Running Past Normal

 

Fifty miles west of Bloomington lies Hillsboro, a monument to middle-class malaise. Fern covered front porches with white picket fences settle impervious to everything, but flags, harvests and lemonade stands. A sense of yesterday lingers in each neighborhood where attics house button downed memories folded away in massive trunks. Children laugh on summer afternoons and winter mornings, as school bells and church bells peal.

That morning she decided to go for a run. It was not her typical decision. Usually, after she had gotten both husband and children off to their various destinations, she would sit down for another cup of coffee, a peek at Dr. Phil or a long drag on a pencil she pretended was a cigarette holder.

Today was different. Today she had glanced at something that encapsulated every lost dream and every lost desire sacrificed on the altar constructed by teenagers and maintained by adults. It was just something written by an unknown name, but just the same, it struck her and echoed throughout the washing of dishes and folding of clothes.

Somewhere right now, in the heartland of America, in the subterranean reaches of a city, a man is running.

She searched like a mad man for her old pair of sneakers. She didn’t have running shoes, but decided that tomorrow she would splurge. But for now, what she had would have to do. One of the laces snapped in half when she pulled her bow tight. Yesterday that would have been enough to stop her, but today she ran into her son’s room, pulled the lace off of one of his shoes and laced her own.

There was a list of errands waiting to be completed hanging on the corkboard by the door, when she stepped outside into the morning sun and exhaled the air with the same joy as someone who had been confined for years. Every care dissipated while one remained: 

“Only a thin veil separates me from everything and everyone I love or have ever loved.”

She stepped onto the pavement feeling its hardness beneath her feet, while knowing that beneath her and through the grass, dirt and rock, was another woman, on the other side of the world, going to bed at the end of the day sighing as dreams blossomed from nothingness, only to die with the sun.

Bending down to touch the earth, she believed, even for that moment, that she could touch the face of that sleeping woman to let her know that she was not alone.

Her first steps were awkward. She hadn’t run in years and soon realized that her body had lost the ease of youth. As she bent down to stretch and feel the groan of unused muscles, she knew that this dream would take every bit of her strength to breathe. 

“It’s almost like giving birth,” she thought, as one again, she began.

This time her steps felt more assured of their placement, one behind the other with a quick gait that became more powerful with each movement. She quickened her pace.

She was running.

Her feet thumped the pavement like worries. She ran though no one was in pursuit. An echo from some past dream had awakened an urgency that dragged her from the subterranean reaches of complacency to frenzy.

Her heart pounded, though not so much out of exhaustion, as joy.

She ran like an outcast from some forgotten place. The sky was yellow when she’d begun and red by the time she realized that the landscape of her life had changed from poised and positioned to free.

Fifty miles east of Bloomington is Normal, a straitjacket to conformity, where everything and nothing is what it is to those who live there. As she approached it boundary, she wondered if she should return. Her husband needed her. Her children needed her.

“No, I’m going to run past Normal,” she thought after taking a break to eat a lunch of sweet cakes, honey and black olives before returning to the road.

Manna never tasted so sweet.

She had found her stride and whooshed past blurs of people, houses, life as one border zoomed into another.

There was an undertow of exigency like a nagging pulse forcing lifeblood itself through her tired veins. She was not adroit at running; tripping on rocks and troubles with equal clumsiness. But she always righted herself before tramping on. There was a candle in the window of a curious little house that she passed along the Cape Fear Coast.

She smiled at the odd symmetry of running in circles, though the earth is a circle so we are all running.

There were many who came and went along the way. She had slowed down for some and hurried past for others. Others waved or winked, while others frowned and threw stones. It would be a lie to say she had not lost her step on occasion, but she redeemed herself from the sins of imperfection and returned to her former course, wiser and well trod. She had d loved and been loved though she could not stay put. Chased by monkeys at a temple in India where the moss grew high among darkened trees, she laughed as she remembered that just yesterday she had been bored.

The faces of her husband and children appeared and disappeared in storefronts and horizons. Longitudinally speaking, she was usually silent except for the huffs and puffs of air she released unconsciously.

