I was supposed to run with my buddy this morning but he called in sick. Just as well, I didn’t really want to run anyway. I kept thinking this to be true as I laced up, wired up and went out the door. Forty degrees and raining, Van Morrison in the earbuds, footfall, easy breathing, pain in my upper back. I’m going slow today, going slow everyday but going.
I head down the hill to the turn on Thirteenth, about a mile and a quarter away. It’s the first time in 3 months I have gone that far. I hook a left, head up for the river. Here in Eugene we have rivers, mighty rivers in fact, but the river I am speaking of is more truly a creek. Local arrogance or pride calls it the Amazon, but creek it is.
The water is high from the winter rains, northwest wind blowing. The northern stars are covered in iron gray sheeting, rolling across the sky in front of a cold front coming in from Canada. I can feel winter coming hard inside the wind. It’s a primitive feeling, primal, timeless, and a little frightening, as winter ought to be. Living through the winter up here is not easy. And yet, here it is and here I am, “just a little futha” down the road.( Eric Clapton and BB King said that.)
I turn back along the mighty creek and realize that I had been playing around with a line from a song; something about the other side of love being hate, of people getting what they deserved. I remembered having been on the other side of love. I spent forty years out there. It was a faithless place, filled with the righteous and the terrified alike, the difference almost indistinguishable. A place where the standing waves in the creek are barriers to crossing rather than water shows of early light, where the rain makes the streets slick and your insides scream with need. Where nowhere is a place and nothing is a number.
The signal towers in the south point to a star filled southern sky, not yet covered by the rushing clouds. That way is the way to get home, to get on with things. I run the hills on the way back, slow, steady, walk a couple, keep going all the way to the end.
Turning on Jefferson, with a couple of small rises yet to go, I realize that for me the other side of love is not hate or righteous anger or justified retaliation. It has got to be the need to carry on despite every good reason to quit. That hatred and righteous indignation, and justifiable anger are way stations on the road back from where I’ve been, turnouts on the road of freedom. Or at least I would like to believe that they are.
In the rain wet morning streets of my new hometown, it comes to me that there is no other side to love. Love is. It abides. Whatever else the philosophers and poets may figure out about “love”, and despite the utter corruption of the word in our times as adjunct to selling everything from All Weather Tires to Zambezi vacation packages, it seemed clear, inevitable to me that the other side of love looks like the painful and often misperceived absence of kindness, gentleness, necessity and truth without the singular realization that they may be, that they are, hanging out just down the road, ready when you are.
Waiting.
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