Tarmac Meditation #6: February 28, 2010
I was standing at my front window yesterday, watching the rain. A hard winter rain, almost hail — a riveting, ancient sound, evocative, and a little frightening. The sky, as is so often the case here in the winter, was gunmetal gray, streaks of purple light in the racing clouds. It seemed an angry rain that comes to funerals sometimes, as if the heavens were weeping and the earth needed cleansing. Appropriately enough yesterday was the memorial for my friend Walter, who died earlier last week of liver cancer after having been diagnosed with it two months earlier.
Walter died clean, thirteen yea
rs after having been diagnosed with Hepatitis C so advanced that he needed a liver transplant, for which he was judged to be too old. He got clean and found a life he loved. He left it with a rare grace and courage, with humor and the oft stated premise that his last days would be his best days, gravy if you will.
For me it was the kind of morning, given what the day would hold, that felt like I wanted to get geared up and put in some hard miles, to get some clarity from the weather and the wind, to drive out my own mortality; to run with the ghosts of my past that they might guide me to a better day. It was not be. And truthfully there had not been a day like that for the last three months.
Surgeries, injuries and age had taken over. I was restricted to some light walking, no lifting and eternal patience while waiting for recovery to take place. Even so, there I was, as I had been nearly every early morning these past months, looking out the window, watching the runners go by, deciding each and every morning that I would not run today.
It came to me that there was time in my dark years that I had done the same kind of thing. I had stood by a window, overlooking a rain swept street, envying the young runners with their laughter and their noise, the joy in the coming day.
My day would be filled with nightmarish dreams and no sleep in aid of the relentless search for more of the drugs that kept me going in those years. These same drugs that robbed me of hope and willingness, of promise and compassion, were the singular definition of my own, very personal war.
And yet.
Inside the terror and the broken mornings I would stand and watch and know that there was something in me that had a remnant of hope, a quixotic clutching grab for something better, for a way to get out of this hell hole that was of my own making.
And like this morning I saw it for what it was — my runner, the carrier of my warrior dreams for all of my life, the heroic myths of my youth, was calling, telling me to pay attention, to suit up and goddammit, to show up. With endless patience he was there every morning presenting an alternative, another turning, a road not yet taken.
I remembered watching those runners from the living room window as they turned the corner. I remembered heading through the kitchen to the rear bedroom window where I saw them as they headed down to the beach. I remembered their laughter hanging in the wind and the sounds of their footsteps, a seductive, lonesome sound, fading like night breeze whispering through mountain pines.
I remembered finally the open closet door where there were a couple of pairs of reasonably new, mostly unused, Asics running shoes in disarray on the floor. I sat on the bed and began to pull on one the shoes. There was some noise in the other room, a sharp reminder of where I was and what I was doing. I put the shoe down and looked out the window again. In a sudden rage I hurled the shoes into the closet.
I kept staring at the closet, at the mess. After what seemed an endless time, I went to the closet and picked up the shoes. I put them back carefully, reminded of something past, something familiar, something long ago. I remembered thinking, with a sadness I had not known until that moment, that I wouldn’t run that day.
After a while a true thought came to me. I was a runner. A runner who wasn’t running, but a runner never the less. There would come a day when I would put away all the drugs and the nonsense, put on some shoes and go back out into the world. A year later it did.
It hasn’t been that long since then but not a day goes by that I don’t make a decision about going for a run. Inside that decision is a deeper commitment to doing the miles in whatever form they take, to staying clean, to keep on keeping on, to doing my work.
And yes, I will be missing absent friends, more likely now as the years pile up. What there is to do about it is to stay present, to remember and to carry on, honoring those who have come before by doing the best I can everyday. God Bless, Walter. Wherever you are now, make them laugh as you did us. They can use a laugh I’m sure. I know we could.
Photo Credit
“Hard Rain” © Michael Lebowitz
“Starting Out” © Michael Lebowitz
Recent Michael Lebowitz Articles:
- Tarmac Meditations #205: Images in the Sunrise
- Tarmac Meditations #204: Images From the Road - Smoke Risin'
- Tarmac Meditations #203: Images From the Road
- Tarmac Meditations #202: Images From the Road
- Tarmac Meditations: Haiku # 42
Lovely.