A Bit of Perspective

This has been a day for the crapper. Work sucked on so many levels and if I were to vent my feelings here tonight, I'd be on the unemployment line tomorrow. Freedom of speech ain't unlimited, folks. Because of events, I withdrew myself from consideration for the promotion for reasons not to be repeated here. I was really looking forward to working today out of my system.

Man Plans, God Laughs.

I was making a turn near the college, barely breaking a sweat, when Dollar dechained. No big. I fixed it before, except this was a major dechain. The gear switching mechanism on a Trek 800 is a Suntour crank and it uses a Shimano 21-speed for shifting. I have no idea what that means. On the other hand, I could see the shifting gear was making a mess of things. After working and cussing for half an hour, I got Dollar juryrigged to the point where he could pedal in a middle-low gear, so I biked home at a big whopping 10.8 miles an hour.

And that was nearly as frustrating as my day at work! There was a time I was proud of going that "fast" over a long period of time, but now it's a snail's pace. My legs were telling my brain to pick up the pace all the way down Mountain but that wasn't going to happen. In other words, instead of working today out of my system, my frustration doubled with no outlet on hand.

*Deep breath*

I need a heavy dose of perspective. No one I know is (a) dying of cancer, (b) living in Pakistan or the Gulf Coast, and (c) Liz probably won't do a Lorena Bobbitt on me next time I'm in a drunken stupor. The point is things could be terrifically worse in many different ways, but they're not. We got bills up the yin-yang, but if that's as bad as things get for us, we're blessed. And I should know because things have been really bad at times and This is not one of those times.

Something's been bouncing around in the back of brain. Please allow for a little non-fictional literature...

He was an old man and it was an old bench. His body sat down, trying to catch his breath. He failed and he died on that bench.

This was not an ordinary old man. He was a convict at the prison where I'm a part-time teacher. I never knew his name or the crime that sent him to that place and I never will, because his records were probably sealed and duct-taped before his humans remains found their last home. What I do know was the old man was a long-time inmate, so his life was already boxed and regulated by the State long before he died. Like many other inmates, he had no choice in where he slept, what he ate and wore, and when he bled.

Did he know when he sat down that last time, that he would not bodily rise from that old piece of park bench? Another inmate told me the old man been sick for a while, spending more time inside the prison infirmary than outside it. Just maybe he'd been told there was no saving him, so he was allowed to make the final choice. If so, it's possible he asked to be released from his hospital bed because he wanted to die like men should die when they can't touch their loved ones: outside under the open blue sky.

So where is he now? Does he have a grave next to a wife he could visit in life only through reinforced glass? Do his children visit the grave to lay flowers upon it or do they tell their friends he was lost in a faraway accident? Or is he resting in a 21st century potter's grave, with no marker for him or the hundreds of his unwanted peers?

In any case, the bench sits inside the main gate of the prison, a few yards from the outside world. With his last breaths, the old man died there in the sun, in a place that was so tantalizingly close to freedom. I imagine his spirit got up from that old bench and walked out the main gate one last time, and I hope he never looked back.



Distance: 5.5 miles
Time: 30:19 minutes
283 calories burned
Six days until the USN