4.1 miles
river road path, north/seabury, south/river road path, south/edmund, south
46 degrees
Deaths from COVID-19: 143 (MN)/ 40,724 (US)
Started my run at 8:41. Not very crowded at all. Only a few runners and bikers. I think I remember glancing down at the river, but I don’t remember what I saw. Heard lots of birds at the beginning, don’t remember any during the run. Noticed lots of activity down by the rowing club–many cars. Will there be any rowers on the river today? Running on the walking path between the trestle and Franklin, a biker called out thanking me for staying on the proper path. I called back “you’re welcome!” and felt good for the rest of the run. What a difference such a small gesture makes! Focusing on these moments, instead of other annoying ones helps me.
A Freaked Out Runner
Yesterday, Scott, Delia the dog, our daughter, and I took a 4 mile walk around the neighborhood. Walking in the grass between the boulevard and the parkway, we witnessed a runner running in the road (on the part designated for pedestrians), getting increasingly upset as bikers (who are not supposed to bike on this part of the road) whizzed by her. When the first one passed her, she yelled “this is not the bike lane!” and then muttered to herself in anger. When the next one passed, she shrieked frantically “read the FUCKING signs!” (the city has signs posted all over the road/path identifying who should be in what lane). I could understand her anger–in other situations, I’ve been her, maybe not screaming “fuck!” but feeling that upset–but I could also see how difficult it was for the bikers, trying to find room to move when it was so crowded and when walkers were also ignoring the signs and taking over the bike paths. I’m not sure how to make this situation with crowded paths any easier, so I try to avoid it by running early, before it gets crowded.
Periodically during my run, I sang out in my head the delightful lines from Emily Dickinson I learned a few days ago: “In the name of the bee—and the butterfly—and the breeze—Amen!”
Speaking of Dickinson, I have decided the poem I will memorize for this week is:
It’s all I have to bring today—/Emily Dickinson
It’s all I have to bring today—
This, and my heart beside—
This, my heart, and all the fields—
And all the meadows wide—
Be sure to count—should I forget
some one the sum could tell—
This, and my heart, and all the Bees
which in the Clover dwell.
Such a beautiful poem. I think it will be fun to recite as I run on these early spring mornings. A poet and gardener decided in 2011 to systematically read through and analyze each of Dickinson’s poems. She’s still working on it now, in 2020. Here’s her post on this poem. In her discussion, she mentions Marianne Moore’s poem about imaginary gardens. I think I’d like to memorize this one too–if not this week, then for next week:
Poetry/ Marianne Moore – 1887-1972
I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers that there is in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful; when they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible, the
same thing may be said for all of us—that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand. The bat,
holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse
that feels a flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician—case after case
could be cited did
one wish it; nor is it valid
to discriminate against “business documents and
school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must
make a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets,
the result is not poetry,
nor till the autocrats among us can be
“literalists of
the imagination”—above
insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them,
shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, in defiance of their opinion—
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness, and
that which is on the other hand,
genuine, then you are interested in poetry.