Walking Uphill in the Wind

I have a friend who loves distance running and he has no problem working against a 20 mile per hour wind in the Boston Marathon. He recently ran a five day race inCosta Rica. I think its safe to say that he’s made for resistances. He knows how to take them inside himself and convert oppositions to opportunities.

I admire this more than I can easily say. I want to be a runner of   sideways or spindrift forces. For myself the matter is more inside the man. I want to be a local Pythagoras who changes the numbers he must endure. I’ve been carrying perfect numbers up a long hill. I’ve been carrying them all my life. I imagine you have as well. The numbers are stiff, grey, elastic, green, revelatory, silent, futuristic or steeped in the past. Oh but they are always heavy. I walk uphill in the sunlight of late spring and the numbers are no lighter today than they were in my youth. I was a lonely child. Blind. Often in solitude. I am lonesome now. I am so very lonely. I imagine you are just as alone. We are, each of us carrying our weighted numbers against the seasonal winds. 

I remember as a boy listening to my grandmother’s 78 rpm records. She had a recording of the Red Army chorus singing some kind of Stalinist anthem and I would play the thing over and over in her dark parlor and see in my mind’s eye a boy’s idea of a forested brotherhood though I did not attach faces or uniforms to it–the brotherhood was synesthesia. My brothers were blue and hemlock green like the trees. And in this way my brothers became numbers I could carry beneath my shirt. Little Stalinist-Pythagorean chorus numbers of a wished for identity. I played the record repeatedly.

Now firmly in middle age I walk in all seasons feeling the losses as they accrue. I like people but cannot understand them. Perhaps this is because I cannot see their faces. Perhaps its because I am meant to be solitary although I have a talent for conversation at least some of the time. I like it when others succeed. I know they are walking with their own numbers, those cobalt and watery integers of loss and wishful meanings that are privately heavy as all valuable things. I wish I could be Pythagoras. Could tell others what their secret numbers will give them if they sing in the proper keys.

Our job is to sing our numbers and run without a chorus. Or say the wind is chorus enough.

Or the numbers are my chorus: all gravity and teeth and the labored breath.

S.K.

Author: stevekuusisto

Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University View all posts by stevekuusisto