I mis-remembered the distance of the route I chose to run today, and ended up doing 12 miles thinking I was doing 8 to 9. I feel like I’ve been wrung out, slowly; but what a day for a mistake. With apologies to John Cheever:
It was one of those autumn Sundays when everyone sits around saying, “I drank too much last night.” You might have heard it whispered by the pledges leaving Sigma Tau, heard it from the lips of the parents, struggling with their Dockers at the University Motor Lodge, heard it from the sweatshirt racks and the incense tables on Pleasant Street where the steel drum player was suffering from a terrible hangover. “Bro, I drank too much,” said Braydon Ellis. “We all drank too much,” said Madison Burrell. “It must have been the PBR,” said Cheryl Emmenthal. “I drank too much of that pumpkin ale.”
This was at the sidewalk tables of Amherst Coffee. The coffee, served in brown mugs the size of small bowls, was foamed in the shape of leaves. It was a fine day. In the west there was a low scud of hurrying cloud so like a town seen from a distance—from a car stuck in traffic on the Massachusetts Turnpike—that it might have had a name. Shaftsbury. Marion. Lowell. The sun was hot. Tara Aperstazy sat by the coffee mugs, one hand on one, one around a glass of Shiraz. She was a slender woman—she seemed to have the especial slenderness of youth—and while she was far from young, she had dressed in capris that morning and given her own backside a smack, as she jogged toward the scent of coffee in her dining room. She might have been compared to an autumn day, particularly the first hours of one, and while she lacked a tennis racket or a yoga mat, the impression was definitely one of youth, sport, and clement weather. She had been walking and now she was breathing deeply, stertorously as if she could gulp into her lungs the components of that moment, the heat of the sun, the intenseness of her pleasure. It all seemed to flow into her chest. Her own house stood in Northampton, eight miles to the west, where her three plaid-shirted roommates would just be waking up and might be considering making a seasonal quiche. Then it occurred to her that by taking a dogleg to the southwest she could reach her home on foot.
