Running Man

I found this post on my Facebook from exactly nine years ago. I couldn't believe I had never transferred it to here before. So, here it is.

If I run through a city, I feel like I own it. On a twenty-four hour stay in London in 2010, I made time for a three-mile run from my modest hotel, the Brunel, a few blocks south to an entrance to Hyde Park, down and around the lake counter-clockwise, then past Speaker's Corner and back again to the Brunel. Walking, sweating the last two blocks.

Tonight, I ran five miles or so through Seattle. I began near Volunteer Park, east down Aloha past Saint Joe's and Holy Names and around the corner onto 23rd. Three songs on the iPod from the start, there was Uncle Ike's pot shop, gleaming on my left. Then past where Ms Helen's used to be, and on to the Garfield complex and Ezell's. Already so much city history, -- such as it is here Out West -- and culture.

On down 23rd and rounding the corner at The Promenade, heading west on Jackson, past the ghosts of Jazz and Blues artists embodied now only in paint on coffee shop windows. I think it was a coffee shop, anyway. Soon that gave way at 12th Avenue to the heart of Little Saigon.

Heading north past Ethiopian restaurants and a place where a friend used to live and the youth jail and Seattle University and all the new bars like The Chieftain, surely hopping on this Saint Paddy's Day and the German place.

Capitol Hill has changed since I last lived here fifteen years ago and more but it's still recognizable in the beer and the grit and the women and men I see as I pass the East Precinct.

There's a stretch of 12th that's still calm and residential that leads to Aloha and up the hill and around the corner, north again onto 14th. Darkly towards the park, the water tower menaces in front and above. Circling the tower toward that big, white mansion (what is that place?) at 14th and Prospect and not long after, I'm at 15th and Aloha again, back where I started.