Keep Them Safe

"Can I color?" The three-year-old I care for asks. 

"Sure." I say, walking to where the markers and paper sit stacked on the counter. When I flip to a fresh page, she asks that I tear it out. I do. She dumps the markers onto the kitchen table. Four fall to the floor. I pick them up and align them beside her paper. "There you go." I say. Two short pencils and a set of old keys have also fallen from the container. I return them to the plastic bin and click the lid closed. 

At the sink, I glance over to watch as she drags the tip of her marker into a blue swirl. She holds it up to show me. "It looks like a rose!" I tell her. Seconds later, she is holding one of the short sharp pencils and drawing a line from the blue squiggle to the bottom of the page. "Only draw on the paper." I say. (The marker ink only shows on the specific paper they're paired with.) She obeys my request, carefully keeping the lead on the page. I turn to the stove, grab the pasta pot and place it into the deep metal sink. That's when I suddenly see her head beside the kitchen island. I ask her what she's doing, afraid she's taking the graphite to the white cabinetry. She doesn't respond. Then a brilliant bluish-white flashes before her. I rush around the downed dishwasher door. I check her. She's silent but breathing and not bleeding. I look behind me. One of the keys from the marker bucket is sticking straight into the electricity socket at the end of the island. With my wits tangled by jitters, I grab the charred keys, which luckily do not shock me, and throw them onto the counter. I check the child again. I inspect her cheeks, eyes, fingers, tummy. She looks past me, sees the soot stain on the wall and begins to sob and mumble incoherent sentences. She then turns and runs away like a teenager. I let her go. I call after her, but decide to give her space. As she clambers up each step to the second floor, I watch from below. Then my sense returns. She isn't thirteen, she's three. I go after her, running up the stairs, my socks slipping me slightly. 

In her pale pink room, she tries to hide beside her bookshelf. There is a little space between the painted plaster and wood. She comes here when she needs a confined private place or when it's my turn to count during Hide-and-Seek. Today, however, there will be neither counting nor hiding in cozy crannies. I pull her to me and carry her flailing limbs to the rocking chair. "You're ok." I say over and over again. But when I sit us down, she escapes me with frantic wiggling. 

"Why don't you go into your bed." I suggest. She goes, steps up onto the ottoman and climbs over the lowered bar into her crib. She dives her face into the covers then turns her sniffling nose and mouth up for air. I sit beside her, rubbing her back and assuring her that many kids have made the same mistake. Immediately after the flash, while I was checking her for holes and singed banana curls, she'd said she was trying to unlock it, the outlet. Now in the safety of her soft blankets, she stops crying, but looks visibly weary. 

"Why don't you fall asleep." I urge. But she won't. Instead her eyes protest by barely blinking. I decide to pick her up. "I'm going to pick you up." I warn. This time she doesn't resist. I wrap my fingers around her ribs, lift and carry her back to the chair. The side of her face rests on the side of mine. The skin to skin touch soothes her. I begin to rock, shifting her head to my chest. Seconds later, her breathing deepens and her long standing cough begins to rattle within her ribs, causing a snore that sounds like that an old man. With one hand around her head and the other spanning her back, I rock to a slow rhythm for twenty minutes. As we sway, the reality of the event catches up to me. Her fingers could have been touching the keys when the electricity reached the metal. Her heart could have stopped. What would I have done if her heart had stopped? Then my thoughts begin racing on a new track. What if she has a concussion somehow and now that she's sleeping she won't wake up? This stomps my feet and halts our momentum. I start tapping her toes like piano keys and telling her that it's time to pick her brother up from school. She stirs and squints. She's fine! She's fine. She's fine. I lay her head back to my chest, collapse into the curve of the chair and rock her back to sleep.  

Last week in a Connecticut elementary school, twenty children, all just six and seven years old, were killed by the unforgiving wrath of a "troubled young man" with access to semi-automatic rifles. The school psychologist, principal, the murderer's mother and four teachers were also slain before the killer took his own life. No one shot survived. When the firemen and paramedics arrived there wasn't even anyone to revive or rush to the hospital. 

