Got my good run. Had a 3.8 mile run with one descent, one incline and a long flat middle, as is my hood. Returning home, I caught my breath – still slowly improving from bronchitis, slowly, but it feels a little better every day. I’m grateful. I took an easy, high-stepping cool-down of a quarter mile around my block. Little kids gathered, a block away on the porch of some drunken laggards, were yelling crap at me. The best was “watch out for that cat”, to which I immediately pantomimed leaping over a cat underfoot, then, for no reason, starting jogging in place, weaving backwards, then forward, then sideways, then forward again under a streetlight where they could stare at me and decide I was crazy. The quick run I’d had before had started out weird, too.
The stars were out. My town is crawling with the dispossessed tonight. People moving out under cover of darkness. It wasn’t as humid tonight, cloudless. A block away, I saw an elderly man weeping in a garage of a nice Armenian woman who throws garage sales every weekend and serves snacks. She was holding his hand, patting it. They sat close, intimately. They were silhouetted in the glow of a big blue bug light. He was sitting close with her and I heard him sob heavily, “what are we going to do?” She looks up but I don’t look at them. I’m wearing a headlamp. Awkward, instrusive. I do my drop down to the river, cross, run abreast a speeding train for a mile, then head back.
I passed a couple drunkenly embracing on a porch, front door wide, all lights on inside. She’s slurring something I couldn’t understand at all, but she sounded confident, pleased about something he was going to do. I passed a tiny old man smoking on the stoop of the welfare high rise, a converted ten-story mid-century bank building with stately columns and marbled trim. His dog sat at the end of its leash, motionless. It was also tiny, wiry and whiskered.
I passed a woman making threats on her cell phone, promising some kind of retribution. Didn’t recognize her. The hookers were not out on my route. The hookers are new, or they were new.
It felt like a scene from a Tennessee Williams play.
Anyway, got four in, had a good stretch after, did some push-ups on the weird chalk diagrams my son drew all over the sidewalk. Numbers, line segments, patterns. Weird.
Job interview all morning. I feel it.
Fifty State Banana 