An old woman gave her orange slices that were dripping with juice. She ran through terrain familiar to both the Jewish and the Gentile troubling ancient dust with peaceful steps. There were children laughing in Gaza and children laughing in the heartland of America. Effigies of forgotten political figures hung from pole to pole with no one lifting up a gun or setting off a bomb in retaliation.

The world revolved as it always had been since before the beginning.

Yet she continued to run past and through consciousness amid cavalcades of recklessness and ruin. She had begun her passage with carelessness as her mapmaker and knew that she wouldn’t end it until oblivion closed her eyes. But that wouldn’t be for years yet. Now there was only the road before and after her with nothing between them but eternity, and the smiles of children playing in the dirt.

Pegasus Awakes

Moonlight lit the darkness forcing purple shadows to rise, glowing the sky like angels in flight. Coyote watched the Pegasus constellation gallop across the night sky. It could not follow its ancient hoof beats nor dream of what life was like in the stars. A lonely howl rose and was momentarily caught in water vapor before descending into silence in the bitter air. Then another howl followed until coyote songovertook every other sound except the drum of heartbeats pounding.

That is how the day began, with the world feeling a world away from itself. As if everything had gone back to a distant time and place, without a reckoning of anything but the midnight sky and the howling of a lonely coyote.

In the morning, the old scarecrow stood in a field of wheat, on the very spot where long dead Indians had once stood, fought and died. Jenny stood in the kitchen doorway, where several generations of other women had stood listening to the call of mourning doves before beginning another day caught between old dreams and the constant unfulfilled expectations of life as a wife and mother.

Looking down the drive she studied the rusting remains of the Cadillac that had sealed her destiny and tied her to the man who had taken her for a ride and brought her back home carrying the first of their children. She hadn’t loved him then and wasn’t sure if she ever had or could. The void between them had multiplied with each child, each unhappy night and each bill due that couldn’t be paid.

“This is the price you pay for being easy,” her self-hatred bellowed to her even after all these years when forgiveness for youthful foolishness should have already occurred. But it hadn’t come and Jenny wondered if it ever would.

Her husband sloped up the steps and came into the kitchen to get a drink of water.

“It’s a scorcher out there again today. No clue how much I’ll be able to do,” he said between hearty gulps.

“I thought I’d make us a cold supper tonight, what do you think?” she asked.

“Whatever you like, you know I always leave those things up to you…”

“But I was just ask…OK.”

The stillness of the air exaggerated the stillness between them.

“Lots of nonsense on the news this morning,” he said, “Newsman called it ‘social unrest.’ Sometimes it seems like the whole world is unraveling.”

“Really, what’s going on? You didn’t wake me to make your breakfast…”

“I think you had a bad night, so I let you sleep,” he said, walking over to her.

“Dang coyote was howling so loud I’m surprised anyone got any rest,” she said.

“That wasn’t it,” he interrupted. “You can’t hide much from me, yet you always try…”

“So do you want an early supper tonight?” she replied as she turned away. “I’m just asking because I wanted to polish the brass and get some other things done this afternoon.”

He didn’t respond but walked out of the kitchen and back out into the summer sun.

In the sky, a lone hawk slowly circled and glided indifferent to the struggles of those below. Jenny watched it, feeling fully awake for the first time that day. She didn’t hear her husband reenter the kitchen and jumped when he addressed her.

“Sorry,” he said noticing her shock. “Got a call from up the road, Hank wants me to help him lift some bags of cement and work on the radiator of his old Lincoln. It doesn’t seem like I’m going to get much done here today, so I thought I’d go over there and help him out for a while.”

Jenny pursed her lips and nodded.

There was nothing to say as they stood together beneath the electric hum of the old ceiling fan. It was a given that this was how it would be between them until one of them died or finally gave up and left. Youthful eagerness to explore every aspect of themselves had been lost and replaced by a need to overlook what remained.

Jenny spent the rest of the afternoon polishing the stained brass and making potato salad.

That night in bed, beneath an orchestration of stars, they lay silently side-by-side as the world around them darkened into oblivion. They did not know that great things were being born or dying in the universe or that just around the corner both blessings and troubles were coming in a series of leaps and bounces. There was nothing but the stillness of sleep upon troubled pillows and coyotesong begging Pegasus to linger.