This is where the word "sentence" comes from.
"In my opinion your son deserves 13 years", said the judge, unsentimentally.
No tender feelings of emotion, just a motion, sealed by a gavel.
That is 4,745 days, during which no pizza is delivered, no joints smoked (well, as far as we know). No studying for exams, no kissing girls, no tossing a baseball with your old man.
I often wonder if people in prison have a plan.
For getting through each day, I mean. I have heard some thrive because in all their prior years
there was no structure, so the structure is a relief of sorts.
I can relate to this, being a lover of structure who is oxymoronically also the least organized creature in the universe. By loving structure, I mean anatomy and histology were like water to a fish or air to a balloon or milk to a hungry baby for me. When I studied these things, I saw nerve bundles in tree branches, liver cells in sidewalk splotches. I walked around my medical school campus in Madison and named your forearm muscles when you waved or flipped me off. By structure I mean I like to know where I will be sleeping, when I might wake up and whether I have enough clean running bras to last through my next day's run. I like to know my hospital orders are being carried out and making someone better instead of worse. I like my family to leave a note if they won't be home when I expect them to, and to text back instantly so I know some ditch somewhere has not claimed them as its own.
My disorder lies in the state of my desk on any given day, by the moat of books that tends to form around my bed, by the piano music lying open in competition for my attention. I am entropically gifted.
I am nearly halfway through a year of running every day. What happens on day 366?
Running has become something of a fix.
Fixing my broken parts. I have always wished to be a quilter. Someone who can make a lovely whole from smaller bits of oddity and beauty. I once did house calls on a quilt artist who saw the end approaching and quilted like a cyclone in those final months, harnessing and sewing pieces that were swept into her eddying energy, fueled by chemotherapeutic fumes.
On day 160 of running I realized something, in-between sneaking peaks (hoping not to burn my retinas to a crisp) at the setting sun drowning in the Pacific Ocean.
I am making a quilt.
Metaphorically lame, yet the thought stopped me for a moment.
Quite literally I have a picture of each day of running thus far. I pick one that most captures my senses. I notice things. Those pictures form a sort of story. Seasons, state of dog grooming, flora, fauna, urban austerity, travels, darkness, all captured.
But what made me stop in my tracks on run 160 was my brokenness that feels like it heals just a little bit more each day I run, like pieces coming together, even in the physical strain and fatigue, the admonitions of too much running and the potential harms, even in the days I fall and draw blood. It reminds me of how Wendy sewed that shadow back on Peter Pan. Ouch, but he needed that thing.
Running is hard, I suppose. Tonight it was cold, rainy, and my work day had been stressful. A couple of weeks ago my femur was screaming in pain. Have you heard the screams of a bruised bone? Angry skeletons are scary as shit. On days when I work a 12 hour hospital shift, the run will be in the dark on one end or the other, and usually the morning end because 12 hours is a nice thought but usually that will become 14 or more. I am not a morning person, really. There are two professions to avoid if you are not a morning person:
1) parent
2) physician
I am a mourning person, as are we all or as we all shall be if we are lucky enough to ever love.
The dopamine surge of exercise is a nice temporary ticket to planet Happy, but that is not why I run. Running is not my cocktail of choice. I do sometimes wonder how I got into running every single day. Once a colleague pulled me aside, and bored his almost black eyes straight into my soul while whispering with Slavic accented mystery "I see you running so much. What are you running from?"
Dude, sometimes running is just, well, running.
I am not sure 365 days is the right goal. Because my structure-craving side needs a goal, that seemed like a reasonable one. But the thing that has me most broken these days, that makes me mourn, is the 4,745 days my son has been dealt. Just desserts? I don't know. He's a kid who screwed up. And I am a Mom who cannot fix it.
So, although my running is by no means a prison sentence for me, and in fact is about as freeing as anything I can imagine in life, it is something I can show up for every day in some solidarity with my child. Maybe I will run for 4,475 days. And hope some of the beauty and hope I feel when doing so will transmit to him through that unruly bond we share called family.
