am--7.5 Loop around Santa Clara w/ a fast finish. My achilles/heel felt ok most of the week, but when I got back to running a little faster, it started to bark at me a bit. Don't know how to handle the stiffness. It really gets me down. RHR--48.
The next book: The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich. This is a book of connected essays from a writer who went to Wyoming to make a documentary and stayed. She is able to make the common engaging and the uncommon universal. I haven't had enough reading about the West in my life recently, and this was refreshing. A few quotes:
"So much of in American life has had a corrupting influence on our requirements for social order. We live in a culture that has lost its memory. Very little in the specific shapes and traditions of our grandparents' pasts instructs us how to live today, or tells us who we are or what demands will be made on us as members of society . . . With our burgeoning careers and families, we want to join up, but it's difficult to know how or where. The changing conditions of life are no longer assimilated back into a common watering trough" (103).
"Incongruity delights him as much as tradition. 'We assimilate a little this way, and a little that way. Life is only mutation'" (120).
The book makes me want to move somewhere like Beaver.
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