When the little girl awakes in my arms, I offer her a juice box. To my relief, the gloom is gone. The nap, it seems, has distanced her from the shock of our little socket show. Later I will have to coax her back into the kitchen, but it won't be terribly traumatic. After that she'll walk beside me on the sidewalk while I call her mother to tell her the story of the soot stained socket. 

Isn't it difficult enough to keep our children safe? Safe from brass keys and inviting outlets, wet monkey bars, and busy streets? Safe from cyber bullies, sexual predators, lead paint, and sharp rusty corners? Safe from chemically constructed food in bodegas, vending machines and cafeterias? Safe from prescription drugs with suicidal side effects, boiling pots on stovetops, plastic bags and abandoned refrigerators? Safe from old steam heating burners in living room corners, slippery bathtubs full of warm suds, psychotic strangers on the bus and broken beer bottles at the beach? Safe from rickety window screens, knives in the open dishwasher, bleach below the sink and pornographic popups on our computer screens? Most of us do our very best to keep a child safe and to defy, as best we can, the impermanence of innocence. Why then do we allow these semi-automatic massacre machines to be bought and sold in our stores like bicycles? Is it because the majority of us have yet to have a child shot to death beneath his/her desk, a cousin murdered at the movies, a sister shot down on her front stoop, or a father executed in his cubicle? Is it because those of us lucky enough to escape tragedy live within the assurances of statistics, secretly convincing ourselves that most likely we, and our loved ones, will not be shot dead in the next senseless massacre? Because that shouldn't matter. Love thy neighbor now. Demand from our politicians laws that protect our lives and not just our rights. 

Baby?

In the five-star vestibule of attentive waiters, crystal chandeliers, a tremendously tall Christmas tree, salty nuts and shiny glasses of liquor, my father tells us about when he and my mother started having us kids. They had had no plan, he tells us. They both wanted children so when they found themselves pregnant just a couple months after their wedding day, they embraced it. 

As Scott and I leave the hotel lobby where my father is staying downtown, my husband turns to me and says, "We should have a baby." 

"What? Are you serious?" I exclaim, searching his face for sarcasm.  

"We're ready now." 

I feel a little nauseous. Not by the conversation, but by all the fancy mixed nuts I've consumed. 

"Was it something my dad said? Or was it that little girl?" I ask, while he leads us through the windy city streets to the bus.

"Both." 

While my father speaks on topics of politics and life, a very young child becomes entranced with Scott. With pierced ears and footy pajamas, she runs to my husband and gives him coasters. With them, he plays peek-a-boo and does magic tricks. She's quite delighted, laughing with a pink bottle dangling from the grip of her tiny teeth. Despite our merriment, the girl's father appears embarrassed to have bothered strangers and takes her back to the girl's mother and older sister. When the toddler is with her family behind us, she watches Scott. And when her father carries her off to bed, she flaps her hand in a wave. We wish her "sweet dreams" and "good night."  

"What are we waiting for? We're ready now." He says. 

"Well... health insurance, but we can pay for it." I say wondering whether we can in fact pay for it as well as a baby. I don't say anything against his proposal because I am too blinded by excitement to say anything that would derail my husband's baby train of thought, however in my head I am calculating... We still owe $3000 to his parents for our car. We have $1000 we need to pay on the credit card. I still owe about $2000 in school loans and we both make very modest wages. Also, there's this: Could we live on Scott's pay? No. Do we want to have a baby in Chicago? I don't know. Can we even fit a crib in our bedroom? Probably not. Do we have money to buy little baby clothes, baby blankets, a crib, diapers, wipes, diaper rash cream, or some kind of rocking chair? No, no, no.  

"Everyone says you'll never have enough money." We whisper during the rumbling bus trip north. We could make it work. If we just keep waiting for the "right time", it'll never be the right time. We're emotionally ready, isn't that enough? All you need is love, right? I don't know about that. We have plenty of love, but I can't write a check for rent with love nor can I fill up the gas tank or grocery cart with love. 

