I meant to write this post the other day, which was the one-year anniversary of receiving the keys to our Portland Condo. Instead, I baked, worked on a manuscript for a friend, napped, ran two miles and walked another.

About running at nearly seventy…

I began running in 1994 because I had watched my older son, then in 8th grade, run with the high school cross country team the previous fall. (Alan was not the runner the coach wanted, it was his two friends, who were already faster than most high school boys, but Alan went along with his buddies and by his senior year he was a strong varsity runner too.) Both the girls and boys teams seemed to enjoy running. The kids said “Good job” to one another when they passed during warm-ups and cooldowns. The girls team sang. Their camaraderie appealed to me.

I had always wanted to run—an ambition I thought I’d left behind in childhood. Now I reconsidered that old goal, read the running magazines, and found the excellent advice to run every other day. Run and tax the muscles; take the next day off to heal. That’s what I did beginning on April Fools Day. I ran and walked and exhausted myself over a half mile on flat beach. I was pitiful. A couple of months later, I could run a strong mile. In August I was running six miles every other day. I have run trails and sand and pavement, in cold, rain, hail, snow, 96° heat, in full sun and absolute dark, steep hills, long slopes, and flat concrete. I would not recommend all those conditions and draw the line at concrete, full sun, heat, and hail.

Several times I ran the Hood to Coast, position 7 and first out of the second van totaling about 16 miles. My middle and hardest run was usually about 1am, which is how I developed my taste for running in the dark.

We have been covering at least three miles each day in a deliberate walk before others are about. I run a mile or two or three every other day. We go out first thing, often by 6am. Today my left foot is sore, though I am not exactly sure how I injured it.

I missed my last run and I will likely miss a couple more until I heal completely.

We are in Portland, and I am sitting up in bed in the early morning, all the windows open while it is still cool. Last night the Night Zombies were out and one in particular was screaming on the sidewalk across the street. I stood at the open window for a long while watching him shove his stolen grocery cart back and forth, picking up his blankets, tossing them back down. He shrieked to be loud and shouted obscenities.

If I called the police when I thought I heard him smash a car window, would someone come? What would they do if they did come? I tried to imagine that scene. How would they speak to him, touch him, take him?

Many years ago, in the early 1970s, my husband and I managed an apartment building while we were students at the University of Washington. It was a pair of massive old houses carved into studios and one-bedrooms and known locally as Big Pink. After overdosing at a local rock festival, a young woman had a complete psychotic break and locked herself in the bathroom shared by several units. Water overflowed the claw tub, and like our recent night-screamer, she was spewing nonsense. More significant, no one could get into the bathroom. I called the police and greeted the officers, and took them upstairs. They were not sure they could do anything but they offered to speak to her.

At first, when they knocked on the door, she responded in a polite and reasonable voice: Just a minute, please. There was a long, long pause. The officers turned to me and shrugged. What could they do? Seattle Police, ma’am. Could you open the door?

And then she started back screaming in rhymes. It was more impressive than scary.

Long story short, they got her out, took her to Harborview where she was admitted. Her father drove overnight from California and cleaned the literal shit out of her studio, and eventually took her home.

Over the years since, most state mental hospitals have been closed. Harborview, which I recall as caring for the poor and mentally ill, now has other work in Seattle. Most mentally ill people today are not incarcerated. Over the years I have known many mentally ill people, talked to them during temporary hospital stays, and negotiated with them as family. Drugs help a few but too many are left to fend for themselves. Jailing them violates decency and families sometimes give up trying to deal with them.

It is an exhausting issue. The local street-dwellers are economically troubled and struggling, or drug addicted (must I say “and alcohol” when alcohol is another drug?), or mentally ill, or some combination. Daytime temperatures are in the 80s and 90s and sometimes over 100, which is enough to rattle me.

What Gary refers to as the Night Zombies generally show up after the taverns close, in the middle of the night. Last night’s screamer might have been merely drunk, or “crazy” for some other reason. There is window glass in the street in the empty parking place where he stood howling for the longest time. A truck came by later in the night, and what I listened to was probably a tow truck carting away the car he repeatedly smashed with his grocery cart.

And I thought at the time I was glad to have a home. Two homes, each with off street parking. And if I was more thoughtful, I would consider my luck and the times I made mistakes, sometimes bad mistakes. I might think of worse mistakes I might have made. I think of my luck in having a family that cared for me, of having a husband who deserves to be cloned.

He brought me coffee in bed after we did not immediately get back to sleep, as he does every morning. And then he did go back to sleep because caffeine works backwards for him, and I think he missed hearing the tow truck. And then I got back to sleep too. And now it is morning and relatively quiet, not yet seven am as I type.

I will not get my run today. It takes me a long time to heal at my age.

Just a few hundred years ago, most people everywhere in the world lived close to their work. “Going to work” meant out into the fields or barn or the front of the house; or it might mean walking out to gather or hunt. The way human beings live today is not how we evolved to live, not even with the pandemic allowing so many people to work largely from home. Few people work and find food and raise their children in their homes. It’s not how we live today in modern society.

Most traditional cultures dealt with “madness” as being “touched” by which they meant “touched by God” and so they did not mess about with them. They fed and cared for them and stayed out of their way.

Even now we do that, but with less caring.

Having a history major for a dad and an anthropology major for a husband leads to such thoughts. I am trying to remember what my World History teacher called me, a “humanist”? Darlene Sherrick was a treasured teacher, and whatever word she used that does not come to mind just now, she meant it as a complement, I think.

[I asked Gary about that word or words Mrs. Sherrick used; he’s thinking about it.]

I might walk today. I might cook a meal if it is not too hot. Yesterday we went to Mama Dút on SE Morrison—incredible food. “Inspired Vietnamese Vegan. An Chay | Eat Vegan.” The owner is featured in a new Netflix episode about food carts in Portland. She tells a story about coming to Portland as a little child, how later her schoolmates would tease her about the smell of the food her mother packed for her to eat. Eeyuh, what is that smell? I had a student who told a similar story about arriving as a child, the home-packed lunches of delicacies she was ridiculed for. (She’s a physician in family practice today.)

We waited more than half an hour in a line that snaked down the sidewalk because we came at their busiest time, then we waited even longer for the food. Gary was thoroughly disgusted (he absolutely denies this) by the wait… until we got the food home and he took his first bite. “We have to go back.” Too too delicious!