Today’s run: 1.02 m, 9:48 min. Wednesday’s run: 5.01, 48:21. Monday’s run: 5.05 miles, 49:41. The longer two runs, which went from my parents’ house to the Capitol, down the mall and around the Washington Monument, were awesome. Sunny weather, 45-50 degrees, and a well-needed change of scenery. Today I only had time for a mile; had to catch the train back to NY.
Thankfully, my Dad is conscious and healing. And cranky, very cranky. The surgery was textbook and he’s blowing above 3000mm with his lung strengthening device. Nurse Michael says this is most impressive.
I often sense that there is an order to things, a benevolent one even – despite being surrounded by evidence that that’s not the way the world works at all. Thank God, my Dad’s OK. And I felt sure he would be. Sure that it “wasn’t his time.”
But shit happens, folks. Our ability to ignore that is a version of what the Greeks called hubris, and what an old friend of mine called “a weird human trick.” Incidentally, that friend’s personal “weird human tricks” were making dolphin noises and opening her mouth so wide she could fit a kitten’s head inside. So I’m stretching the definition.
Even as I prepared for my trip to DC, I was processing the news that a former classmate of mine – a great girl that I regrettably didn’t get to know during high school – had died two days after having had a minor surgery, at 34. As we sat in a hospital waiting room hearing from the surgeon that all had gone well in their refurb of my father’s heart, her friends and family were laying roses and sunflowers on her casket. On a sunny day in November of 2010, they lost their friend and daughter, for no reason at all.
Then there was the TV. The hospital waiting room’s version of water torture is nonstop CNN. The same stories, again and again, through widescreens on every wall like it was Fahrenheit 451: The mother whose son was stomped to death at a party. The man who robbed, assaulted, and then burned to death a mother and her two teenage daughters, and who will now be killed by lethal injection. The girl who will testify this week against the self-described prophet who kidnapped and raped her, repeatedly, for the better part of a year.
Terrible things happen, both perverse and natural. They happen when they happen and that’s that. Someday I will be at the hospital again and it will indeed be time for a loved one to pass. Even the luckiest life awaits certain traumas.
So, like fortune cookie say – and my fortune cookie last night really did say this:
“Enjoy it while you can.”
My body seemed to remember how to do this “running” thing, even after nearly a month of recovery. Not so much as a twinge in my calf – victory!