That night when we get off the bus and cross our street, I ask if this is happening tonight. Scott pauses. Then says that we shouldn't start tonight. That we should talk about it more tomorrow. 

After Scott falls asleep beside me, my thoughts keep me awake as they scramble from one idea to the next. If we got pregnant now I would have the baby in August... 

I sleep four hours that night, falling into sleep around 2am, and then catching myself awake at 6:30am in mid-thought. I think about baby all day long. I drink baby coffee and despite my lack of baby sleep I am baby excited. I call Scott twice to see if he's come to any conclusions. He hasn't. We'll talk when we get home from work. He's going to call his father to talk to him about it. Ok, I tell him, that's a great idea. An hour later, I call him for the second time. 

"We'll talk about it when we get home." 

"Fine!" 

That night, we talk. I am immediately disappointed. Scott knows, as I've known all along, that we just aren't ready yet. Scott's father said that we'd need health insurance a few months before becoming pregnant otherwise we wouldn't be covered. He also said that we'd need to make sure we were ok with being in Chicago for it all. Also, he said, Scott needs to be making more money. 

"I'm sad." I say. "It was so exciting to have you so excited." 

"We don't have to stop being excited. It's going to happen. Just not yet." 

The Big Cowboy Hat in the Sky

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When Saturn finds itself in the same place it was when we were born, Astrologers call it Saturn's Return. It starts about the time we turn 28 and concludes by 30, or so I've been assured. If we survive this despondent phase, we reach Adulthood. However before we can cross over to the promised land of clarity and confidence, we must trudge through something resembling a poorly planned party where we are all required to play brain teasers while intoxicated on the destructive drugs of personal development and recurring regrets. Our challenge at the party, if we shall call it a party, is to cast off what isn't working in our lives to focus on what is and what will. 

Last month, I turned 29. I've been treading for about a year in a deep kiddy pool of what smells to be piss, pus and puke. For my birthday, I bought myself a used tweed bathing suit with a pleated skirt and found a couple arm bubbles for occasional rest, but mostly I just hang on the wall gagging and hollering questions at the lifeguard like he has any idea whether I should become a certified career woman or not. Three months ago, Scott turned 28. A week after his birthday, my dear husband belly flopped beside me, sinking to the plastic bottom. I watched while the yellowish green water hid his naked body like a G.I Joe guy in the grass. I thought he might be dead, drowned, but I didn't give up and eventually I drew him to the surface with silly songs and false promises of cake. Once he was breathing again, I stole him a kick board, a beer and a wet suit and we laid in the living room talking. An hour later, we were pulled to our feet, our eyes covered with blindfolds and our shoulders set to spinning. After several dizzying turns, we were stilled into wobbling nausea, given sharp pins with dangling tails and told to wander through the darkness in search of our destined donkey butts. Zealously, I accidentally poked my pin through Scott's pants and into his flesh. He cried out, removed the used handkerchief from his eyes, wiped away the dried crumblings of snot from the ridge of his cheekbones and looked at me, then looked to the pin pressing the loose denim to his hip. He didn't pull it out. Instead he just looked at it. That's when I said, We've been procrastinating about one of the most important things, our purpose in life! We thought it was theater. But maybe it isn't. Perhaps leaving the theater has been obvious for awhile. We just didn't want to believe it before. 

"I don't want to be poor anymore." He said then, a cloud in each of his deep set eyes. 

"Me either." I agreed, pulling the pin out. Strangely, he didn't bleed. Instead, he deflated a little. 

After 730 days of such demoralizing activities as these, the fishing nets of fog and fear will be dragged away.  We will be handed goody bags of the graphite sketches and the lists of declarations and newly acquired aspirations we drew while at the stubby craft table in the corner of the kitchen. We will find our dusty car keys in the basket above the fridge and our boots behind the boxes of empty bottles in the yard. 

