Sun
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On Sunday morning at nine, I slipped into my running shoes and set out west from home with George Frideric Handel’s Messiah on the earbuds. (The Phil had performed Bach‘s St. Matthew Passion night before—a gargantuan undertaking for the orchestra, each of two accompanying choirs, and the audience—and once I had slept that off I found myself in, you know, an oratorio mood.)
It was distinctly more warm in the sun, so I stuck to one side of Manhattan Avenue going north into the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, where I trod on a pizza saver. That is the piece of plastic in the pizza box that, I have now learned, keeps the cheese from sticking to the cardboard. One of its prongs went clean through the sole of my right Nike.
But it wasn’t a day for disasters. And that’s mostly what I feel the need to write today: that the sun shone and I crossed some bridges on a spared foot and passed the veterinary hospital where my cat survived his accidental poisoning last summer and got to yoga class in time to stretch out the steel guitar strings that seem to be responsible for cohering my bones. I rode a Citi Bike home with a cargo of French carbohydrates, and sat in hotter sun and colder shade on my friend’s deck for a meal of elegant plants. That’s the kind of day of day it was, in which gloomy weather and aches and pains and cumulative inconvenience and a whole panoply of fears about the future recede because the sun has discharged its promise to come back and radiate a warmth you can feel; that you can’t not feel, really.
A happy spring to you.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.