I wake up at 7 a.m. The sliding glass door that leads to our deck is always slightly ajar, even in the icy bowels of winter. Our apartment gets too hot otherwise, and I don’t sleep well if I’m sweating.
(It’s a privileged problem, I know, being too warm in December in New York City. I see the homeless woman who camps out on the F train platform every morning. I know how lucky I am.)
The hardest part about motivating myself to get up and go for a run in these cold months is putting on my layers of spandex–first the shorts, then the leggings, then the turtleneck–and wrapping my head, hands and feet to minimize the loss of body heat. Once I’m suctioned into my Under Armor, the rest is usually pretty easy. I stretch a bit, lace up my sneakers, connect my earbuds to my phone and head down the five flights that separate my studio apartment from the Brooklyn tundra. If I can just get myself dressed, then I’m good to go.
By the time I reach to the sidewalk, I’m there, psyched up and ready to tackle five or fifteen miles. Once my feet start kicking–and I don’t care how far I’m going–I never want to stop. Everything moves more easily when I’m running—my legs, my arms, my breath, my thoughts.
Running as a metaphor has been done, beaten, murdered, brought back to life and then killed again by pretty much anyone who’s ever condescended to self-identify as a writer. So forgive/indulge/berate me for saying that running is a lot like life. It’s a lot like a lot of things, actually. Anguish in preparation, reward in execution.
I like running before work. Clear my mind and pretend for an hour or so that I’m Mariah Carey or Jennifer Hudson or—don’t judge me—Michael Bolton. The music that fuels me is popppppy. Bombastic hooks and major chords are my best friends on the trail, because happy music makes for happy runs.
Today, I listened to the finale from Pippin.
Think about the sun, Pippin/
Think about her golden glance/
How she lights the world up/
Well now it’s your chance.
The first time I listened to the Pippin finale while running was in September. I went home to Boston for my aunt Babsie’s funeral, and it came onto my shuffle. I’d never thought to run to it before, but for whatever reason, I decided to let it play that day. Babsie was in so many ways the brightest and most consistent light in my life, and when I heard those lyrics that day, I felt a healing take hold. The song became a message to honor her, to carry on the positive spirit she influenced throughout her life.
Whenever I hear it now, I think of Babsie, and I run a little faster, breathe a little deeper, smile a little wider. I miss her so so so much, but I love to think about her while I’m out for a run, because I can entertain her memory for longer periods of time. When it gets too painful, I just run through the hurt, rather than suppress it; stomp the sadness into submission. I don’t know what this looks like to the people I pass. It’s a pretty aggressive process in my body, and I’m sure I look as crazy as I feel. Whatever.
Babsie loved the Brooklyn Bridge. She said she walked across it when she visited my grandmother’s cousin Connie, who moved to New York from Hawaii after the attack on Pearl Harbor, where her husband was stationed.
“Oh god, must’ve been back in the 40s that I visited Brooklyn anyway,“ Babsie told me. "She lived on Flatbush Avenue. Do you know where that is? Connie’s apartment was across from a church and next to a Chinese food place, do you know what I’m talking about? Well that’s where she lived. And she took me to the Brooklyn Bridge, and I tell ya, it was the most beautiful thing I ever saw.”
The morning after Babsie died, I went for a run across the Brooklyn Bridge, crying and laughing along the way. Now it has become another thing that reminds me of her, another symbol of potential I’ve yet to realize, light I’ve yet to share. It tells me that Babsie wanted me to make good, and so good is always my goal.
The way I can make the most good is by writing. Right now, I’m writing this and thinking about how, when I get home from work tonight, I’m going to finish a scene for a show I’m working on with my writing partner. It’s a musical, something we’ve been working on for nearly six years. In that time, it has gone through many incarnations, but the original structure remains in tact, even if the interior completely has been gutted.
I participated in a workshop with playwright Andrea Ciannavei over the summer. She’s spectacular, and something she said changed my fundamental approach to writing: “Don’t be afraid to blow it up and start from scratch.” So, that’s what my writing partner and I have done—demolished our show so that we might start anew.
We had characters, a plot (however reductive or ill fitting), and some really nice music. But we realized our show didn’t have a point, a theme, a thing that we could say, “This is what it’s all about.” I’ve been searching for that thing for a long time—it’s been at least two years since a friend pointed out that it was missing—and this morning, running on the Brooklyn Bridge, listening to the Pippin finale, thinking about Babsie, I finally found it. I looked up at the sun, and boom, it hit me.
The point of our show, it’s ours now, and all we have to do is earn it. The preparation has been six years in the making. It’s time to execute.
–Tommy
© 2013 Tommy Jordan O’Malley
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