This schedule is becoming part of us—life all mixed up, one thing blending into another, seams overlapping, as we all work to grow, expand outward, learn to love a little better.
Friday runs are complicated by Oldest’s newest activity. The boy with the habit of breaking into song has finally stopped claiming he hates to sing and joined the before-school choir. He loves it. And because I can’t manage to get up earlier, I’ve worked my run around his schedule: wake up Oldest, make sure he gets out of bed. Run two miles while he gets dressed and starts breakfast. Return home, wake up the girls, drive Oldest to the school. Park. Oldest goes inside for choir, I run twice around the path that circles the local schools, and we meet up back at the car to go home again.
Running this morning, I realize the sunrise is a friend I’ve come to count on. The thought that in a few weeks the time change will leave my entire run in the dark is a little daunting. The discouraging lines that run through my head some days (“But can she keep up the pace? Does she have the endurance?”) are challenged by the fact that I have recently worked myself up to running five miles most mornings. If I can build up my physical endurance, I have hope for my emotional and spiritual endurance, as well. The emotional meaning to the physical discipline is not lost on me. I feel strong these days, and—nice bonus—my rear is smaller. I will simply have to run in the dark, brace for the cold, find warmer clothes. Quitting isn’t an option this time.
On our way to the school, Oldest is full of plans for selling magazine subscriptions and cookie dough—fund-raisers for band and choir. This is a new concept for him, and he is enthusiastic. In fact, we have added a lot of new experiences this fall, and his enthusiasm for it all is amazing to see. He is flourishing. I drop him off at the door, park the car, and finish my run.
A fifty- or sixty-something gentleman coming towards me on the path smiles and tells me I’m in great shape—keep it up. When we pass each other again on the opposite side of the circle, he asks how many times I’m going around. I hold up my fingers, say “twice,” and he grins. “Wow! You’re doing great!” I’ve never been a particularly strong or fast runner, but I eat up the encouragement. I feel strong, healthy, maybe even almost fast.
I am determined to keep running because I want to be stronger, yes. Also because while I may argue with you that middle-aged is whatever age my parents are, (hasn’t it always been that way?) it’s hard to escape the fact that in less than a year my 30s will be behind me completely. I remember being a little puzzled that my grandma would say she felt the same as she did when she was 25, or that she always referred to her friends as “girls.” Shouldn’t you, after all, be comfortable referring to your peers as “women” by the time you were in your 80s or 90s? But it is becoming ever clearer to me how these things could be. I, too, feel like I could still be somewhere in my 20s. And I am always a little dismayed when college-age men call me “Ma’am.” I may be getting older, but I am determined to fight feeling old.
I am almost finished with my run when I see a crowd of people on the sidewalk ahead of me. I had noticed them gathering at the park down the street my first time around, but now they are walking past the high school—adults with children—some in strollers, a few weaving through the group on bikes. It occurs to me that maybe I know what this is, and the chills that go through my body are hard to manage while running.
One week ago, on another lovely Friday, an 11 year-old boy was found in the woods nearby, apparently dead by his own hand. I don’t know for sure, but my guess is that these people are walking in his memory, showing their love and grief. I see nothing in the news about this later, hear nothing in the community. But the possibility is there.
There are other reasons I run, too. The reasons I don’t talk about. There are days when I am running to throw off the frustration and anger that sometimes want to overwhelm me. To release those feelings that come up from dark, hidden places and show themselves in the light of day. “How could somebody do something like that?” people say sometimes, when they hear a particularly terrible news story. I always wonder, “Do they really not know?”
I look towards the parking lot, and there is Oldest, my own precious 11 year-old boy, leaning out the drivers’ side door, a flash of bright blue waving at me. I cut towards him across the lawn, leaving the sidewalk to the walkers. I don’t want to pass them, I don’t want to turn away, but giving them space seems appropriate. Besides, Oldest is waiting for me to take him home. I try to imagine him feeling the kind of pain the other 11 year-old boy felt, and I am in tears by the time I get to the car.
When he was a preschooler and getting braver about venturing out away from me, I always tried to make sure Oldest was wearing a brightly-colored shirt when we went to the playground. I was so worried about losing him. Perhaps the bright color—orange or yellow or blue, usually—would help me keep track of him while he played, make it harder for him to wander too far away from me.
My back is to the walkers now. They look so normal, the children all moving just the way you would expect children to move when they are going for a walk outside with their parents. Oldest has been singing for half an hour, and he is still full of music. He asks why I am crying. He is oblivious, I think, to the kind of pain that makes a person feel like they have no options left. But I don’t know if it will always be that way. I struggle to explain how I can hurt for a stranger simply because he hurt, or how I can feel tied to him because he is the same age as my own son. Does he know how terrified I have felt at losing him, even months before he was born? He is solemn for a moment. He is a compassionate being, a deep-feeling soul, but this is a little beyond him. That’s probably a good thing, I think. 11 years old should be too young to understand some of these things.
“Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you
can understand.”
From “The Stolen Child,” by William Butler Yeats
