Day 119: Escape

Sometimes there's just so much going on that spending a few minutes out on the road really is a way to escape... from everything.

This morning I woke up, packed up the car, and hit the road. I had to stop at work for a little while because my work computer had evidently gotten jammed up on something and I wasn't able to connect to it remotely. So I unfroze it. But the time required to do this meant that I couldn't run in the morning... I would have woken up earlier, but I thought I needed at least a modicum of sleep.

Drove to Brooklyn, actually making good time, and spent the day there with my grandmother, my brother, and my parents. Things seem sort of stable for the moment but obviously not good. The social worker came for a little while and I eavesdropped on her talking quietly with my grandma about what happens from here. Very strange.

One bright spot is that my dad and brother and I took a break and went down to the corner to Cuccio's, the bakery that has since childhood supplied me with chocolate-chip cookies and other goodies. Even though the neighborhood is now mostly Russian, at least the few Italians who run Cuccio's are still around, including the old, old woman who sits in the chair behind the counter, surrounded by groaning shelves of pastries (which in itself is weird -- who buys all that stuff, and do they throw out a lot of it and make fresh stuff?). I got cookies, my brother got a danish, my dad got a donut for himself and had a cream puff custom-manufactured for my mom, and when the old woman said, "There's nothing better than a good cup of coffee," and put on a fresh pot, my dad got some coffee, too. I went across the street to Rite Aid, which used to be a Key Food, and it almost made me cry that there were five brands of good old seltzer on offer (Seagram's, Schweppes, Canada Dry, Perrier, and Pellegrino) -- in most of the country, you cannot get even one.

Drove back to Long Island in the evening, and finally there was time for a run, which once again was done at sunset, for the third time this week. At one point as I went along (4.1 miles), I noticed that the pink glow of the sky matched the hue of the streetlights coming on. The iPod was blaring in my ear, cars with lit headlights hurtled by, I wondered about my grandma, work e-mails were piling up by the dozen, and with each step -- almost 500 miles now, since I started the marathon training -- my whole body pounded into the ground... but that moment of pink was even better than the seltzer and cookies: the best time of the day.