The March Hare

I've never been a runner. In elementary school, when forced to participate in the Presidential Physical Fitness program, I "protested" by walking the mile rather than running it, reaching the finish line only seconds before the autistic boy. However, I've decided it's time to turn all that around.

At this writing, I can run just over a quarter of a mile before I have to stop and walk. In one session, I can run an entire mile and a little extra with some walking in between. It hurts, but only later. When you're actually doing it, it feels good, something I didn't think was possible. Your body hits a point where it decides that fighting you is getting nowhere, so it might as well just go along with you for a while. Your body doesn't worry; you'll pay in the morning, when you get out of bed and crumple to the floor in a pitiful heap, unable to stand for a full minute and a half.

With all of this comes an immense feeling of personal power, aside from the morning pain. I'm starting to feel that if someone was coming towards me with ill intent I might actually be able to run away from them and escape, rather than having to rely solely on my ability to fold myself into a ball and weep. I will weep no longer; I will run with an even gait and regular breathing, until I am at least a quarter of a mile away.

The only problem is that you can't run with your eyes closed. I don't know why I really want to do this, every time, but you end up running into fences and tripping over things.

I'm not sure how my dog feels about all of this running business. She seems to enjoy it, but last night she vomited twice on the track as we made our way around. I admit I felt oddly superior. I didn't puke, and I'm the one who's supposed to be out of shape.

I should not complain about the weather in Mobile during the winter. There is no ice, people don't die of hypothermia or have to have fingers and toes removed after being beaten by teenagers and left outside overnight. It's windy, and it gets down into the twenties at times, and once it snowed, and that's about it.

But there's something about spring here that makes it better than spring anywhere else I've lived. For one, the Japanese magnolias, one of the mose beautiful flowering trees I've ever seen, bloom in February and in March the petals start to fall in a two-week-long shower of pink and white that is unearthly, it makes you feel like you're living in a movie or a snowglobe. For another, spring wakes up a certain smell in Mobile, the smell of old buildings and trees, an authentic smell of time. Some might call it mold, but I call it history.

I've been spending a lot of time walking around Mobile lately, partly because of a bet I have going with my boss that I can lose more weight than he can in fifteen weeks (I'm winning, by the way), but also because I know that my time in Mobile is limited, and I'll never live here again once I leave, I'll only be a tourist. It seems only fair to the city that I figure some of it out, see some new things, before I go away to places that are not normally described as "throwbacks" or "backwaters".

Today is Mardi Gras, and as I walked toward downtown, I started to see families camped out in the parking lots of closed banks, grilling burgers and sausages and wearing t-shirts in purple, green, and yellow, not a good color combo unless you're The Joker. Girls with batons walked together away from the parade routes, their duty done.

People were collectively trying to be happy, and that's always a nice thing to see. It shows perserverance in the face of great odds, and that, with the help of beer and grilled meat, we can forget our problems for a few hours and put on a damn fine parade. Plus, there are moonpies to be thrown, caught, and eaten like bounty from the gods.

Add this to a sunshiny morning on which it is possible to wear a t-shirt for the first time in months, and things feel pretty good.

I have a brand new short story up on Raketenwerfer.

My family celebrated Christmas on New Year's Eve, because it was more convenient for everyone and gave us all more shopping time. So there we were, opening our gifts and having a lovely time, when I looked into the bag of stuff my grandmother was giving me. Inside the bag, there was an honest-to-God muu-muu.

"Is this a muu-muu?" I screamed, and then I immediately put it on over my clothes, pushed a pillow under it, and put my cigarettes in my pocket. I was already wearing flip-flops, so that was covered. Voila, instant white trash.

After my grandmother left I asked my sister if she had gotten anything odd from her. "Oh, yeah, she gave me a can of Progresso Tomato Soup."

"You don't think she's maybe..."

"No way," my sister said. "Remember when you were ten and she gave you and Brennan bottles of ketchup and mustard for Christmas?"

It's good to know that some things don't change. My grandmother has always wrapped up whatever she has lying around the house, regardless of how inappropriate it might be.

However, the muu-muu was part of a trend this year to give me sleepwear that could be packaged and sold as birth control. Three-inch-thick flannel jammies, a pink chenille robe that zips up the front, a pair of raspberry cotton pajamas that emphasize everything that's wrong with me. Obviously someone doesn't like the idea that Stephen and I might breed.

I got engaged! On Christmas Eve! To Clurg!

Also, I have been accepted to UAB, so I can finally get an education, and I have just gotten my first real publication credit for short fiction, in the next issue of ' The Project for a New Mythology' (I think there's a link to it on Clurg's blog.)

I have been writing many ghost stories, rearranging my furniture, reading everything but Don Quixote, which is the only book I'm supposed to be reading right now, and I hope to get The March Hare in fine fettle once again. If you have any suggestions for themes for the Vineyard-Clurg nuptials, leave them here.

Yesterday, I did several uncharacteristic things.

First, I had a shouting match with the chef at work. I don't shout, I generally act pathetic and cry and win arguments that way, but yesterday was different. Yesterday I was filled with white-hot rage.

When I bicycled home after said shouting match, I found that the water company had shut off my water for non-payment of my bill, which I pay every month online. I had to give them one hundred and five extra dollars, and still fill a bucket of water at my neighbor's hose in order to flush the toilet. I got really snotty with the water company on the phone, and generally stomped around like an ogre. The water company was totally unimpressed with this, and their 8-noon turn-on service didn't show until 12:30, just to put me in my place.

Rage, I tell you. Absolutely useless rage.

Last week my dad called me.
"Hey Sunshine!" he said. "How about you tell your job that your appendix is burst and you can't come in for a couple days, and we'll go to the beach."

"I like my job, Dad. I'd rather not get fired."

"Oh, come on. They ain't going to fire you."

My dad said this as though he knew it for a fact.

I compromised with him. He picked me up after work on Tuesday, and we rode on his Harley to Destin, Florida, where my uncle has a time-share he hasn't been able to use. We ate dinner at the Waffle House. My dad told jokes for three straight hours. My dad made friends with our surly Waffle House waitress.

The next morning I got up at seven and went into the ocean at seven-thirty. For anyone who has never been to the Gulf of Mexico: our beaches have the softest, most powdery snow-white sand imaginable, our water is a perfectly clear green, the color you think emeralds ought to be. At seven-thirty, there are no waves, three are no other people, there are no strong currents to pull you sideways down the beach. I walked into the water and was soon in above my head, but I could see everything on the bottom. In fact, I felt very afraid, because I knew that this was too good to be true, that some nasty sea-creature was waiting below me to sting or bite or maim in some way. The water was like green glass.

We rode away from Destin at eleven o'clock that morning, because I had to go to work that afternoon. My dad was sad when he left me at my house, he didn't want to be at the beach alone. I told him to go to a bookstore and get a few books and read them on the beach. That sounds like heaven to me.

My dad didn't do that.

My dad still can't believe that neither myself nor my sister had the gumption to just take a week off of work to keep our dad company at the beach. My dad can't believe how boring my sister and I are. Boring, and functional. One day my dad will have to accept us as we are. We've accepted him as he is for some time now, after all.