October 11th, 1970 - May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude
I have time to think. That is the great, the greatest luxury. I have time to be. Therefore my responsibility is huge. To use time well and to be all that I can in whatever years are left to me. This does not dismay. The dismay comes when I lose the sense of my life as connected (as if by an aerial) to many, many other lives whom I do not even know and cannot ever know. The signals go out and come in all the time.
July 17th, 2023
A few Saturdays ago, insufferably, I got up just before 5am, dressed in the dark, ate a bagel in the dark, and drove out to the edge of Shenandoah National Park to meet a group of runners training for marathons and half-marathons in the fall. I know. This is boring, but stay with me - I get into trouble soon enough. The training group happens every summer, and it’s run by a coach who has been doing it for free for something like 40 years, and I thought it might be a “fun” way to force myself to stay running through the ridiculous Virginia heat, but I haven’t actually signed up for a race in the fall. That is, I lied to the coach to get onto the team. I think all I want is to know I can run long, after a lifetime of believing I wasn’t built for distance.
It was humid and 75 degrees by 6.15am, but we weren’t allowed to talk about it. Standing there in the pink light, the mountains perfectly blue and hazy behind him, coach gave a whole speech about how he never wanted to hear a single one of us, on any of our runs this summer, stating the obvious. Examples of stating the obvious include: It’s hot. It’s early. It’s humid. I’m tired. We’re not allowed to say these things or complain at all. I can’t say I’ve ever in any other circumstances endorsed this kind of edict—I love complaining, negativity, bitching, and in my experience, it’s often the case that anyone who encourages avoiding negativity is trying to control you—but if I’m to become someone who can run long distances, my mindset needs an adjustment, clearly.
We set off down the gravel track towards Sugar Hollow reservoir in groups loosely based on pace. We all looked like we’d been hosed down within ten minutes. I chatted with some of the people in my group, mostly women and a couple of men, but we soon splintered. Our paces were all over the place. Once we reached the reservoir, we turned around and started running back the way we’d come, separating further from one another as we progressed so that eventually I was running pretty much alone, with only the sound of my breathing for company. According to my training plan, I was to run seven miles.
I was coming up on six and a half miles and on the lookout for the left hand turn that would take me back to the starting point where my car was parked with a blueberry muffin inside. Just then, up ahead, I saw the Gatorade station that one of the volunteers had set up and I sprinted over to re-fill my handheld bottle which had been empty for some time. I stood by the cooler and gulped, refilled again, and then took off, just as a handful of other runners were coming up behind me. Revitalized by the electrolytes, I ran faster than I might have, knowing the finish was almost in sight. My chest, my heart, had begun to ache a little, like a cramp, and I’d definitely overdone it a bit, but I wasn’t worried because, again, I had less than a half mile to go. My thoughts briefly veered off course towards the afternoon in my doctor’s office when, after he’d examined my irregular heartbeat, I asked if I could continue running: yes, he’d said, of course, and then he paused and added, well…don’t go running anywhere remote with nobody around and no phone signal.
Still looking out for the turn, my watch buzzed to tell me I’d passed the 7-mile mark. I should be back at the start now, I thought. I picked up the pace again, searching for the turn around each corner, but the road kept going and going. There were no other runners around me now. I realized I was lost, that I had missed the turn somewhere. I took out my phone. No signal. GPS was able to locate me on Google Maps and I appeared to be miles from where I needed to be. I will admit that I began to panic. Chest pain. No signal. Nobody around. Miles back to the car. I turned around and sprinted in an absolute frenzy back in the direction I’d come. I stopped by the entrance to a dirt track that, according to my phone, cut clear across the expanse of land between me and my car, and would save me having to retrace my many steps. There was a gate on which hung a sign: Guns on Premises. Up ahead, a farmer was working next to his idling tractor and I tried to approach as noisily as I could, waving my arms and yelling hello. I asked for the quickest way back to Whitehall and instead of pointing me across his land, he told me to go back the way I’d come and take a right at the fork in the road, the fork I’d missed. How far? I asked. Few miles, he said.
By the time I made it back to my car, the only one left parked on the grass where we’d all gathered hours before, I’d run 10.5 miles. My watch congratulated me on my longest run yet. I got in the car and dry-sobbed with relief, devouring the muffin as if I’d been stranded in the wilderness for days. I turned the car around and drove slowly east. I passed the house with the confederate flag flying from the porch, and further down, the house with the large Abortion is Murder sign hanging from a tree high over the road, out of reach of anyone who might try to tear it down, though I did consider stopping and trying. I drove in a daze, bumping along at 10mph until I came to the intersection where I would turn towards town. I looked up at the green road sign pointing in the direction I’d just come: Break Heart Road. Come on, I thought. Who is going to believe that.
I read a beautiful article in The Guardian last week by a British novelist called Maddie Mortimer, about her late mother’s diaries. Her mother passed away at the age of 52, and left behind a large handwritten archive spanning over 27 years. In the wake of her mother’s death, these diaries became Mortimer’s constant companion and she was able to find advice, solace, and comfort in what her mother had written, so that it felt, to her, as if her mother were still with her at times. Sometimes, the diaries addressed her directly: Maddie, if you’re reading this now, I do hope you’re enjoying it. And it was in reading this piece, which moved me to tears (be brave, be brave, be brave), that I realized that of course I am writing my diaries now for my son. While I have always kept a diary, I have never been as steadfastly committed to them as I have these last few years. My diary forms the very core of my creative life; it isn’t a precursor to my ‘real’ writing, or a warmup exercise, or an obligation. It’s an intentional practice of communicating with the person who, many years from now, might want to hear from me. The signals go out and come in all the time.
Here’s what I think I’m trying to say: I run because I want to live forever, and I write to Elliott because I want to be able to communicate with him if I don’t.
Obviously my diaries are still often a tedious litany of complaints and a catalog of bad moods. He can skip over those parts if he wants, to get to the parts where I mention him. There are a lot of mentions of him, sometimes I feel too many, to where I wonder, even in the writing, whether I am too preoccupied with him and should instead turn my attention to something else. It’s hard, though. He is very interesting to me!
To wit, I’d like to end on this moment, my favorite of last week: One evening after dinner, Elliott was scribbling with a pencil, attacking the paper, and he asked me to draw something. What do you want me to draw, I asked, and he said Snoopy and Woodstock. I made the mistake of drawing an accurate depiction of them, I was actually quite proud of myself, but then Elliott was disappointed that he couldn’t draw Snoopy like that, he got really down on himself saying I can’t draw Snoopy, I can’t do it. Mine and Adam’s chorus of ‘it’s okay!’ and ‘it just takes practice!’ no doubt irked him, as it would me. So I encouraged him to look at some of the other lovely paintings and art he has made and asked if he wanted to hang some of them on the notice board, which he was excited about because he got to climb up and push the pins into the cork. Then I gestured to his other work displayed on the fridge with magnets and said, ‘look, this is like an art show of all the paintings you’ve done at school.’ He was still standing on a chair at the notice board and he said, beaming, ‘I’m an artist!’ To which I responded with glee, ‘Yes! You’re an artist! So am I! So is Daddy! Welcome to the family of artists!’ Then Adam swooped in and grabbed him and swung him around a bit.
We are going to Ireland for most of the month of August. I can’t wait. If you’re there too, please let’s see each other.
Yours,
Helen.