City Running: Seeing the Sadness

This morning on my run I saw a dead cat on the path. And that was not the saddest thing I saw.

Tito's listening?
Near the train station in Zagreb

I love running in the city--any city--and have had many adventures this year. A couple of runs along the Tiber in Rome, where there were tented homeless encampments, but also construction workers preparing for festival season by building booths on the riverbank.

A run in Zagreb early on a very hot morning, very few people about, featuring sober and silly public art projects.

I took a long and beautiful--if slightly dusty--run in the countryside in Russia. I stopped to drink from a natural spring and was passed by a silent Russian man, dressed in a proper outfit for the country--high rubber boots, long pants, a jacket--and carrying a bunch of birch branches over his shoulder. I saw him ... and then I didn't. If he had been in a Russian film or novel he would have earned the sobriquet "vechnyi ded," Eternal Grandfather, as in the Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky film Siberiade that I made my students watch earlier in the year.

Eternal Grandfather

Disappearing silently into the woods

But this morning I was running in Philadelphia, along one of my favorite routes. The Schuylkill River Trail has been a huge amenity for Philadelphians ever since it was opened--I myself have watched the birch trees grow to full height over the years. Gorgeous landscaping, a great pathway for walking to the Art Museum, biking to Manyunk or the Wissahickon forest, or indeed running. No matter how early you head out for your run, there are always other people on the trail.

And inevitably there are a few people sleeping rough. Morning runners get used to this--I've even seen it on the bike trail I run on in Yellow Springs, Ohio. I don't know when I first began to observe how the homeless manage overnight, probably when I became an urban runner. It's tough. People often cover up with a blanket or sleeping bag even on sultry mornings, for the privacy more than anything, and they have their belongings around them, in roller suitcases or bags or both.

Which is why I just ran past the dead cat this morning. It was nowhere near its home, I'm sure--I saw it on the other side of the Penn athletic fields, not too far from the Schuylkill Expressway. It may be that some undergraduate gave up his lease for the summer and released the cat into the neighborhood, thinking it would be able to fend for itself. In the end, it couldn't.

Market Street, Philadelphia

Sad, but not as sad as what I saw a few minutes earlier on the Market Street bridge. The new improvements there feature benches with planters, and inevitably at 7 a.m. those benches serve as sleeping spots for homeless people trying to catch some zzzs before the pedestrians begin to flow by on their way to work.

The guy I saw this morning was sucking his thumb while he slept.

It was fully inserted into his mouth. I'd never seen a grown up suck his thumb like that. This man could clearly use some services. I wished I could encourage him into a van, take him somewhere for a shower and a decent bed, offer him some food and perhaps some mental health attention. I even wished I could just make a phone call to facilitate some or all of that.

Instead I ran on. But I will remember this sight, the saddest sight I've seen in a long time. I hope he finds some cooler shelter today. It's headed to 95 degrees.

Cool as a cucumber in Zagreb, Croatia

Sober Reflections on the Current State of Russia

UPDATE: Evan Gershkovich, with other American and Russian political prisoners, was freed on August 1. As someone posted somewhere, we can rejoice that our people are out and the Russians have received murderers and spies in return. The optics of Evan's (and Alsu's) rushed trials to make sure to convict before the trade deal went through are bad... but then, what is good out of Russia these days? Trying not to despair. This good news is something anyway. Just over five years ago, I found myself with ten days on my hands in Europe. I had taken a group of 20+ students to Hungary and Poland, and I was due to participate in a conference in Croatia. There was a window. Any normal person would head straight to the beaches of the Dalmatian Coast. Instead, I went to Rome, to John Cabot's Guarini Institute , where we held a panel on the topic of 30 years after 1989 ... and then I went to Russia. Musing on the former Soviet Union and my time there as a student--especially after wat...

RIP Randy Nolde

In everyone's life there is a teacher who motivated her to try harder, strive for more, reach beyond. Or in my case, a teacher who teased, goaded, poked, pried, laughed, lampooned, and somehow created an atmosphere where I was ready to work my tail off to make him proud. Randy Nolde, we will miss you. Mr. Nolde was my Russian teacher in high school. I first got to know him as a younger person -- the Russian Club Banquet was quite the event in my home town, and my grandmother used to take us regularly even before my sister enrolled in Russian language class. Every year, the high school cafeteria underwent a magical metamorphosis. Huge murals of scenes from Russia -- fantastic, colorful onion-domed churches, and young peasants reaping wheat, and Armenian maidens with long braids and colorful costumes -- hung all around the edges of the room. On the menu: chicken Kiev made by the cafeteria ladies, supplemented with cafeteria salad, but also khachapuri and piroshki made b...

Cringeworthy? Really??

It's so sad. I've gotten my first reaction to my new book. Well, second reaction. My sweet husband was brought to tears reading the introduction (possibly because he remembered just how many drafts of each section of the book, and of all the sections left on the cutting room floor, that he had read, and read, and read before). But now I've heard from a potential reader that his Russian friend-in-exile (and more importantly that friend's teenage son) think the title is кринжовый. Ouch. That hurts. Why do we need Russian literature? Do we? My Polish friend wrote to encourage me when she saw my linked in post about the publication and assured me that SHE and all her friends still love Russian literature ... even and despite the fact that Russians sometimes misbehave. (Some Russians more than others, and sometimes not just misbehaving--the world's reaction to the murder of Alexey Navalny in prison is noteworthy and important. We need to hold those responsible in contem...

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