Tarmac Meditations #174: The Road Goes On Forever?

What follows is a Facebook update that I wrote this morning, wanting to be publicy pleased with walkng for some distance over terrain. I chose the image because it appealed to me. After I posted it I realized I had gone walking today because I had just heard that a very good friend of mine, with whom I had once danced under a full moon to a “tune that was a hit before her mother was born,” had suddenly passed away.

We had been overlooking English bay, after midnight in the spring. It suddenly seemed such a long long time ago. I needed to get outside and breathe. When I came back I wrote the post, and as you can see it had less to do with walking and my physical improvements and more to do with the grinding reality of Tarmac Meditations in my life:

“I wanted a cappuccino after I did my little lifting routine (2x). I had learned before all this lifting happened that a longtime, good friend of mine, a fierce, wicked smart, loyal Prairie tough kind of gal had suddenly passed away, much too young. ‘Oh no, goddammit’, my first thought. Walking to the store became my necessary and sufficient choice for remembering. I walked to the local market to get the coffee. Then I walked back, downhill one way, uphill the other. The image came to mind and finding it cheered me, but it needled me as well. Maybe the ‘road goes on forever’, but with apologies to Robert Earl Keen, the party (?) comes to an end. ‘Life is a century’, Gregory Corso once wrote, ‘Death an instant’.
RIP Sharon Riis (1947 -2016).”

Image Credit

Photos by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.