Get Yourself Connected

At 1am the phone rang. The last of a thunderstorm still rumbled in the distance, and I'd been woken a couple times within the last fifteen minutes by bomb dropping, earth shattering thunderclaps that jolted me awake in panic, but then I breathed a sigh of relief and was quickly lulled to sleep. Then the phone rang.

One of my friends, when he calls, usually dials at 1, 2, or 3 am, forgetting that that's usually when most of us sleep. I hadn't talked with him in a while, so the phone call was a surprise, but it was good to hear him, and I decided to fight off sleep to catch up. He told me about some things he's been up to lately and I asked questions, and then he turned it on me, "So what have you been up to?" I went blank. I haven't blogged lately, I've gone underground, swimming, drowning somewhere, in grading, traveling, reading, writing some things but never finishing. I mentioned some of this, he was good about it, but when I hung up the phone and tried to sink back into dreams, I was haunted by the thought, "What have you done?" I've been teaching 8-hour classes, and 4-hour night classes, and have read until my eyes hurt and edited more papers than I can count, yet this isn't what seems to matter right now.

"What had I done?"

So this morning I woke up when I was good and ready, put on my hiking shoes, a comfortable pair of jeans, and a green hoodie and hit the Riverwalk that runs through Lansing. The hard rain had swollen the river, and there were places where the trail was covered in a foot and a half of water. The way I usually go, toward downtown, was cut off by an impromptu river, so I took the eastern branch of the walk. I walked for an hour-and-a half until I got to MSU, walked the sidewalks on campus past dorms and huge towering brick halls. The carillon pealed a song from just beyond the trees, and I went to the Union for a burger, then the library, then got a coffee and walked an hour-and-a-half back.

There were a lot of people out. It's one of the first fairly warm days of the year and everyone wanted to be out in it, walking, jogging, biking, you name it. I breathed deep. It was good to be moving, stepping through woods, brushing past branches, stopping to chat with people with dogs, smiling at the joggers, then noticing their not as amiable boyfriends. The city looks different from this perspective, not as lonely, not as alien, and reminded me today of all the things I love best about this place and will probably miss when I'm gone.

After a hard rain, some of the debris is washed away. The sky is still overcast, the trees still bony in their skeletal frames, the grass plastered down like a limp gray head of hair, but there are red berries on some of the branches, brown and black squirrels rooting around for nuts and seeds, chasing each other with their cache-finds--almost frisky--and buds swelling at the tips of trees. Something's waking up, breathing, alive, and it's very good.