Today Tanja walked 2 1/2 miles!

In the before times, she was in the habit of meeting her friend at the track and walking for a little exercise and camaraderie. So today they met again, in the spirit of renewal, and they set off with no stated goal. Ten laps later Tanja decided she’d done enough. They used to go for twelve laps, so this was an excellent first showing. Now, it is possible that, back in the day, Tanja would get to the track early so she could run a mile as a warm up. And she might bust out another run in the afternoon. But this blog is focused on progress and a 2.5 mile walk counts as great, tangible progress.

Tanja also made the bed today. I hasten to add that I have really been trying to make the bed on the regular because I know how much she prefers getting into a nicely made bed. And I have come to accept that my whole “why spend time neatening a thing that you are, by definition, just going to rumple again” attitude is simply laziness masquerading as logic and would, if taken as an operating principle, lead to the downfall of everything we hold dear in modern civilization. So, yes, I’ve been making the bed on the regular, as I said, but these days the bed gets so much use and at such varied times that it can be hard to keep up. So when I came up tonight and discovered it all pulled together, instead of feeling like I’d dropped the ball, I got a feeling, hard to describe, but sort of like, well, everything’s gonna be alright.

So we go to bed tonight as upbeat as we’ve been all week. I was going to share a poem that has been stuck in my head for a while, but all of a sudden I’m thinking about a song I first heard blasting out of a open dorm window on a warm fall day in ’79. At the time I understood it–erroneously, comically, predictably–to be a paean to the bachelor life. It took me another 40 years to realize that it is–exactly opposite–all about being strong together.