My grandfather passed away earlier this year, and I still don't know how to process it. I decided to head to a bowling alley for a game, as it was one of his favorite hobbies and rhythms in his life. It comes down to timing to know how to spare myself space, but I am still waiting for it to strike me squarely. This wordplay is accurate to my score, but also how I am not sure if I will get used to the truth of his absence, it just feels like he is away, not gone. Like if only I was able to visit his house in the right window of time, he would be there to greet me and ask me about my life and how the state of the world has gotten to be so askew from his memory of when it last "made sense, instead of being crazy and strange" to him in his over-90 years of life. I loved him dearly, but in his last days, he withdrew from visitors as he hated for them to have their last memory of him to be of his diminished state. My game was rusty, but there were moments where I could see how I could improve through habit and applied practice.
It has been over a decade since I lived in this neighborhood, but it is such a fine day. It doesn't feel that long a distance of either time or mileage, but as I jog around familiar streets, I am slowed by body and mind of who I once was and where I existed.
My parents have moved out of the house, but the crab apple tree is still there, with the small rock border remaining installed at its base. It was on that tree's lower branch that I wore down in middle school, learning how to withstand a "dead hang" position because my best friend had told me that those were the "only chin ups that really counted."
In much younger days, there was a tree in the backyard that I scrambled up and got spooked at the prospect of jumping down. Like a cat clinging with its claws to the branch, looking to my slightly older sister down below as a savior and proxy guardian angel to rescue me. She admitted later that she didn't think that handing me makeshift wings of branches with leaves and telling me to flap them for air resistance would actually be taken as the leap of faith that it was. And I baby-bird crashed to a reunion with earth, with blood from my nose and tears from my eyes at the impact of knee to face. But these years later, I don't get to observe the tree due to the installation of a higher privacy fence than the wood stained picket fence which had been there the majority of my memory. I take it on similar faith that it is still present, though also shaped differently by the years.
A little over half a decade ago, during the initial pandemic months, I had signed up to do a virtual marathon on a whim with a few months to actually prepare, just because I really dug the T-shirt design. I remembered that there was a loop around my parents neighborhood which was roughly a mile and just figured I would just do a little over 26 laps in the pre-dawn early morning. This was an extremely foolhardy decision, but I was fueled by determination, confidence in scope, and the novelty of thinking "It would be very funny to manage to do this just because I wanted to pay for a cool looking t-shirt design as a motivating factor..."
As with many things in my life, grace preserved me where mere willpower should have made me come up short. I am not the fastest competitor, but I am persistent and adjust accordingly with an eye to finish. But such carelessness with proper conditioning has me now walking at a stiff clip to give relief for my shins being unused to absorbing this shock. I manage to make it 4 miles before tapping out on my tracking app at about 50 minutes.
Is this anything to really brag about? Not particularly in terms of the data, but the contrast to knowing where I was to where I am now is sobering and grounding. I suspect that I take my youth and resilience for granted, even as the years erode my ability to recover, like walking up a sand dune of a giant hourglass, forward progress is one step forward, 3/4 step sliding back. But I press on, knowing that the muscles do not remain over static, but must be kinetic in routine. Where I am now is not where I shall be, and even staying in place means treading sand and building resistance through practice.
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