It's Not the Heat...

...it’s the (lack of) humidity. But the memory of the salubrious sunshine is already fading. Oh, sigh. We spent two-and-a-half days in Phoenix, making our annual pilgrimage to the shrine of spring baseball. The A’s won one, lost two—but really, scores are (almost) beside the point at Spring Training. Our motel was just across the street from Papago Park, which means I was able to run at daybreak for two days in a row. Or two days running, if you will.

I might have been a lizard in a previous incarnation—that’s how much I love the desert. The creature I was earlier in this life, of course, was a child of the high Nevada desert. The years I spent in Florida in the 70s were punctuated by occasional trips back to Nevada during which I was soaked up that bone-deep essence of “home” that I’ve never found anywhere other than in the desert. Anyway, the Phoenix runs were great, bringing plenty of rabbit and quail sightings. Did you know Papago Park is home to both cottontails and jackrabbits? I didn’t know that until last weekend, but it’s true. It’s also home to myriads of birds, whose names I wish I knew.

My second day out I ran right into the dawn, and have the phone camera image to prove it. What a thrill to run from the darkness into the light, and how I bless every day I'm lucky enough to see the dark recede!

Since coming back to the Bay Area, I’ve run twice, once in the post-daylight saving early darkness and once along the SF Embarcadero at noon with my intrepid running buddy / coworker, the ebullient Ms. S.

Would that my existence consisted of nothing but runs. As it is, my life between runs seems to include way too much fatigue, stress, and self-doubt. I don’t know how I’d get along without my self-medication of choice, the old heel and toe.

As long as I'm scribbling (is that possible on a computer?), let me take a line to sing a few bars of "Happy Birthday" to my youngest grand-niece, who has more talent in one finger than most other people possess in their entire body. Happy day, Ms. Bethany!

Moving right along (as runners are prone to do), to a subject related to nothing at all I've been talking about. Some folks have asked me lately how it happens that one of my kids, a good boy raised in Berkeley, has become rather conservative politically in his adulthood. I know for a fact that he’s not at all the lost cause some of my liberal cronies think he is—he merely (merely!) has a strongly felt sense of what is right and what is wrong. Anyway, he recently recommended to me an article by playwright David Mamet that he said articulates many of the thoughts he’s had himself in the course of his political development. I, in turn, recommend it highly to you. I can’t say I agree with every line and letter in it, but I did find myself nodding my head quite a bit as I read. I especially like the concept that our country is “not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace.” Also, “the right is mooing about faith, the left is mooing about change....” Many are the days I speak only bovine.

At its best, our country is the world’s biggest marathon (note return to blog theme—segues are us). There’s room in it for the fastest and the slowest, the youngest and the oldest, the ablest and the most challenged wheelchair athlete. And every runner has the right to his or her own version of the race. Run tall, y’all.