If we get early parole or the proverbial bus takes me out before then?
Well, then, hopefully someone will finish my quilt for me.
That is 4,745 days, during which no pizza is delivered, no joints smoked (well, as far as we know). No studying for exams, no kissing girls, no tossing a baseball with your old man.
I often wonder if people in prison have a plan.
For getting through each day, I mean. I have heard some thrive because in all their prior years
there was no structure, so the structure is a relief of sorts.
I can relate to this, being a lover of structure who is oxymoronically also the least organized creature in the universe. By loving structure, I mean anatomy and histology were like water to a fish or air to a balloon or milk to a hungry baby for me. When I studied these things, I saw nerve bundles in tree branches, liver cells in sidewalk splotches. I walked around my medical school campus in Madison and named your forearm muscles when you waved or flipped me off. By structure I mean I like to know where I will be sleeping, when I might wake up and whether I have enough clean running bras to last through my next day's run. I like to know my hospital orders are being carried out and making someone better instead of worse. I like my family to leave a note if they won't be home when I expect them to, and to text back instantly so I know some ditch somewhere has not claimed them as its own.
My disorder lies in the state of my desk on any given day, by the moat of books that tends to form around my bed, by the piano music lying open in competition for my attention. I am entropically gifted.
I am nearly halfway through a year of running every day. What happens on day 366?
Running has become something of a fix.
Fixing my broken parts. I have always wished to be a quilter. Someone who can make a lovely whole from smaller bits of oddity and beauty. I once did house calls on a quilt artist who saw the end approaching and quilted like a cyclone in those final months, harnessing and sewing pieces that were swept into her eddying energy, fueled by chemotherapeutic fumes.
On day 160 of running I realized something, in-between sneaking peaks (hoping not to burn my retinas to a crisp) at the setting sun drowning in the Pacific Ocean.
I am making a quilt.
Metaphorically lame, yet the thought stopped me for a moment.
Quite literally I have a picture of each day of running thus far. I pick one that most captures my senses. I notice things. Those pictures form a sort of story. Seasons, state of dog grooming, flora, fauna, urban austerity, travels, darkness, all captured.
But what made me stop in my tracks on run 160 was my brokenness that feels like it heals just a little bit more each day I run, like pieces coming together, even in the physical strain and fatigue, the admonitions of too much running and the potential harms, even in the days I fall and draw blood. It reminds me of how Wendy sewed that shadow back on Peter Pan. Ouch, but he needed that thing.
Running is hard, I suppose. Tonight it was cold, rainy, and my work day had been stressful. A couple of weeks ago my femur was screaming in pain. Have you heard the screams of a bruised bone? Angry skeletons are scary as shit. On days when I work a 12 hour hospital shift, the run will be in the dark on one end or the other, and usually the morning end because 12 hours is a nice thought but usually that will become 14 or more. I am not a morning person, really. There are two professions to avoid if you are not a morning person:
1) parent
2) physician
I am a mourning person, as are we all or as we all shall be if we are lucky enough to ever love.
The dopamine surge of exercise is a nice temporary ticket to planet Happy, but that is not why I run. Running is not my cocktail of choice. I do sometimes wonder how I got into running every single day. Once a colleague pulled me aside, and bored his almost black eyes straight into my soul while whispering with Slavic accented mystery "I see you running so much. What are you running from?"
Dude, sometimes running is just, well, running.
I am not sure 365 days is the right goal. Because my structure-craving side needs a goal, that seemed like a reasonable one. But the thing that has me most broken these days, that makes me mourn, is the 4,745 days my son has been dealt. Just desserts? I don't know. He's a kid who screwed up. And I am a Mom who cannot fix it.
So, although my running is by no means a prison sentence for me, and in fact is about as freeing as anything I can imagine in life, it is something I can show up for every day in some solidarity with my child. Maybe I will run for 4,475 days. And hope some of the beauty and hope I feel when doing so will transmit to him through that unruly bond we share called family.
If we get early parole or the proverbial bus takes me out before then?
Well, then, hopefully someone will finish my quilt for me.
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