It’s weird what pops into your head
without warning.
I was out running yesterday morning, as
I’m wont to do. The snow was falling; while it wasn't heavy it hadn’t been cleaned up
yet, and the end result was like trying to run four miles on a sandy
beach. It was hard work, but I managed to do it.
Several times while I was running I had
a brief thought float through my head, the brief thought being that I
would never finish the run. I knew there was no logic behind the
thought, because I knew I WOULD finish, but the third or fourth time
the thought popped up I flashed back to another time I thought I
would never finished a trek through the snow, a time and an occasion
I hadn’t thought about for decades.
When I was nine or ten years old (or
somewhere around there) I had to walk down to the area around NMU
once a week for something (and I don’t remember what that something
was, only that I was in or around the University Center). I was a
student at Whitman at the time, which means my family lived on the
1100 block of Norway Avenue. Once I finished school for the day,
once a week I had to walk down to NMU for something, and then walk
home when I was done. That’s how you did it in the early 70s, at
least in my world. You walked.
Anyway, while I was out running as an
adult yesterday I flashed back upon those days; specifically, upon a
day when I had to walk back from NMU when it had been snowing quite a
bit. Now, remember that I was nine or ten at the time, but for some
reason I seem to recall that the snow was so deep and so hard to walk
through that, at the time, I thought it would take me hours to get
home (if, in fact, I ever did make it home). Every step seemed like
it took all my energy—kind of like running in the snow
yesterday—and the distance I still had yet to travel seemed
insurmountable.
At least that’s what it seemed like
to me at the time. Obviously, I eventually made it home the seven or
eight blocks with no problem. The journey probably didn’t even
take that long. It’s just that, at that time and with the snow, it
seemed like those seven or eight blocks were half way around the
world. Sure, I know now, as an adult, that I could walk that
distance in ten minutes; heck, I could even probably run it in two
minutes. But when you’re nine or ten and staring a seemingly
endless journey in the face, it must make an impression on you.
Or, at least enough of an impression
that you flash back to it over four decades later, for no reason
other than it’s snowing again and the journey in front of you once
again seems endless. The human mind is a delightfully weird piece of
equipment, isn’t it?
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