Running Away

My friends and I emerge from the rec center all tired and flush from lifting and jog on down the hill, starting off slowly, talking about nothings but they are nothings that matter, bathroom remodels, barbecues past, old Fords, the weather. Perfect day for running, we say, if the wind isn’t up.

After awhile I’m winded enough to stop talking and my brain kicks in and I wonder if I will ever really get this gig. I want to be an elf gliding down the hill but in my head I sit in meetings, watching people discuss blocks of information that came from somewhere and will go somewhere else. I wonder how they knew where to find it and how they know where to send it. Strategic, multitasking, making decisions with insufficient information, deciding which manufacturers can be told everything and which can’t be told anything, knowing when to pipe up and knowing when to shut up. Thanks to last month I feel lucky to be here but mostly I feel lucky no one asks me anything. I sit, a benched rookie, watching, learning (I can hope).

We cross the boulevard and stream down a side street and someone talks about how his daughter used to clean house for a guy who owned a sports shoe distributorship, some ten thousand squares of suburban success, then the guy died and his son took over and went bankrupt and now he works for her in the meat department at Safeway. Funny how the world turns. But that’s life, people are always winning and losing. I can never decide if I am winning for not losing or losing for not winning. Mostly all I know is I am living for not dying.

The return trip is uphill and we run it faster. I don’t set the pace but I won’t fall behind. In between breaths my mind pares down to mathematical basics. Last weekend’s hike (puff) three thousand feet (puff) three miles (puff) three thousand over fifteen thousand change (puff) almost a twenty percent grade (puff) no wonder (puff) we were (puff) tired (puff).

Then I try to remember that thing Gauss made up when he was six years old, how to sum up a series of sequential numbers. It’s so simple, I never can remember it, I try to work it out while I pass landscaping shrubbery and cars pass me and the office building looms uphill. What is it, half of n times half of, what? Start over, one plus two plus three all the way to ten is (add add add) fifty five, okay, five times eleven? Is it n over two times n plus one? No, n over two times n plus one over two? Closer, yes, test it out on n equals five, on n equals eight, finally after two hundred seventeen puffs I’ve got it again for sure: the sum of all numbers from one to n is n squared plus n all over two. This keeps me alive while I run, while I puff puff puff in my personal prison, this Hanoi Hilton inside my head, inside my head.

Inside my head I wonder why after all these years meetings remain a mystery, conversations only half-decoded. Numbers work but numbers are boring, anyone can do numbers, it’s for judgment we get the big bucks, for judgment and experience and maturity and——

We speed up through the parking lot. No one wants to pretend he’s got something to prove but no one wants to come in last either so we finish fast and walk around in circles afterwards huffing and puffing and saying good run. Everyone has a meeting to run off to and all I want is a meeting with a good dog and a long hill but those are ungrateful thoughts, can’t have that, so inside we go, shower, dress, back to the hive. I’m happy enough because I feel tired, I feel healthy, and I figured out (yet again) an elegant way to add up a series of numbers. Another day in my unknown allotment is passing, but it isn’t being wasted, not entirely.