However until that glorious day comes, I'll be at the sticky ping pong table, swinging at soft lemons. Why are we home nearly every night too tired and cold to socialize with this city? I wonder. We were so busy planning our move here that we didn't really figure out what we'd be doing once we got here. Sure we had some ideas, but mostly we moved to Chicago because we wanted to. I'm afraid that means we're doomed. Perpetually following our guts and hearts instead of our brains and heads. We never knew it'd be so much like life here. As strange and stupid as that sounds to say. We move and move and move with these hopes that everything will just work it's way out like a loose knot tugged from one end. But it doesn't ever. There are always snarls twisting into doubt and depression, which tightens and becomes even more impossible to separate. Particularly now with Saturn staring down at us, it's rings pointing in every direction. With all the politeness I can muster, I shout to the hidden stars above the city lights, Please Saturn, team up with the North Star and give us a little guidance down here. But that big orange stone in the sky remains silent. That's when I throw my shiny paddle at the sandbox, my cuticles burning, and declare to myself that we must stay still for a moment. Take a class. Make some friends. Enjoy this marvelous city.

I return to the craft table where I sit on a doll sized chair drawing pictures of a fictional farmhouse. I draw a dirt parking lot, a bike rack and a row of rocking chairs. I write about piles of mismatching mugs, plates and pots. I draw pellet stoves glowing in cozy corners, sending smoke to the sky. I write recipes. We'll live here, I draw an arrow pointing to the second floor windows. We'll work here, I write beside the cafe on the ground level. Behind the house is a great big field with a vegetable patch and a row of little apple trees reaching from their roots. There'll be live music. String instruments vibrating, raspy spit drenched harmonicas wailing and old folk tales telling. Patrons will sit together on tattered oriental rugs, reupholstered ottomans and blanketed love seats, sipping beer, dipping cookies into coffee and singing along. 

I show my paper plans to Scott. He smiles and tells me to stop searching the Internet for foreclosed farmhouses, but to preserve my pencil sketches and recipes because they might just come in handy one day.

Sneaking into Jewelry Boxes

The sun is out. It's the 10th of November, but it's something like 55 degrees in Chicago. Scott drives us from the airport. My mother and I sit in the backseat and my father sits in the front. 

"We have a couple options." I tell them. "We can go out to breakfast right now; we can go to the grocery store and I can make breakfast or..."

"Let's go out to breakfast." My mother resolves. 

"Do you still want to go to the movie? It's at noon? We could walk there, it's only a mile away, did you bring sneakers?" The independent cinema I work for is showing Buster Keaton's Cameraman with live organ accompaniment. I thought it would be fun to see the old silent comedy on the big screen together. I also cannot help but spit rapid sentences at my parents whenever I am with them. They don't mind, they tell me after they've been quiet for awhile. They like listening. And yes, that all sounds great to them.  

While my mother and I snuggle in the backseat, she points to Sunny's gold diamond ring on her finger. She takes it off and slides it onto my right ring finger where it settles above my knuckle quite perfectly. I look down at the old gorgeous gleam, flattening my hand to admire it properly. 

"Do you want it?" She asks. An offer which is far too spontaneous sounding for me to accept. I love the ring, but I can't take it from her. It used to be my great-grandmother Sunny's, then my grandmother Nancy's and now it belongs to my mother, Sandy. Though I do suppose my mother calls me Rachey. So maybe it is meant to be. But she needs to think about it more, I decide, giving it back. 

For the rest of the ride to the restaurant, we discuss our plans for the weekend. I have them from Saturday morning until Sunday night. 

"I want to see your water." Mom says. 

"We can take Penny to the dog beach. Maybe tomorrow morning after we check out of the hotel." 

After dinner at a raw vegan restaurant where my father's noodle dish is surprisingly cold and my mother's pizza is on some kind of bark bread, the three of us sit together, sipping water and wine and giggling about how many times I've dragged them to such alternative food establishments. Then my father glances over to my mother and asks, "Don't we have a special little gift for Rachel?" 

"You're here, that's my gift!" I say, thinking Dad's assuming something he shouldn't. But then my mother surprises me. 

"I tried, but she didn't want it." She says touching the antique gold and diamond stones. 

"You were serious?" I exclaim.  

"Would you wear it?" She asks sliding it back onto my right ring finger.

"Yes." I say looking at my hand adorned with a new delicate sparkle. 

