Sputnik is overhead.

Sixty years ago today, I came home from kindergarten and my mother was at the stove in the kitchen of our house, making my lunch. I don't have a lot of memories from this period of my life but this image is locked in.

My mom told me that the Russians had put a sputnik into space and it was flying overhead even at that moment.  I had no idea what a sputnik was, or what the import of what she said was or even what it meant, but her tone, reflecting concern and momentousness, and the unusualness of her talking world events with me, a kindergartener, made this brief interaction forever frozen in time in my memory bank.

This started in lockstep the space race, because we were behind, for awhile, the Russkies, the supposed missile gap, the specter of hordes of Russian tanks sweeping over Western Europe and the Cold War, which we might still be in, after a brief pause for detente. This was the paranoid fifties, when we huddled under our schoolhouse desks with our arms covering our heads during nuclear attack drills.

In this period of mass murders and massive hurricanes, it seems like it was a quaint era back then.  My classroom five years later was on the 3d floor of a schoolhouse five miles from what would have been ground zero for a hydrogen bomb airburst over Manhattan; my wooden desk and flesh forearms would have saved my life in such an event for sure.

Chicago is in...

...four days. Yikes!

Currently I am sick. I have a terrible head cold. I ran five miles today and it exhausted me. I couldn't breathe. All the discharge from my sinuses ran down my throat. I bubbled as I ran along.

I have a doctor's visit scheduled for tomorrow.

Last week I was in Colorado on an exhausting series of depositions in a contentious case. Opposing counsel is, well, I'll be charitable and say nothing. Opposing counsel mentioned the nuclear sanction (a bogus threat) of Rule 11. That's how the case is being defended.

Flying back from Denver on Friday, when the plane set down at Dulles at midnight, I thought one of my ear drums was going to burst. My head was so stuffy I couldn't make my ear pop no matter what I did.

I'm getting ready to fly back to Denver next week for more depositions. Oh, that's after I fly to Chicago on the day after tomorrow to run a marathon.

In the last ten days, I have run eleven miles.

This is how I currently feel about running in the upcoming marathon in the city on the lake.

Can you picture what will be
So limitless and free
Desperately in need of
some stranger's hand
In a desperate land

Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain
And all the children are insane
All the children are insane
Waiting for the summer rain
There's danger on the edge of town
Ride the king's highway
Weird scenes inside the goldmine
Ride the highway West baby

Ride the snake
Ride the snake
To the lake
To the lake

The ancient lake baby
The snake is long
Seven miles
Ride the snake

He's old
And his skin is cold
The west is the best
The west is the best
Get here and we'll do the rest

The blue bus is calling us
The blue bus is calling us
Driver, where you taking us?

I think I'm freaking out. Do you suppose Jim Morrison knew what it was like to run a marathon?