Saturday

Saturdays are for snoozing and schlepping, but also for the staging of pocket-sized rebellions.

It begins with the 5:40 AM alarm, which I do not set.  The absence of this alarm makes my morning a spitball, a wandering pitch I must keep in view.  Sometimes I wake up at 4:00 and read novels in bed.  Sometimes I wake up at 7:00 and roll back over until 7:15.  And sometimes I wake up precisely at 5:40 AM, my brief flicker of insurrection drowned in the dark sea of routine.  (Add one baby and there's no telling.)

My next mutiny comes when I divagate from my usual running route.  (Yes, I still run; I am unable or unwilling to mount any serious challenge to the incumbency of exercise.). I still begin by running South on Oakland.  But then (SHOCKER), instead of turning West on Zephyr,  I continue South, following Oakland all the way down to where it fetches up agains the train tracks.

For a block or two, no more, I run parallel to the tracks, and this is it, my treat, because I have loved train tracks for at least decade, and there is something about being in motion alongside the possibility of motion, the long secret snake of journeys past and future, that is almost unbearably sweet.

Today I saw a train.  Only four cars, but they thundered so satisfyingly, steaming and screeching, a blue, train-shaped silence in their wake.