"Somehow I always knew that you used to sneak into my jewelry box and try it on like I used to sneak into my mother's room and try it on."

"I would." I say. 

"I think I would pretend it was my engagement ring." 

"Me too." 

"I've always known it would belong to you one day. Do you really like it?" 

"Yes Mum!" I do, of course. 

"Don't sell it." 

"I won't!" I would never. 

Maybe one day I'll have a daughter who sneaks into my jewelry box to try it on.

The Romantic

According to Enneagrams, I am a "Type 4, The Romantic." I long for what I feel is missing. I have severe emotional intensity. I crave to be unique, but have an ever present fear that I am deficient and lacking in everything I do. I am, to a wretched fault, persistently envious. If only I were thinner, prettier or married to some successful businessman. In addition to all this seeming baggage, I am a Scorpio. I am passionate, devoted, motivated, sympathetic and stubborn. I am so interested in others that it causes me to stare at strangers in restaurants and swerve as I drive past pedestrians on slanted cement sidewalks. I crave to know what everyone around me is talking about, struggling with, wearing, feeling, like an untreated OCD addict might kiss every door handle fifty-seven times before turning it. If I had shown any promise in science, I may have become a nurse or psychologist, but I didn't. Still I like helping people. Perhaps that is why I am so desperate to start a family. Mothering, I know, will be something I succeed at. Or at the very least, something I won't be rejected from. In college, my intuitive traits drew me to expression and led me to art's open ending. My emotional instincts were what attracted me to acting and experiencing theater and film. My husband says I am the perfect audience member. I weep when they want me to, cringe when they show something gruesome, and laugh when they surprise me. When acting work proved sporadic, I learned to write my emotions (of which I have more than I care to keep) away into safely kept sentences.  

When we are labeled into types, signs, stereotypes and palm lines it would seem that destiny is predetermined by some godly chemist in the clouds, but what about when we add in every factor? Can one truly sum herself up into a single list of ingredients? I wouldn't know the first thing about the mathematics, in calculating life long calorie percentages, but we can forget about all that for the time being. I am the third child of four. One of three daughters. My mother used to call me her peacemaker. I am twenty-eight years old, nearly twenty-nine. I am caucasian. My husband says we're middle class though we're broke as tramps. I am 5'8 and 147 pounds on a good day. I have an extremely delicate soul and seriously sensitive skin. I am Irish, Italian, English, and French Canadian. I am an American. I have dark brown hair and when I'm worried, strands of it stick between my wet fingertips as I rinse it of shampoo in the shower. I have bluish brown eyes. I have a freckle on the center of my throat and visible veins beneath my brows. I was raised a Catholic and I married a Jew. I want to find a church or a temple to attend, but fear I'll be too embarrassed because God doesn't seem to be very popular anymore. I miss the days when "God bless you" was nice and not offensive. I sweat and blush whenever I'm embarrassed. I wake up early every morning to walk to the beach where my dog herds birds who sit on the water like buoys of beaks, wet feathers and wide wing spans. It injects joy into every pore of my body and pumps bliss in and out of my lungs like menthol. I want to pay a psychic to read my ora and predict my future because I am gullible, hopeful and supremely interested in what's to come. I am an actor. I am a writer. I am a product of my mother, my father, my ancestors, and my generation of so many others equally lost in this current American era here upon this benevolent Earth. We are all scrambling for guidance and acceptance, no matter our birthday or birth order. But labels, it seems, can help our minds name complex matters by aligning our differences into categories and explanations. I separate myself into pieces, roots and stems because I hope in better understanding myself, I will understand how to better myself. 

