What up? Me? At 6am? Why? Why is this happening? What’s going on? Curse you day star. Curse you monkey dream. Woke up feeling all pinched and nabbed and grabbed and poked by little wizened monkey hands and couldn’t get back to sleep. Fucking monkeys.
So I got up and shaved and showered the ghostly monkey paws off my body, made breakfast and coffee and took out the recycling. You know. Mundanity packaged into process. I discovered a giant dead cricket sitting next to the remote on the couch. I assume it tried to watch Sharknado and died in the attempt. Huge cricket though. Dispose of cricket corpse. I packed everything for this next run last night, so there’s much stuff to shuffle around but I shuffle it anywho. I answer emails and answer Facebook messages and by 7.30 can legit pretend I’ve run out of things to do.
Three hours later we’re rolling out and by now we’re running alongside the Susquehanna River somewhere shy of Williamsport. My Dad grew up around here and my childhood consisted of driving up this route a couple of times a year. I Loved it. My mom hated it.
She said she didn’t like Pennsylvania and it wasn’t till years later that I understood there was a lot more to it than that. It’s a beautiful stretch of road and far more relaxing than the I-95 corridor that we frequent (and that we’ll unfortunately have to take on our way back home). Blasted rock faces, the river low in its bed exposing bleached boulders and white water. We’re coming up to exits for Selinsgrove, PA where we scattered my father’s ashes. His birthday’s tomorrow. He would’ve been 72.
