LIFE AS A HUMAN

Tarmac Meditations #85: Early Morning False Alarm

In the distance, while lacing up before 5:00 … “Come out with your hands up, you are surrounded!”

This down the street on a what was otherwise a very quiet summer morning. I remember those mornings from another time … more like the end of another long bad night. I ran by, recognized a couple of the uniforms from some local races, nodded and got my miles. It was a very hard way to live. When I looked back the lights were still flashing and several lives were heading south. After my run my neighbor asked me what all the fuss had been about; I pointed down the road and said “It took us years to learn that the “shit” could kill you, I guess it’s their turn now.” He nodded, sipped his coffee, hit his smoke and went back inside. I don’t know where he had been when I had been where those kids are now, but he had been somewhere and the memory wasn’t easy. I was glad in that moment that I didn’t have his day.

Moondance by Van Morrison had been playing on the ‘Pod while I was running. When this song/album came out I was working a cement crew in a sewer treatment plant being built in Toronto. My girlfriend and later, wife and mother to my kids, used to get up and make lunch for me. In the early summer morning we would eat breakfast, usually maple syrup bacon and eggs and toast and coffee on the french-paned glassed-in back porch of our beautiful, soon to be replaced by a huge apartment complex, brick house with a view of downtown. What ever could go wrong with that? It was simpler then and maybe it was easier but inevitably it changed. Now the apartments remain, the wife is ex, the children are grown and lovely…the music and the memories are still plenty good. I can almost taste that bacon and really, there is no need to explain why I was smiling when I finished my run.

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