Running

It’s been weeks since I last dipped into this blog and I think too much time has passed for me to fill in the last few days of our scooter trip as if my memory of it has the same quality now as it did when I still had sand in my hair. I’ve added pictures and fixed up some spelling mistakes, taken out descriptions or metaphors that sound inaccurate or unnecessary now, as I do with most of these posts. I always miss mistakes before posting and I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to kick the habit of reading what I meant to write instead of what I actually wrote. This is probably something I shouldn’t confess publicly because the jobs that make my mouth water require me to be perfect in that sense. Ah well.

Going down the mountains into Kenting Sam’s scooter hit something on the road and skid out from under him. He landed on his side and the scooter on top of him. Luckily we weren’t going very fast around the sharp corners. My heart quivered like a rabbit and I was pretty useless trying to pull the scooter off of him, but he just brushed himself off as best he could, checked out his road burn, and rode back down the mountain. He’s all right now, but the rabbit feeling returns to me when I think back on it.

Besides that, at this distance, I will just say that the last few days were colder than we would have liked, but that the sun peaked through clouds every now and then. I was the most scandalous woman on the beach in nothing but a bathing suit. We played volleyball with friends of friends and ate on patios of restaurants along the least offensive strip we passed. I learned some things about Chinese and Taiwanese politics from graduate students we ate with. Most importantly, I met Adam’s friend, Alfie, who is truly great.

We drove the scooters to Kaishung and made plans to take a train and send the scooters back north by truck. Alfie’s family, his great aunt and his cousin, were kind enough to let us stay with them in Kaishung. I had a strange sleep on a very hard bed in a room with both of these women. Two large beds were pushed together in the dark, and, in the very same moment, the three of us lay our backs down on them. I tried not to breath or move in the silence and it took me a while to fall asleep.

I won’t soon forget the trinkets on the cousin’s desk, little women warrior figurines and hello kitty merchandise, a framed picture of a very pretty girl, stacks of polyester blankets in the corner of the room and the sound of the rain falling in the alley; those are the things I woke up to.

I stayed in bed for hours that morning and read a story about a prostitute brought to America from Vietnam by a soldier lover and then abandoned. I won’t soon forget how much that character loved apples.

For a while now I’ve wondered at how little we remember well. There are oinly a handful of vivid memories in the palm of my mind. Their apparent significance baffles me, for in retrospect they seem just barely symbolic and little else. I wonder if the quiet intensity of that morning in Kaohsiung and the memory of apples will keep. It’s about as exceptional as anything that has so far.

It was good to come home with Max, as I anticipated it would be. February disappeared and then it was March. That sounds like a cop-out, and I guess it kind of is, but nothing sticks with me about the end of February. The weather was as moody as a teenager and now I have a cold. We watched bean seeds grow or not grow and adopted a new kid into the Giraffe Class, an Indian kid named Bhanu. I have gobbled novel after novel. Lately, with reading, I feel like I've burnt my tongue and can’t taste anything anymore but I keep eating and eating anyway. But this food, the stuff of Marilynne Robinson, is so good it finds its own new taste buds. I’ve picked up running again. Even in this thick air it begins to feel like it used to--just difficult enough. My legs ache in the best way and I'm craving vegetables. And best of all my head feels cleaner.

I want to write some things about running. A man whose name I can’t remember right now writes that meditation is not about escape but is about putting oneself in a place to think what they actually think and to take note of those thoughts as evidence of neurosis that cause suffering and that one might work through and out of. He says it a lot better than that, of course, and I would track down the quote but that book’s been returned to its owner. He writes other things about meditation too, but, as with everything, that is the only shell from the beach I carry with me. It relates in this way: when I run, I think about the simplest things in the simplest terms. Because of the amount of physical energy running requires I always have very little left over to put towards mental exercise. My thoughts are less edited and without direction, put together like someone beading a necklace with her eyes closed, and I come closer to learning what I actually feel about things. I think that is a good place to work from, like tending to the wounds themselves instead of just adding more bandages. I share these labored-over and perhaps seemingly personal thoughts with you on this blog, but some of my running thoughts will never be written down or spoken out-loud. Some of them are very ugly, like so many secrets. They are also gifts, I’m realizing now, and reason enough to keep running.