14 miles
5k packet pick-up and back
85 degrees
A great bike ride! Biked to St. Paul on a dedicated path, then a dedicated bike lane, then the pothole-filled road to Summit Brewery to pick up my race bib for tomorrow’s 5k race. Then, took a bike path all the way back. Stopped at the Confluence, where the Mississippi and the Minnesota Rivers meet. Then checked out the fake falls near hidden falls which was actually a gushing storm drain. Ended at Minnehaha Falls where Scott and I ate at Sea Salt for the first time this year. I got thai red curry with shrimp and pineapple which was awesome.
While I’ve never been a hardcore biker, I’m extra chill these days. In fact, even though I have 12 or 15 gears or something like that on my road bike, I did not shift gears once. Not even when we were climbing the super steep, never-ending hill on Montreal. I guess I should, but it’s just easier to stay in the same gear and I don’t really care. I’m just happy that my vision is good enough that I can still bike.
Read this poem on poem of the day (poets.org) and loved it even though I don’t love cats.
For Katy
Rodney Jones – 1950-
When Milo was a kitten
and spent the night
with us in the big bed,
curled like a brown sock
at our feet, he would
wake before daybreak,
squeak plaintively
in his best Burmese,
cat-castrato soprano,
and make bread on our stomachs
until if one of us did not rise,
sleep-walk to the kitchen
and open his can of food,
he would steal under the covers,
crouch, run hard at us,
jam his head
in our armpits,
and burrow fiercely.
Probably he meant nothing by that.
Or he meant it in cat-contrary,
just as he did not intend
drawing blood the day
he bolted out the door
and was wild again
for nearly three hours.
I could not catch him
until I knelt, wormed
into the crawl-space
under a neighbor house
and lured him home
with bits of dried fish.
Or he meant exactly what he smelled,
and smelled the future
as it transmogrified out of the past,
for he is, if not an olfactory
clairvoyant,
a highly nuanced cat—
an undoer of complicated knots,
who tricks cabinets,
who lives to upend tall
glasses of Merlot.
With his whole body,
he has censored the finest passages of Moby-Dick.
He has silenced Beethoven with one paw.
He has leapt three and a half feet
from the table by the wall
and pulled down
your favorite print by Miró.
He does not know the word no.
When you asked the vet what
kind of cat it was, she went
into the next room
came back and said,
“Havana Brown.”
The yellow eyes, the voice,
the live spirit that plays into dead seriousness
and will not be punished into goodness,
but no—
an ancient, nameless breed—
mink he says and I answer in cat.
Even if I was not
born in a dumpster
between a moldy cabbage
and an expired loaf of bread,
I too was rescued by an extravagant woman.