Le Weekend Excerpts
Drove south Friday and endured the suffocation of a clogged freeway, moving three miles in 40 minutes while a dinner reservation waited at the end of the hundred mile trip. I exercised patience by taking it out on the unlit end of a cigar.
Ran a 5K Saturday. The race was a pleasure, if you can believe that. The delightful early morning ride to Oxford, the gathering anticipation, the presence of Katelyn this time all contributed. And the race, this glorious excuse to leave nothing on the table, this invitation to knock the pavement of all that’s been eating you... to run "on the brink" miles and experiencing the body’s disbelief while not allowing the disbelief to matter. Afterwards lingers a hard-won mellowness, a contradictory combination of mental sharpness (an oxygenated brain) and physical lassitude. I wonder why I only do it twice a year. May have something to do with the pain.
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My niece has crossed a boundary of some sort. At the tender age of 7 ½, I can see a slight loss of enthusiasm. She’s still as effervescent and sweet as the day is long – a living example of “Thank Heavens for Little Girls” – but she is starting to acquire, if not irony, then its pre-adolescent relative. And watching this unfold is fascinating. She is more easily bored. She no longer runs to her uncle with the same frenzy. But that, of course, is the difference between dogs and humans; humans are less easily impressed.
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It’s mid-June and reports of summer’s arrival are greatly exaggerated. At least I've been conditioned to it by the last two Junes. The Junes of this century are nothing like the Junes of my youth, when unendurable classroom instruction extended to a sweltering arid June 5th finale....but then everything is improved by nostalgia.
But also how can I protest when my landscape is reaping the benefits of constant rain? The asparagus grows fast as grass, the tomatoes have revivified from their earlier disputatiousness. The annuals look pleased. Everybody but me. But there is nothing quite as wonderful as reading indoors with the rain slap-happy against the roof. I feel no compunction to be running or biking or weeding or otherwise engaged in trivial outdoor pursuits.
Plus there is nothing quite as wonderful as reading indoors with the rain slap-happy against the roof. I feel no compunction to be running or biking or "sunning while imbibing" or otherwise engaging in trivial outdoor pursuits. So I tell myself.
Besides, sunny days induce panic, as described by Helen Fielding in "Bridget Jones Diary":
Feel strange sense of unease with the summer....Realize, as the long hot days freakishly repeat themselves, one after the other, that whatever I am doing I really think I ought to be doing something else. The more the sun shines the more obvious it seems that others are making fuller, better use of it elsewhere: possibly at some giant softball game to which everyone is invited except me; possibly alone with their lover in a rustic glad by waterfalls where Bambis graze, or at some large public celebratory event...Maybe it is our climatic past that is to blame. Maybe we do not yet have the mentality to deal with a sun and cloudless blue sky, which is anything other than a freak incident. The instinct is to panic, run out of the office, take most of your clothes off and lie panting on the fire escape is still too strong.
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