words

We live in an apartment building with a courtyard, mailbox key and a maintenance man named Tom. Sometimes the beagle across the yard howls an horrendously shrill cry. One time, I stuck my head out the window and said, "it's OK pup!" in my gentlest way, but it only made him bellow longer. We live in Chicago now. I play my guitar and sing covers of songs with simple chord progressions. We ride busses to live shows. We walk the dog to a fenced-in beach with fresh water waves and damp sand marked by overlapping paw prints. I live in Chicago now. I miss my mother and my sisters, my brother and my father. I miss my state. My friends in Massachusetts. My life in Massachusetts. I miss knowing where everything is though I like discovering this new pace, tree leaf lace and storefront face. I ache for my mother's arms and my father's coarse kisses, but I love how scary this all is. There's a time difference between my home state and here. One hour. That means I have more time every day, or rather that's how it seems when I call and it's a just little too late to chat. But there aren't any mountains here. Just a hill at the park where I like to take pictures of people standing beside their bicycles, perspiring running partners or holding spools of strings that connect to kites on windy days. I don't know that I can be home for Christmas and I'm afraid my father will be melancholy to not have his mother or daughter there beside the tree, at the dinner table or in the church at midnight. I want there to be a better word for love. A stronger, sturdier word for miss. Because I love and miss more than these small familiar lines of letters can express. Sorry is so pathetic when I want it to be valiant and bleeding. I don't regret moving here, paying for a truck to lug our life nine hundred miles to the left, for quitting our jobs, or for straining relationships with the complexity of physical withdrawal, but I am still sad for it, which is another word lacking in true depth. 

The film, Away we Go, written by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida and directed by Sam Mendes comes to mind a lot lately. It is one of my favorite films. Verona, played by Maya Rudolph and her husband, Burt, played by John Krasinski have this conversation, while they huddle by candles for warmth. 

VERONA

Burt, are we fuckups?

BURT 

No!...what d'you mean?

VERONA

I mean, we're thirty-four-

BURT

-thirty-three 

VERONA

and we don't even have this basic stuff figured out.

BURT

Basic like how?

VERONA

Basic like how to live.

BURT

We're not fuckups.

VERONA

We have a cardboard window.

BURT (whispering)

We're not fuckups.

VERONA (whispering) 

I think we might be fuckups. 

BURT (whispering)

We're not fuckups.

On our wedding anniversary, we sit in a restaurant where we both feel a little under dressed and we talk about three years of marriage and nine years since our first kiss. Numbers. Astounding numbers followed by the self-calculating word, years. 

"What do we want to happen before our four-year-anniversary?" Scott asks. 

"We could prepare ourselves to have a baby." I say. "Figure out what we need to do to be ready."

"That would be awesome." 

"I think we're emotionally ready. We just need to be financially."

After dinner, we sit on the train as it rattles on its elevated tracks toward the North Side and I tell him, "My mom used to say we should run our own bed and breakfast." After three weeks of employment searching stress pressing on my shoulders, I suddenly need something real to be striving for. If it's a bed and breakfast then it's a bed and breakfast and I can start taking classes and buying used books on hospitality. 

"We should try and win the lottery. Then we could buy a big house and not have to pay a mortgage and we could open a bed and breakfast." He says.

A few days later I bring it up again and he asks, "How would this be easier than working for a company?" 

"Because we can be our own bosses." I say with multiplying impatience. Then I realize my bed and breakfast dream is just like when I thought we should buy a house because we couldn't afford rent any more. It isn't logical. Only money can truly beget money and we have no money. My hopes pull like the kites I've seen on windy days. Pretty in their diamond silhouettes, but far away. Maybe when the weather calms... I could make warm breakfast every morning for our guests and wash the linens and sweep the uneven wooden floors. Scott could set up a projector and show films at night. Our kids could run around the back yard where a vegetable garden would grow, a rectangle swing would float from ropes and benches would stand waiting for the morning sun. We could have beer and wine and live music on the weekends. We'd meet so many new people and invite old friends and family to come and stay with us.... My plans always hide the practical, but never do my detailed daydreams fully suppress my fear that we'll never be grown ups, that we'll always be just a couple of fuckups.

RUN!

