Lent

It’s Lent. I’m not Catholic but my wife is what she calls a secular Catholic. If we had children I imagine they’d be of mixed origin, reluctant Catholics. This is good. I can get behind the secularization of any religion, really. It’s silent, private, and occasional. My wife still votes liberally. She champions birth control and women’s rights. She’s still all-American.

As the spouse of a Catholic I’m not obligated to alter my life for forty days. I don’t feel any compulsion to give up chocolate chips or pork chops. My life, more or less, will go on as normal. I’ll continue to shave every morning. Some nights, I’ll have a beer before bed. On the best nights, I’ll have a glass of Jameson or (God bless it!) Johnny Walker.

That’s not to say that I’m not affected by my wife’s decisions. For Lent, Julia has decided to go to bed an hour earlier every night, get up an hour earlier every morning, and push through a run just as the sun is breaking above the eastern horizon. To me, this is a blessing.

If I want to swim at the university’s recreation center, where I do all of my indoor training, I have to get there as early as possible, slip out of my clothes and into my shorts, swim a few slapdash laps, then shower before heading off to work at the university’s Writing Center across campus. I have to get there early so that I can be at work at a decent hour. Most importantly, though, I have to get there before the most ambitious freshmen and sophomores, who still live in dorm rooms just a few blocks from the rec center, shuffle in, because the rec center only has four swimming lanes and if I end up sharing a lane, I’m afraid I’ll crash into someone much more fluid, much more graceful, than me.

But most mornings I don’t swim. Most mornings I run. Even before this week, before Julia and I decided to hobble our way out of bed at six a.m., I got the most joy lacing up my shoes in the morning and setting out on the streets of Fort Collins just as my body was springing to life. I hate to get soft here, but there’s something purple and romantic about pounding your feet into the pavement when a lot of the world is still brooding over their first cup of coffee.

This is even truer at six in the morning when the night is still hanging around, refusing, just yet, to leave. At that hour there are only a handful of minutes left to savor the near dark, the silence. The few people you pass by, you share a certain kinship with, especially other runners, or cyclists, or even those out walking their dogs. They, like you, know what it means to still be half-dazed from sleep and trying to catch a glimpse of something beautiful before your mind is awake enough to register what that something is.

Today’s the first day of Lent and we’ve been waking up at six a.m. for less than a week and it feels like a honeymoon.

As runners, Julia and I have different goals. I like to run longer than she does. This morning I eagerly dressed myself to run, slammed down half a cup of coffee, gave her a kiss, then took off out the door just as she was getting dressed. Fort Collins has several miles of intersecting bicycle paths that cut through town. You can get on them and just go without hitting a street for several miles. At six in the morning there are few people on the paths and they make for good running. I hopped on, heading east, following the curves toward the rising sun. Already, the blue-black of the night was turning pink beyond the tree line and I wanted to run and run, heading toward the east, toward the sun, as if it might be the last day on Earth, as if there wouldn’t be another sunrise tomorrow morning.

I’ll never know what it means to be Catholic, to carry around that faith like an heirloom. Or what Lent means, what it feels like to sacrifice a piece of yourself year after year, to seek penance through self-denial. But that’s ok. I can live with that.

I may grow weary of traipsing through my mornings at a brisker pace than most people see throughout their days, but for now, at least, it’s worth relishing.

Swim Lessons

At thirty-three, I’m learning to swim.

When I called my mother and told her this, that for the first time in my life I’m slipping my bone-thin body into a pool for public swimming lessons, she reminded me that she’d already paid for lessons. That I should already know how to swim. “That was over twenty years ago,” I remind her.

“And you’ve forgotten?”

The truth is I’ve never learned to swim. Not well. Not competitively. I’ve learned to flounder, to kick and punch at the water as if it’s challenging me in a street fight. After three weeks of lessons, I still do that. Only, with more grace.

When I was fourteen, I almost drowned. My friends and I were swimming in the wave pool at Worlds of Fun in Kansas City. The waves crashed on top of me. Then they crashed on top of me again. I panicked. I remember being sucked under, the hazy summer light bobbing on the surface seemed miles away, though I was only submerged enough to catch a mouthful of water before rising for air again. I bobbed. I kicked. I punched. If it was a street fight, I was losing.

I wanted to warble out a scream. But to do so would require more breath. When a middle-aged woman with bruises on her ankles floated by on a tube, I grabbed the slick rubbery thing and held on for my life.

Now, I’m learning to swim. Every week (for three consecutive weeks now!) I pay my fees at the Mulberry Pool and swim. I’m learning to kick, but with my legs streamlined and fluid. I’m learning to use my chest as a buoy. I’m learning to pivot and turn and breathe. I’m learning not to punch the water. I’ll never win that fight, anyway.

When I told my wife that I’m learning the fundamentals of the breast stroke, she corrected me. “That’s freestyle, babe.”

I’ve gotten more serious. I bought a Speedo. I make sure my face and head are shaved every morning (though I ignore that my chest and legs are covered in wild fur) so as to prevent drag.

This week, I swam my first twenty-five. That’s a whole half a lap.

The delectable, exquisite Italian Greyhound - Luca.