On Monday, Gary and I covered at least ten miles. I ran two of them. Wednesday I ran three miles and we walked. I scheduled a 3-mile run for this morning, but Gary wasn’t feeling well so I went out alone. I’d decided to run two miles instead of three. How many did I run? One. I came home and worked for a while, and then I lay down. I felt rotten too. We tested for Covid and that was negative, and we’re feeling better after hot showers.

I generally introduced assignments with a story, so here it is: Before we married, and while we were both students at the University of Washington, Gary and I managed a once-notorious apartment building in the University District known locally as Big Pink. The FBI and the Seattle Police came several times while we managed the building, but the last of the prostitutes had just left before we moved in, and the last drug dealer accidentally set fire to his kitchen soon after, so he was gone soon enough. This was in the early 1970s, and my memory is not entirely reliable, but what I’ll write what is still vivid and accurate.

An Art History MA (or PhD?) candidate asked Gary if he could have mail sent to our address. Mail for all the apartments was delivered to a row of mailboxes in an enclosed front porch. Gary said, “sure.”

In the mean time, our friend Tom and Connie Thomas had promised to let us have their little rental house at the SW corner of campus. The house was charming, tiny, the rent was minuscule and somehow the house did not officially exist—therefore, no utility bills. Perfection! Our apartment was wretched, but conveniently located and for $30/month, affordable. The house was just $70/month, still an incredible deal. Except, we didn’t get to enjoy it. The guy using our address, let’s call him WK, got that house instead of us. Tom and Connie were so sorry but his wife had been a colleague in the Art History Department.

Here’s the wrinkle: WK’s red-haired wife was at UCLA the next term, pursuing her PhD. WK moved into that perfect house with LB, a studio arts friend of mine.

When we figured out that using our address was WK’s way of preventing his wife from knowing he had moved in with his girlfriend, I confronted him. I told him he was a rat and we would not allow him to use us in that way.

WK turned to Gary and said, “Control your woman.”

Gary, bless his heart, laughed and laughed. I probably did too, but I was pretty ticked off, so maybe not. But WK’s words became one of those lines that still make us laugh.

The world doesn’t go as we planned, people do foolish things, and sometimes the fools are us.

Create something: a meal, a bit of music, send a birthday card in the mail, write a letter. A blog post that’s a little late. Useless too. Creation just because is something people do, it is a majestically human act. A little bit out of our control.