Running in circles

 I had dropped my son at practice and was on my way to the track nearby. While I waited for him, I had planned to run in circles.

The sound in my head wasn't music. Instead, I listed to an accounting of time: specifically, the 12 minutes it took three men to hunt and kill a human being last year in Georgia.

Twelve minutes to snuff out a life and 72 days to convince authorities to make arrests in the case.

I had already heard the news: that a jury had convicted three white men - Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael, and William Roddy Bryan - of the brutal murder of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man who had been jogging through their neighborhood.

Few people call it what the men's act of barbarism was on that February day in 2020: a lynching. But we all know that's what the jarring video, recorded by one of the murderous trio as they cornered their victim, had captured.

The nation learned of Arbery's killing only after pressure from family and the public forced the release of a video, put forward by those who hoped the footage would exonerate the perpetrators. It did just the opposite. Since then I have followed this case as if I knew Arbery personally. 

We had some things in common: He was a runner; his birthday coincided every so often with Mother's Day, and, as the news reported, he was curious about houses under construction. I find myself equally enthralled with the bones of a house and have walked around sites and peered through windows on runs myself.

Just the loose threads of human existence we rarely draw together to their logical conclusion. Such as the unlikelihood a gang of vigilantes would shoot a middle-aged white lady for looking around a construction site or jogging through a neighborhood on a midday afternoon

The true scandal is why this is a privilege not afforded to all.

It's tempting to think that the system worked in the case of Arbery's murderers. But it didn't really. It served the obvious. Anything less would have been a perversion like the legal circus in Wisconsin, which delivered a total acquittal for two homicides by a teenage vigilante. 

We can't keep running around in circles.

I listened to the verdict commentary as I ran in the outermost lane. I told myself I would stop when I got to his number. 

When I had run eight times around the track, I slowed to watch the distance on my watch. As the number ticked past 2:22 I slowed; waiting for 2:23 – the number that has come to memorialize Arbery. 

I have run that distance so many times; in four seasons of weather; carved it into the shape of a heart through my neighborhood. 

Today will be the last time, I think. 

My son will be done with practice soon. Together we will be home safe and sound. 

The wind sliced at me as I ran around in circles. I had forgotten my hat and gloves. 

I think about Ahmaud's mother a lot. I think about how tragic it is to lose a son so tragically; and then to have to watch as his life and death get co-opted by people like me. She didn't give him to the world. A hate crime did that. 

Race day

The alarm was set for 5:30 a.m.

I had a plan. I would wake up, stretch and shake the rust off of my barely rested muscles, and then get back into bed after having made the first of several cups of black coffee. 

If it worked correctly, there would be plenty of time to gather the gear I'd packed the night before and warm up the car. 

Of course, this hurry-up-and-wait approach works a little too well. Often I will look at my watch and realize I have lost track of time. 

When I check now ... 

It's three a.m., three-0-one, now ... and soon to be three-0-two. I'm still awake, with the imaginary screenplay of the events to follow playing on my mind in a loop. 

Why can't I sleep? Race-day anxiety, I suppose. 

Seems wasted on a person like me. 

Fast is relative. I usually finish so far from the front runners that the light from said front runners is not likely to shine anywhere near me. 

I don't even keep pace with the sweepers -those caution-cone-colored volunteers who circle on bikes with the look of concern creasing their faces. 

I read their faces: Will I be the person they need to steer toward a medical tent? "Gosh I hope not," I reply wordlessly with a smile and thumbs- up as I continue to jog along, concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other. 

Three-forty-five. I finally sleep. When I wake again there is only a single minute ticking down until the alarm is set to ring. 

I turn it off before the rousing clang begins. I don't want to risk waking the house unnecessarily. Not that my herd-of-elephants tip-toeing won't do just that anyway. 

As I stand and stretch in my darkened room, I run through the plan for the rest of the morning: The drive to Schenectady, the finding of parking, the warming up in place behind the start line. 

I wonder why I do this to myself. Heading off before the sun rises to run more than nine miles, alone ... in a crowd of more than a thousand.

I could sleep in and run my own race later. 

The small part of me that lacks the compulsive impulse wishes I would crawl back into bed. No one would think any less of me, not even me. I might gain a few points for the wild abandon. 

But coffee calls. 

Downstairs in the kitchen, a note leans on the coffee maker. "Coffee is inside, ready to go. Have a great race."

By the time I park my car and find my place in line, I am truly ready. I start slowly, keeping an easy rhythm through The Stockade. I find my race pace as I approach Union College, tracing my initials from Lennox to Waverly. 

The neighborhoods seem to fly by despite my slow jog. At every corner, there are people waving signs as they cheer on someone they know along with dozens of strangers. 

The city seems as warm as the morning's sun.

I am reminded why I love this course as we dip into Niskayuna before climbing back toward Central Park and into Vale Cemetery through to the eventual finish downtown. 

 It has nothing to do with the realization that I shaved ten minutes off my 15k time. That's just a bonus

The last to know

“Hey, you guys didn't tell me it was school picture time,” I yell over the sound of morning routines: the whirring of hairdryers and the pounding on bathroom doors.

