Running for Your Life: A Congressional Run II

So you want to live in Park Slope department: Overheard on Seventh Avenue and Prospect Place, “Okay. I’ll pick up the poop, you park, then call me back.”

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Mapquest and Google Maps and every other free online trip detailer must be in cahoots with GPS makers because these Web services flat out do not give directions that can be followed by a reasonable person making reasonable decisions based on the breadth of useless facts and scarcity of essential information they come up with.

I’m in Vanya driving the streets of Washington, waiting for the next stall-out. Listening, when, thirty minutes after having arrived, zooming past RFK Stadium and still I am no closer to K, who lives within sight of the Capitol Building, she tells me. I pull over into yet another restricted parking area, across the road from a Hyatt, and I’m thinking – it’s funny how you can have thoughts that minutes later seem absurd – that K and J’s apartment is on a grid far, far away, not anywhere close to me and the Hyatt, and, maybe, in another time, that grid will be closer but now it may as well be on another planet, so I will point Vanya to the road home and come back when it is closer to Earth, annoyed that K and I are both so directionally challenged, that we will not be able to find the precise place where Vanya will be comfortably situated next, or close enough, to K and J’s place on a letter street in the elusive SE Zone, but that moment like an errant thundercloud passes and not long after there she is, K, jumping up and down because she sees the salt-covered Vanya and I must be inside – and Vanya hops to it, Brooklyn-drives head-on into a stream of DC traffic that wisely yields to the parking Vanya, parallel and directly in front of K’s new home.

It’s been twelve days since Thurber, K and J drove off to DC in a U-Haul and K and I do what’s expected, a big Father-Daughter hug, then Thurber jumps up on me – and I count – twelve times. It was his practice at each of our greetings for the four months he lived in Brooklyn to jump up on me a single time to say hello before going about his various business, so to compensate he does a twelver before he finally scoots away and leaves me be.

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The next morning it’s clear but not too cold, almost shorts weather, and I suit up for a run and leash Thurber to go with me. In January, the crowds in DC are thin. A squad car idles in front of the Library of Congress and there’s a few joggers (Not long to see that DC’s a southern town, K and my first stop after leaving Vanya is We, The Pizza, a Pennsylvania Avenue dining salon with Pre-Prohibition Beer on tap and upstairs seating, whites in the hard plastic chairs, blacks in service), Thurber and I loping down Capitol Hill – the dome built on a little hill, otherwise it’s flat as a cutting board – through a barrier that’s not exactly clear that dogs are allowed, about a stone’s throw from the Capitol grounds where an African America woman police officer smiles and says as I pass with Thurber, “Good morning, sir.”

I pause to look out over the wide expanse of the mall, and Thurber jerks ahead and the leash falls to the ground. He’s off and I can’t get him. I call his name loudly, but he gallops away. Crowds gather. Not far ahead is the Washington Monument, and beyond the Lincoln Memorial. I imagine Thurber racing off, tourist photographers snapping pictures, police mobilized. I imagine K never speaking to me again. But who has a better right to run these fields, this symbol of freedom and liberty, than Thurber, more coon hound, an original American breed, than anything else, and I’m wondering just how many cameras are getting this on film, he really could go rogue, past the Smithsonian Institutions, beyond Independence Avenue, all these other roads named after American states and places and moments in history and I’m hoping Thurber does something ironic for crying out loud, which he does when he does his crouch to take a crap with the Capitol Building in the background, and I’m sorry I didn’t give the Japanese tourists who got that photo my email address because I would’ve surely posted THAT picture up on my blog today, but I’m preocuppied with releashing him, picking up with a plastic bag and then running, looking for the right trash receptacle – not recyclable, maybe compost – because on the Original Strip Mall there are trash barrels of every conceivable type, and I’m smiling thinking the J tourists are now getting a shot of me running with Thurber and a bag of shit, toward the needlescape of the Washington Monument, and beyond my favorite, the Lincoln Memorial, elevated on a “hill” to parallel the Capitol one, where now, a bit to the southeast K is asleep, finally dogless on an Aerobed in the middle of her cute apartment with a fireplace, J bringing firewood last night after twelve hours at his restaurant, K gathering kindling from their backyard, so Southern!, stageset from “Streetcar,” I’m thinking the version I saw with M and K in 2005 but not too hard because Blanche will come to mind, and the tragedy of the sudden death of the actor who played her, Natasha Richardson, a cautionary tale that when it comes to your health don’t second-guess, listen to your body, don’t “tough” it out, for God’s sake.

Thurber is off. Like Brooklyn. As if he knows these pathways. Even that we must veer to a single lane en route to the Lincoln Memorial, packs of tourists and the running is a little dicier on this beautiful, clear, cold-enough day; snow on the ground and I’m thinking Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven,” as I scoot along and off the pedestrian path to the gnarled roots and ice patches, the only way to keep going, around the tourist clots with guides that suddenly stop, but Thurber pulls hard on the leash when he senses woodlands, foot pads to tiny brain and genetic code that shouts plains, trees, underbrush, ponds and meadow; funny Thurber can be fast-walking, almost teasing me, slowing on asphalt, then even the hint of ground and tree root – and he’s bounding, so that it’s all I can do to hold on to the leash, sure that in a second, I’m down on my face, sprawled before even getting to the place where Lincoln is waiting.

Next: Central Park, the Half-Marathon