100 Words Per Mile: Thought About the Garage

I inch closer to running my first marathon.

January 16, 2022
15.00 miles
2:09:00

Woof. Today was a new record for me, and yet, I still have to figure out how to run ELEVEN more. Marathons are absurd. There was a time in my life when running ten miles was out of the question. Now, I’m supposed to run twenty-six? Do I hate myself?

Now that my runs are getting longer, there is some navigational gymnastics that needs to be done so that I don’t run too far from home. Traditionally, I try not to cover the same path twice, this way I avoid monotony and my run remains interesting. The baby mucks things up, though, because I don’t want to be more than four miles away from the house at any given moment. This requires come compromise, and so today I found myself retreading a few roads.

We’ve slowly been transforming the house into something a little more accessible for her, including an entire corner in the living dedicated to the baby. There’s a pink rug, the long mirror that used to be in her crib, what the people call a “baby gym,” and a basket of stuffed animals. It occupies the same space where we kept the Christmas tree. When we took all of our Christmas stuff down a couple weeks ago, we decided to take advantage of the blank canvas, and it’s worked tremendously.

The baby still wakes up every three hours or so and because it’s easier to grab her from the bassinet and breast feed, my wife tends to take most of the night shift. But when 5:00 comes, it’s my turn to take over with the bottles we prepped the night before. Thanks to our baby’s new play corner, the hours in which it’s just us have been extra fun lately. She rolls over, she makes silly faces, and she’s begun to reach for and grab the little rings that dangle from her baby gym. Maybe reach is a reach. She swings her arm wildly and occasionally makes contact.

In addition to her new corner, my wife has recently cleared the bottom shelves of our large bookcase. This was met with a little resistance from me—I really love my collection of books—but I was long due to get rid of a few. My wife handed me a box and asked me to fill it with the books I’d like to donate or sell to a used bookstore. This turned out to be an easier process than I expected.

I started with the literary magazines. All the New Yorkers, the Missouri Reviews, the Ploughshares that had collected there from contests or submissions or expired free trials that had gone unnoticed. (If you’ve watched The Good Place, Michael has a hysterical joke about New Yorkers piling up with no end in sight.) Then there were the books I didn’t actually love, or the advanced review copies I was holding for some reason or another.

Finally, there were the books I was afraid to admit I didn’t like. A part of me believed that removing these books from my library would be a failure of some sort. I couldn’t or didn’t want to finish them, but I convinced myself the timing was right—you’re either going to read Infinite Jest or you’re not.