbs
With information seeking nature

or more depressingly:

They were mostly raised
in tanklike SUVs called Caravan or   Quest; winds rarely visited them.

When we're inside, packed away in our house, or seat-belted comfortably in our cars, we forget that air can be wind. That we absolutely need it to live, to breathe, but it doesn't need us. What if we get so comfortable, so cut off, that the winds rarely visit us? That would suck. No, that would blow.

Hillman brings us back with writing. I think Air is why I run. Elemental Air, filling my lungs to bursting, on the final mile home, Jimi Hendrix's "Stone Free," in my ears, heart pounding, talking to Air. In conversation. I'm not sure who is speaking, who is listening, who is breathing.

Sunday Afternoon

Sitting on the back deck, Mother's Day, heavy wind has dislodged and claimed three baby birds, rolling fodder for our Golden Retriever.

Anna wanders the back yard clipping random branches, compiling a nest of sorts of her own. She's barefoot in cold grass with kinetic hair reflecting a dancing mind in motion. She skips by, reads what I am writing, smiles, and is off.

The wind is central, primary, pervasive. Last night it was a loud lullaby laughing through open windows. Today it flung sailboats along the river and applauded our sea glass hunt along the beach.

Sometimes when time presents itself, I'm not sure whether to read, to write or just be still.