5.1 miles
bottom of franklin and back
53 degrees
Another cooler run. Shorts with my bright orange sweatshirt. Ran to the bottom of the franklin hill before I stopped to walk and use one of the few port-a-potties on the route. There used to be at least one more under the lake street bridge, but they removed it. Chanted in triple berries to keep steady and distracted, or focused, depending on your perspective.
Listened to rowers and a beeping bike that I thought might be a bird before I saw it and striking feet, all around. Lots of runners out there this late morning. Listened to my “Moment” playlist once I started running again. It started with U2’s “Stuck in the Moment” and I thought about my latest insomnia rut.
10 Things
- a greeting from Dave, the Daily Walker: Happy 100 days after your birthday! Dave is the best — well, maybe not with his math!
- dark and green in the tunnel of trees, a circle of faint light up on the hill
- at least one yellowish orangish tree
- down in the flats the river’s surface was laced with grayish-white foam
- someone sitting on the sliding bench as I ran north, their bike propped behind the back of the bench
- returning south, the sliding bench was empty so I stood behind it and assessed the crumbling hill and the block view of the white sands beach
- finally took the dirt path that cuts behind some benches just south of the trestle
- 2 people walking 2 dogs, one person saying to the other something about an unwalked dog needing to be walked
- 2 women walking in the flats, one of them to the other: It’s by Ann Patchett. I wish I would have written down the passage.
- running on the north double bridge — just past the old stone steps — something caught my eye on the fence. On the way back, I remembered to stop to check it out. A small cut-out of Frump’s head on a popsicle stick with a caption: ‘tator on a stick. I took a picture, but decided not to post it*
*it took me a minute to understand fully the meaning here — at first I was thinking of the state fair, but finally it hit me that tator = dictator. Memories of reading Simon Schma’s Citizens about the French Revolution and heads on pikes being paraded around Paris. A sad and scary time in this country to have a president who foments such violence and violent responses in others.
You
1
A line from Endi Bogue Hartigan’s poem “Running Sentences”:
First the cloud of gnats first the movement through the cloud
and then the body, not a cloud
Something about running through gnats — which I’ve done many times — and the body as not a cloud, triggered past thoughts about encountering someone on the trail and what happens to the You in the time/space between my Thank you and someone else’s You’re welcome when I thanked them for moving over.
2
These were the original thoughts, from a 31 may 2023 log entry:
I had a breakthrough in the second mile as I passed a walker and a dog on the Winchell Trail. They noticed me before I reached them and moved to the side. I said thank you and the woman replied you’re welcome. As I continued running on the steep-ish trail with no railing I thought about how when I said thank you, I was the I, she was the you. But when she answered you’re welcome, I become the you and she the I. Each of us both. Then I started thinking about the space and time between when we each embodied the pronoun, before my I turned into a you or her you into and I. This is the space of possibility where unhitching can happen, when we can be both a you and an I or something else that doesn’t divide and separate or assign us a fixed role — as active I or passive you. A moment when we can experience or behold the is below the threshold of thought, over and above society and its constructs.
31 may 2023
3
And here’s an excerpt from the draft of the poem I wrote:
first movement,
a making
space for each
other, then
a cloud of
Yous to pass
through. Bodies
enter cloud,
cloud enters
bodies