(The following piece was written for a different venue than this but it occurred to me that it’s also a part of something soulful that seems to be happening to me internally lately, i.e., certain memories of things that felt good suddenly are rising.
(For instance, I had three distinct memories of my mare this morning and for the first time in fifteen years I didn’t cry when I thought about her. I only felt happy.
(And I had a dream this morning and the only detail I could remember included an old friend who died a couple of years ago and I felt so good at seeing her again.
(Then this piece came to mind for a writing group. This experience occurred a long, long time ago, long before canes and wheelchairs were even conceived of as a part of my life. It made me happy to write it.
(I think the soul is very active at times like this and if so, I decided I could share a bit of mine with you.)
It’s the middle of Texas in the middle of August in the middle of the day. They don’t make ‘em much hotter than that. With no traffic on this isolated back road, I can hear the murmur of my breath and the sszzp of my running shoes as, with each step, they pull off the tacky pavement. Anything on it – and that’s me – feels like it’s in an oven, with radiant heat from both top and bottom.
I hear crickets in the tall grass and at a ramshackle house along the way a small dog pack tries to intimidate me. Without stopping, I lift my shoulders and put my hands on my hips, arms akimbo, becoming very large, and growl right back at them. They’re suddenly confused and mill around, trying to understand what this thing is that looks like a person but that sounds like them. By the time they figure anything out, I’m long gone.
I’m about four miles out in my daily eight mile run on my lunch hour. The sun is more than hot across my shoulders and sweat glistens on my exposed bronzed skin. I feel the barely cooler sensation where the tiny breeze created by my own movement tries to remove the heat from my back and belly.
I look straight ahead down the road but I can see my loosely fisted hands pump in and out the sides of my vision and the matching rhythm of my thighs as they rise and fall in and out of my lower line of sight. I hear the light tap of my feet against the pavement and am pleased with the regular tempo. I’ve acclimated to the heat; I don’t like it but I recognize the results of my regular training in spite of it. I breathe deeply and smoothly, without effort. I’m a well-oiled machine and it feels good. I can do this forever, or so it feels.
I should know better than to expose my fair skin to such hot direct sun but ya gotta do what ya gotta do. And what I gotta do is train for a marathon. It’s coming up in December. That means a minimum of eight miles at least five days a week and a long training run of about twenty miles on the weekend. The only time I have to do this daily run is on my lunch hour. I can finish the eight miles, take a quick shower, get back to work, and still have time to shovel down my salad.
It feels really good to have a healthy body that functions like bodies are intended to function. I’m strong and I’m healthy and there’s nothing better than that. My back is straight, my shoulders square as I return to the small stadium from which I started. I plan to finish up with a lap around the quarter-mile track but then I realize there’s some sort of activity that’s taking place, that began while I was out in the boondocks.
Well, then, I’ll just run around the outside of the fence surrounding the stadium.
Abruptly something changes. I no longer feel the heat. I barely see all the people as I dodge around them without changing my pace. My feet hit the ground harder and my breathing comes faster as I keep increasing my speed. Around and around I go, faster and faster, soldiers looking at me, doing nothing but looking and getting out of my way. I feel like I’m flying even though my feet lightly pound the ground. Pound, pound, pound.
Suddenly a thought occurs to me: Hey, you could kill yourself doing this.
And I slow down to a trot, feeling my breath, once again noticing the heat, realizing I need to get back to work. My footsteps are no longer light against the ground but now just ordinary walking steps. I head across the field back to the hospital where I work.
I don’t know if I could have killed myself running like that or not; the perfection of it tells me that wasn’t likely. My body was doing what bodies are intended to be able to do and it wouldn’t have let me get in trouble. But my everyday self had to step in and, well, the perfection was over.
But the feeling of my feet coming down in a regular beat was like being inside a beating drum, inside my beating heart. I’ll never forget that.
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