Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day

Veterans Day, or, as we used to call it, Memorial Day. I read in the paper that to date more than 1.3 million troops have served in either Afghanistan or Iraq. It boggles my mind.

Leafing through the new issue of Runner's World I see there's an article on running in Baghdad (and you thought this wasn't a post about running). It seems that fitness is such a key ingredient in surviving over there that running as a common activity is a given. I haven't read the article yet.

I am a blue-stater, both by locale and by personal inclination. But never let it be said I don't respect and support our troops. May they run long and thrive. And may they come home sooner than we might have hoped at this time last week.

In my area, that blue-state hotbed, the rains arrived last night. (Can blues be hot? Yeah, baby. Just ask Nancy Pelosi.) It was nippy outside--40 this morning--but not unholy. There was no real deluge, more of a shower that wasn't scattered. I put off my run until about 11 a.m., and then kept it short because I was unaccountably fatigued. During a good run my mind floats free; when the old left-right is work my mind jerks and whines and wants to go home.

A good run last Wednesday, when I ran down to the gym to work out and then walked home, a 37-minute hike. Running, I slogged by the now-stripped-down cornfield adjacent to University Village in Albany, and was taken up short to see live geese growing among the broken-off stalks. An entire flock, probably 20 or more in number, had come down in the field, no doubt to feed.

They weren't in a bunch, though. They were evenly spaced across the entire field, and with their feet and legs hidden by the grass and stalks, they appeared to be growing out of the ground--each one a gourd-shaped body topped by a slender stalk of a neck and a small, elegantly marked head and beak.

When you're a word whacker, by inclination and by trade, when you're writing there shouldn't be too many subjects you can't tie together. Memorial Day and geese? Fitness and corn? The common thread is living and dying. Thousands of dead heroes, 20 live birds, some dead plants. And fitness? Another word for aliveness. For quick-ness, as in The Quick and the Dead.

When I run, I'm forced to be in my living body, to vibrate as my heart pounds that oxygen-bearing blood into every corner of my being. I feel blessed to be among the quick, to be healthy, to be free--to be living a life of immense privilege in a world where freedom should never be taken for granted. Because I feel the miracle of life pulse so strong within me and indeed in the world that surrounds me, I have a really hard time advocating a solution to injustice that involves destroying that miracle anywhere, anytime. I revere the sacrifices made by our troops, and pray the day will come when their kind of sacrifice isn't the mandatory price of freedom. I understand why Rodney King's plea became an instantly iconic quote: "Why can't we all just get along?"

Okay, blue-staters. You've been whining for six years; it's your time to show the world what you can do.