Running for Your Life: Curse-Mudgeon

Rain, sleep-inducing humidity, Thurb! training imperatives combined to keep us off the country road this past weekend. We’d planned a ride north with the hound for apple-picking and cider-sampling, the wide-open spaces of upstate New York. (Why do I keep thinking Fresh Kills but it’s Something-Kills or –Kill, not a landfill site, but maybe that partially explains why we stayed put. Inertia, ironically enough, is a powerful force, isn’t it?)

Maybe it’s my time of life. Now that I’m closer to sixty than fifty. Are you still middle-aged at 60? And this curmudgeon-y self isn’t about transference, that I’m upset about aging things: aches and pains, indigestion, sleeping problems. Fact is, I’m in great shape. Except for a half-hour of morning stiffness, I start each day more like a typical twentysomething than a typical fiftysomething.