Running Commentary

Fourteen years ago today I ran the San Francisco Marathon, my first. I was less that two months away from my 50th birthday, and I was under-trained and overexcited. My boyfriend of two months, Z, showed up at the 16-mile mark and ran with me to the finish. I've had this picture on my refrigerator since 1996, and I never get tired of looking at it. One reason I love it is that I appreciate how rare it is to pinpoint a specific instance of joy, an event so special that I can say with certainty, "This was one of the happiest moments of my life."

I'm thankful for the passage of time, which has (paradoxically) allowed me to remember more. Specifically to remember more good things about my mother than I was able to during the time directly following her death. Her last three years were hard on her and hard on me, and it's taken time to put them in perspective. She lived to be 94! She lived a long, complicated, unspeakably rich life! Should I use another exclamation point? Surely the memory of her evokes many (!). Here we are, she and I, in front of our house on Bon Rea Way, in Reno, circa 1966. Me: 19 years old; Mom: 55. Sometimes I still get the impulse to call her on the phone and ask her a question about cooking, or about literature, or about travel--she was an expert on all these subjects. Sometimes I just want to tell her how cute our cat is, or how funny Z was last week when he and I spontaneously started talking in rhymes. She loved animals. She loved wordplay. Or I want to describe the run I took when Z and I were...

How funny it is to say "I feel like my life has somehow changed." Funny because of course it has. Change is what my life--what anyone's life--consists of. My closely held illusion that everything in my little sphere remains the same is just that: an illusion. All the same, one reason I haven't posted for a while is that my world feels a bit unexplored lately. On April 1, I started eating a more or less vegan diet. Somewhere around that same time I started running with a women's team from my running club (see my last post). These are two specific, identifiable changes in my life, so it's easy for me to attribute all other manner of changes to them. It strikes me, however, that they may be the symptoms rather than the causes of a general shift I'm feeling in the nature of my existence. Abstract enough for you?? I would be more clear for you if I were more clear myself. All I know is that as I get older and start to believe in my own mortality more than was ...