It's been a day of contrasts.
In the morning, I rewrote a chapter and a half. I always dread rewriting and, even though her comments are always helpful, I still dread opening my mentor's emails and going through her edits and suggestions. She's as honest as they come, and that's part of the difficulty. Sometimes, I'll manage to make her cry because of what I've written, but I'm more afraid of boring her than anything else. She pushes me, which is what good mentors and trainers will do. My ears are still tingling from the round scolding I received on being lazy and reverting to verb-adverb constructions without even trying to look for a punchier verb. Yes, writing is that technical.
That was a morning spent in my head.
I biked down to Concord Plaza to pick up my race package for the half marathon I'm doing on Sunday morning. I feel pretty well prepared-- at my high point, I was doing 55k/week-- which is about as much as I did when I trained for a full. Today, Vancouver was showing itself off for us all. The sun was out in full, citizens began baring winter-white flesh, and all the glory of the sun drew out the best and brightest of everything in its path. I even bought my first ever pair of flip flops at the race fair. I've avoided buying and wearing them because of their lack of support, and for someone who values running as much as I do, you make sacrifices to be able to keep yourself able to run for the rest of your life. At any rate, I found a pair of flip flops by a company that makes heat-moldable insoles for flat feet, and I found them for half price. All around me were extremely fit people with skinny legs and high cheekbones reveling in their perfect health. On the way home, I biked next to False Creek and marveled at the way white sailboats cut frothy white wakes in the deep blue water.
An afternoon wallowing in the goodness of living in a beautiful city.
But the day ended strangely and sadly. I went upstairs to drop off my month's rent, and sat for a while with my landlord-- a gent in his 90's. He was, no doubt, once a vigorous man, but after spending the day at the doctor's office getting outpatient surgery for his ear, he was not well. His eyes were sunken into bleary, darkened patches in his skull. A wound on the top of his head that had not healed well now left a scabrous indentation the size of the palm of my hand. And here I was, a youngish man in his prime, preparing to run a race that few on earth have the time and talent to run. He was confused when I sat down-- he thought I was moving out-- when actually I had phoned him a couple of minutes ago to tell him I was coming to drop off the cheque. Lucky for him I tend to be rather honest, and I gently reminded him that no, I hadn't paid this month's rent yet and that I had come up for this very reason. He told me his wife was well, but that she didn't like living in the home, and that his stepson, David, (with whom I deal with when I have problems with my apartment) is a good boy and visits her twice a week.
I thanked him for letting me live where I do. I wished him well, and bade him goodbye. Yet as I closed the door behind me and left him sitting alone in silence in his living room chair, I felt as though his time was almost at an end.
I know it shall happen to me too. I will get old. I will get brittle. I will look back on this time in my life and sigh, Alfred J. Prufrock-like, and wonder when death will finally come to take me out of this battered body. Even if I get married and have a family, perhaps my wife will be taken by death or disease or accident. Perhaps my children will hate me and never visit. And maybe I too shall end up in my living room chair, staring out at the setting sun, wondering where all the strength and fire that fueled my youth has fled to.
I bumped into my next door neighbour in front of the mail slots the other day. I asked him how he was, and he chuckled.
"All right-- considering circumstances," he said. I assume he meant the fact that he had to use a walker to get around, or that he now had taken such a view on his life that it was only a short matter of time before he, too, would breathe his last.
It is not necessarily a depressing thing to live with the elderly. I am being taught to number my days rightly, to think ahead of what sort of man I hope to become by the time I am their age. Will I have spent myself for nothing and for the privilege of dying alone? Or shall I, in my final days, be glad for the life that I have lived, be glad that for many years I was an athlete, be glad for family, for friends, for the blessing of being and not merely existing?
"In the end, we all die alone," I thought as I walked to Safeway. Then, even as I thought it, I realized how that sounded.
No. We will not die alone. I will die, folded in the loving arms of Christ who even now, waits for me to pass on in time and to wake anew in the Kingdom fulfilled. I wondered then what those who have no faith wait for in their old age-- oblivion? Darkness? Some Nameless Void? I could not imagine breathing my last with that great unknown hanging over me. Thanks be to God that I do not have to face this alone, and that death, far from being my enemy, one day will be my long-awaited guide to the Blessed Realm.
Comments (2)
amen to that.
Have a good race tomorrow!
Reading and writing is not my cup of tea. But your blog is one of those that I enjoy reading alot. Thanks for sharing.