Running in the Fog

Richard Robbins

Running in the Fog

I'm not thinking about mystery. I'm not thinking about blindness. I run through a cloud over barely thawed streets and walks and can almost feel the pulse in my ear match each foot-fall. I'm thinking about not slipping on ice invisible to my naked eyes. I hear crows, bells of a garbage truck backing up. The ground cracks for a moment under my shoe but I stay in stride. The first thick burning starts in my calves.

By mile I, my whole body's warm, and now it makes its own fog as the air of my lungs goes back outdoors. I'm not thinking ofthe way clouds form at the face of our differences. By now, I've started the rosary at least once to keep my mind from heavy jelly legs and short wind. Some days I say three before I'm through. I'm thinking of pain mostly, the way I careen away from it.

A long time ago, I found out that two miles is a small wall to run through. Any season, indoors or wind, on a course over mud, the body

knows the distance and begins to flag. All the needles sink to zero until I do something. That's when the heart might skip a beat or the car almost hit me. If I don't stop, it's two minutes until I know I can run forever. I'm not thinking about biology, the responses to stress. The sun doesn't break out now as endorphins gull me into immortality. I'm talking about how rhythm comes after self-absorption, how this road opens up, even at short distances in fog, when the load of self disappears.

Ifl do stop running, I wonder about myself until next time. I don't know ifl'll ever do a thing for my wife and sons, for any anonymous soul, worth remembering. I'm thinking about the daily refusals of grace. Also about how the same thing happens when I don't stop, the fresh unknowing each time I start life over again, days and days after I keep running.

By mile 4, I see the end ofthe hilltop where my street begins. Ifl push hard my pulse will be 18 beats faster than ifl don't. Warming down these three blocks to my door, I notice every trill and whistle rooftop to oak, every freight car

coupling a half mile away. On a foggy morning like this one, each sound makes its own lonely shape inside a bell the same white color as air.