I wonder what a jogger from 2012 would look like to folks on trolleys, in shops and on sidewalks during 1930s Chicago. Hot pink sneakers, spandex shorts, tank top, sweat bands and white wires connecting ears to pockets. They'd run away screaming. Or they'd just start running too, for World War was just around the corner and maybe bomb threats had already reached the papers. Now, runners are commonplace. Runners passing joggers. Joggers passing walkers. Walkers are another story entirely. Ever pass two women walking really fast side by side, their elbows jutting out like the wooden oars of an Olympian rowboat? Listen close. Are they trying to solve one another's problems or just talking trash? It will be one or the other. But forget that, I want to discuss the act of running for exercise. I had tried a few weeks back with Penny-the-dog, but my herding, tracking, protective pup started to panic, naturally, pulling me to every smell she could reach and to where she hoped to find safety. The fur on the sides of her face stuck out, her tail was stiff and her ears were back. To prevent this panic, I walked the rest of the way and eventually she became preoccupied with pissing on every tree and calmed down. Today, sans dog, I go out on my first real run since moving to Chicago. In old peeling sneakers, a baggy lavender t-shirt with a dinosaur on it and my dark running shorts I go. I pass runners wearing all kinds of spandex. So much spandex they could swim in the Arctic and go to a penguin prom if they so desired. I also pass runners wearing things on their feet that resemble folded skies or like giant mouse traps. They kind of bounce as they run. Science Fiction books from the seventies and even eighties could never had predicted the weird shit people do for fitness nowadays. My head is tilted down with my royal blue baseball cape covering my eyes and flushed cheeks. It's strange that we do this, this running. We once traveled only by foot. Food was scarce. Now it's everywhere we look, convenience stores of candy bars, fast food french fries, sidewalk carts of tacos. And the poorest are often the fattest. We all once had to cultivate land and/or forage food and water. Now most of us sit all day sipping from the faucet and cardboard coffee cups. Then like third graders released for recess, some of us bust outdoors to run down sidewalks, dodging old folks, children in school uniforms and shrieking loonies at crowded bus stops. I'm not wearing headphones today. It's safer, I decide. I can rely on my eyes and my ears. Scott almost got hit by a truck this morning in a crosswalk. We had the signal, but the truck had the green and apparently the driver didn't feel like waiting for us so he drove between our moving feet and the curb. Scott's head was down though and hadn't seen the truck so I yelled, "Scott! SCOTT!" He stopped just in time and looked up. We both glared at the butt of the truck as it drove off. A girl with an inhaler in her hand just passed me. I feel mildly chubby. The chewed up baby carrots in my stomach are bouncing. Whenever Scott and I are with anyone who mentions running marathons, my husband will say "Rachel and her sisters ran the Boston Marathon." I always correct him. "Jogged. We jogged the Boston Marathon very slowly. Took us five and a half hours." Then, if I'm feeling silly or tipsy, I tell them the story of the porter potties before the race. While my sisters and I stood in the long line for the toilets, I begged my little sister to let me go in before her (the enormous pasta dinner we had the night before was executing an unexpected exit strategy). She refused, smiling as she entered the tall light blue rectangle of shit, sanitizer and Evergreen stink. Two minutes later, she emerged ridden with despair. No toilet paper! She told us. OH NO! What did you dooooo? We asked. She grimaced and mimed pulling up her pants without wiping. My other sister and I were in hysterics. For a good poop story always kills in my family. What did I do as the next person in line, you wonder? I grabbed one of those free hand towels they were handing out all over the place. I held my breath, walked into the little blue house of horribleness, pooped, wiped the most luxurious wipe of all time, tossed the towel into the bucket and walked out of there ready to tackle that marathon one fourteen-minute-mile at a time. I would be much faster at running long distance if there was some kind of fear involved. For instance, if I lived in a post apocalyptic world with dragons, angry aliens and/or mythic monkeys that could fly helicopters and jump through volcanoes, then staying fit wouldn't be a top concern because I'd be in incredible shape. I'd be skinny for lack of rations. I'd have tons of muscles from running, crouching in brush and fighting battles with my ax. And I'd be so fast because I'd have death-by-fire-breath chasing me wherever I went. I mean, that'd sure as hell beat saying that the fastest I've ever run was up the basement stairs of my parents' house. A sprint, which was never even recorded or witnessed by anyone besides the fictitious ghost that gave me the chill that inspired me to run up the stairs in the first place.