the metropolis and mental life

My wife and I woke up at 6 this morning (our usual time but a time unusual for a holiday)for separate predawn runs, she recovering from last night's 14 and I out for ten at a decent clip. The loop took me around the empty main streets of the neighborhood and briefly into the vacant downtown in ways that always remap the city of birth for me, turning it into a grid of pure geography, mere physical miles of streets over which to lay a morning ten. Places that in thought and memory seem far from home seem, when running, almost inconveniently close, maybe a mere 1/2 mile or mile away. To loop west to the public junior high school, down town, and back across the bridge with the WPA statues measures a mere four miles or so. The neighborhood streets are closely gridded, each block less than .1 miles long. More later. It started snowing toward the end of my run, and the snow continues to fall peacefully. I have to shower now.