I’m sitting at this picnic table at a repurposed lumber mill a short drive north of San Francisco. Drinking a turmeric latte and reading my favorite book. No, that’s the wrong word. My most important book. It’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami. People like to say “I’ve seen it, no joke, 20 times” about that movie they’ve seen six times. Realistically, this is the 11th or 12th time I’ve read this book — a sort of memoir of Murakami’s life as a runner and a writer — since it was published in English in 2008. That’s the year I quit my job as an editor to write full-time. So, once a year or so, now that I’m doing the math.
I tend to pull down my hardcover copy of this book whenever my practice of being a writer requires a jolt. Or when my general morale vis-à-vis being a human being needs a lift. Murakami writes about the twin solitary crafts of running and writing. If you can overlook the vast gulf between our talent as writers, I think he and I are a lot alike. So it helps me, when my own writing and/or running is sputtering on fumes, to read Murakami’s private thoughts as he navigates similar struggles.
Anyways, I’m reading this book. The one I read once a year or so to feel better about being alive. The one that I use to jump-start my self-confidence when I’m scraping the bottom of the fuel tank. And suddenly I’m crying.
I cry what’s always felt to me like a slightly above average amount for a person of my general demographics. A white guy. College educated. Comfortably middle class for most of my life. I usually cry in private. Today there are about a dozen people around me, sitting at their own fancy woodworked tables, drinking coffee. Chatting with a friend or reading their phones. I don’t make any sobbing noises. I’m glad to be wearing my reading glasses, though I don’t think anyone would notice even if I wasn’t. Pay no attention to the guy sitting quietly with a book, crying.
I’m here today, reading alone, because I was able to take my toddler to her preschool for the first time in a week. She was the 6th of 8 kids to get sick, plus the teacher. For all I know the other two have been out sick the past week, too. The ten days she spent in school before a legacy coronavirus tore through her classroom of mask-wearing two-year-olds were the first days a qualified professional has cared for my daughter since she was born. Up until now, it’s been my primary vocation. I have no professional training in being a caregiver. I never exactly trained to be a writer, either. I just kind of started doing it. But I haven’t written anything new in two years.
So, yeah. Turmeric latte. Murakami memoir. Quiet tears. Not the incredibly loud crying I did a year ago, wearing an N100 gas mask with charcoal filters in the front seat of our newly leased car parked outside my friend’s apartment building in Cole Valley, after I’d dropped my cats to live with her while my wife and I flew our baby on a transcontinental flight – in the middle of a global pandemic – to flee apocalyptic wildfire smoke and seek shelter with my wife’s parents for what turned out to be nine long months of Covid winter in rural Canada. That night I cried so loud that, even through the industrial-grade filtration mask, I’m pretty sure everyone within three city blocks could hear me. And I’m still sorry they had to hear it. That was a violent, mournful wailing. The sound of a middle-class white guy’s existential collapse.
Today’s tears are prettier. Less offensive. Sure, they’re triggered by the same general thought I had last year: “I don’t understand why life needs to be so hard sometimes.” But this time I’m not working through them alone in my car at night. Instead I’m experiencing them with my friend Haruki. He’s writing about the first time he ran nearly 26 miles, from Athens to Marathon, on assignment for a Japanese men’s magazine in the summer of 1983. The run’s going well until he hits the 23 mile mark, at which point he beings to hate everything: he gets angry at the sheep munching grass along the side of the road, angry at a staff photographer snapping photos from the accompanying van, angry at the blazing naked sun even though it’s only just past 9am.
After struggling through those feelings of depletion and rage for three more miles, focusing on just putting one foot in front of the other, he reaches the end. The Marathon monument at the entrance to the village of the same name:
Strangely, I have no feeling of accomplishment. The only thing I feel is utter relief that I don’t have to run anymore. I use a spigot at a gas station to cool off my overheated body and wash away the salt stuck to me. I’m covered with salt, a veritable human salt field. When the old man at the gas station hears what I’ve done, he snips off some flowers from a potted plant and presents me with a bouquet. You did a good job, he smiles. Congratulations.
I feel like Haruki Murakami is speaking to me through the page, presenting me a bouquet of hastily snipped flowers: You did a good job, he tells me. Congratulations.