"It was a shock to us, too. I didn't even comb my hair," said the boy's muffled voice.

“Mom! Can you tell him to hurry up?," his sister texted. "I'm going to be late!”

I mumble something about there still being time as I ignore her pleas and click on a link that had blinked into my email: My son's unsmiling face showed up on the screen.

His hair, newly barbered, was pushed up high on top of his forehead but still ever-so-slightly askew. It is a look he had painstakingly preened to seem like he had just rolled out of bed. Everything about it said Too-Cool for School.

Welcome to your child's high school years. That will be twenty-five dollars for two five-by-sevens and eight, wallet-sized reminders.

Of course, I bought prints of the boy in his berchon expression straight away, even though when they arrive - in six to forty-six weeks - the copies will live in a dining room cabinet, where I store the rest of the official mementos from my kids' school experiences.

His sister's progress reports and quarterly report cards occupy the top shelf. The letters and missives have been extracted from their envelopes and piled in ascending order from kindergarten onward. 

His are filed in about the same order, interleaving between notice of grades with concert programs, playbills, certificate awards, and dozens of stock-white envelopes with younger and younger faces staring out from little windows of transparent glassine.

Oversized serving bowls I've never used (lest they become broken or cracked) act as a bookend, keeping the pages upright and from accordioning out onto the floor at the feet of whoever opens the cabinet.

This is my system.

The organization of opportunity. A box here, a folder there. The common thread between them is an intention to file it for easy retrieval, should the need to access his first-grade third-quarter progress report materialize.

My system makes sense only to me.

Which is what I think, when my husband forwards a similar link for our daughter, who the school has somehow classified in their etched-in-stone recond as belonging to him first and to me as occasional chauffer and forgotten-item delivery person.

I tried to correct that record once after one particularly aggravating game of phone tag.  Failing, it would seem to have them with the order of operations from "DAD" to "MOM" -- at least on the first attempt -- since I am the parent who has the most flexible schedule and the one who isn't likely to be traveling far from home.

Evidently, they thought my acrimony was based soley in matrimony, because after that, all the official correspondence from school included me on a separate line at the same address … as if I were the Ex living with my Husband and his Mrs.

“Well, that's very big of me,” my husband joked.

I didn't know what to do besides laugh with Mr. Husband about how progressive we were as a family. 

“Laugh all you want," the girl tells us wryly as she reaches for her keys. "But this explains why I got called down to the guidance office in the fourth grade and handed an invitation to join the Banana Splits Club," she says before she slams yet another door. 

“I never understood why she didn't go out for that. She loves making desserts.”

“Uhm. ... Because it's for kids whose parents are getting a divorce. She thought they were telling her the bad news.”

That sounds terrible, but it's probably going to get worse when they find out you've been hoarding all these horrible pictures.

I wish us all nine lives

 “What's this now?” I asked my son after I turned off the road and into the schools' driveway. About a dozen people with placards had gathered on the sidewalk where the intersection jammed with cars. It was just after 7 a.m., his usual driver -- his sister -- had taken the day off.

"Anti-factsers," he said with a sigh. “They don't want their kids to wear masks or have to get vaccinated or to discuss American History, I guess if it means talking about the racism parts. But I don't think any of them have kids who actually go to school here.”

“That seems weird.”

It took several minutes to get through the line, let him off, and get back to the road where the protestors stood, waving at traffic with bare-faced, beatific grins. They were joyful in their work professing strongly-held but evidence-free beliefs.

As I waited for my chance to escape, a woman bundled against the cold wave at me, seeking some solidarity. Perhaps a thumbs-up.

I gave her a different finger. 

It happened so suddenly. A knee-jerk reaction to a cheerful wave of a sign that bore a stolen slogan, and my undeniable urge to protest gushed forth. I used the only sign I had on me.

I was angry. Civility be damned.

The face outside my window changed from a smile into a startled scowl and finally rested in a downturned slant. I recognized the person then. I knew her. From a past life. One in which acquaintances seem to go deeper into friendship than they do. 

This knowledge, I suppose, should have caused me to feel remorse for using such a base vulgarity. The telling it like it is becoming less clear when you're telling it to a familiar face.

But I had none of those feelings. I had all of the shocks of recognition and none of the remorse. I didn't feel caught in a weak moment. I felt relieved. 

I rolled down my window and made my silent protest official, albeit with more publicly acceptable words. She conveyed, with equal reserve, that our diametrically opposed disappointments were mutual. I rolled my window up again and sat in silence until a break in the traffic allowed me to merge.

I drove away slowly, letting the distance between our planted flagpoles dilute my animus.

I don't need to know why she and the others have picketed a school none of their children attend using statements of things that aren't happening there anyway. Maybe she's a true believer, or perhaps she's searching for something that's missing from her life.

Aren't we all? Missing something?

I just hope she remains healthy and that she and her family gets through this crisis without a visit from harm. But I don't have to expend any more energy changing hearts or minds.

Consistency can simply become a thing we mold around our broken thoughts, rendering it into a defective weapon or an ineffective defense. 

We may be out in the world glaring at one another, but we still fit in a box with Schroedinger's cat, destined to be right and wrong at once.