Coming around the slow curve revealed the view he'd been looking forward to. Between subdivisions ran this treeless street along the crest of the hill, with no houses having been built on one side, where the sidewalk disappeared and the hill dropped away. Jake could run along the edge of the asphalt and feel the dried weeds coming up between the cracks, and then crunching beneath his feet. The view filled his vision and looked out across a valley. The Guajome, named by the indigenous people a few hundred years ago. A lot of it was farmland now, and he could see the highway snaking between and around the neatly cropped green hills, off to the east. He could see the suburbs filling the valley from the sea, creating a swath of sienna stucco and burnt orange spanish roofing tile. It ended abruptly, he could see, against the wild land on one side and farmland on the other. It was a shoreline, of sorts. But we were building into the sea.

And there beyond, in the distance, lay the great Sleeping Indian, as he was known. A string of elongated hills, with a roundish, head-shaped rise of the land on one end. It was an otherwise unnoticeable featured terrain, but if someone pointed it out to you, you would see it immediately, and without mistaking it. The Sleeping Indian. There he was, on his back. He'd be miles tall, if ever he was roused, and decided to stand up. And when you thought of the suburbs drawing up to him like a blanket, you realized you knew people that lived at the foot of the Sleeping Indian. And now that he's been pointed out to you, you will never be able to un-see him.

The sight of the view always cleared Jake's head, and the breeze in his face as he ran downhill made the list in his head come to life. New words formed, and combinations of adjectives swam poetically in his head, and he knew that he was writer for sure. And he would speed up, knowing what to put down on paper when he got back to his desk.

Around the corner, and a steep downhill, trying to pick up speed without falling, and without noticing the house on the corner, the one with the fake grass. He hated that grass, laying out there, fading in the sun. There was nothing real about it, unless plastic was real, he thought. And he knew for certain every inch of it. He knew because he put it there.

Burrows Greenscape was his business. A small, "family" business. Just him and his dear wife, selling fake grass to the sun-drenched southland. Just think of the advantages of artificial turf! Why, the government was even offering rebates if you installed the stuff. Get rid of those water-sucking plants in your yard and put in this stuff. Lose the sprinklers entirely! Think of the money you'll save!

He hated it. Hated everything about it. Its soulessness, its fakeness, its inability to grow and thrive. The mere idea of it was an insult to God, he was sure. But it was a living. He came into the business on a whim, years back, when he was down on his luck. Digging ditches came easy to him, it seemed. He had worked construction while he was in college, and knew that there would always be a job in it, so he felt that he'd always have that to fall back on, if college didn't work out, that is. Years later, when he got married and walked out of that coffee show forever, he applied for his contractor's license, and went into construction full time. Someone showed him the fake lawn product, and he did it on a whim, entertained by the thought of it -it was so absurd.

But he did good work, and was semi-reliable. The mark-up on the stuff was enough to make a decent living off of, and here, years later, he found  himself laying lawn after lawn of fake, plasticene fescue. And his customers were always happy

Most of them were older, and their lawn-mowing years were over. Retirement, for them, came down to sitting under their aluminum patio cover after an afternoon of blowing the leaves off the never-growing lawn. They smiled a lot, and Jake envied them. But he got a good tan out of the work, and all the digging kept him in shape. Still, he felt deep down, somewhere in his soul, that installing fake grass was an affront to God. And here he was rolling the astroturf out over his own neighborhood.

He couldn't help but look at it, as he ran past. He saw the turf coming up on one corner. And a bump in the middle where an old root was that he couldn't (or didn't) remove during the install. He saw the sand collecting on one end, and blowing up on to the driveway. He hoped the customer didn't recognize him running past, and he tried not to notice the grasses' more than ten percent fade rate, which was contrary to the written warranty. It wasn't his fault!

And as he came past, and around and back up the hill to his house, he thought of today's job: another lawn in another part of town. The digging that needed to be done, and how tiring it as going to be in the noonday sun, and how tired he already was, from the run. And why was he out here doing it to himself, anyway?

He was about to step into the boulevard and back across when he saw him there on the other side. The Naked Runner. Little blue shorts today. Running shoes. And, again, no shirt. The man with intent, and at a good clip. Jake kind of admired the pace the guy kept, to be honest, but that clenched jaw and those squinting eyes. That furrowed brow that looked angry, it kept Jake at bay, and he moved up the opposite side of the street until he was past. And then he crossed. Avoiding the naked runner entirely. Don't mess with him, he thought. Best not to get in his way.

And he followed the sidewalk the last few blocks home. Under the pine trees and sidestepping the ankle-busting pinecones that rolled beneath his feet. Past the graffiti laced street sign that he'd been meaning to clean, and around the last corner, over the old manhole cover, up around the gutter and storm drain, and there it caught his eye, as it always does, the old rusty brake drum.

It looked like it had come off a truck a year or so ago, and the weight of it, and it's unobtrusive location away from the walk, left it undisturbed there. No one felt the need to move it, or haul it away. The brake just sat and rusted, there, at the side of the road. Jake tied to make a metaphor out of it, on nearly every run. That here was an abandoned brake, rusting away. That perhaps it was shorn off by someone in the heat of escape, racing to break out out and away from the suburbs. The brakes had come off, and it was no matter. We've got to get out of here, and we've got to go fast. And we're not gonna need that because we ain't planning on stopping.

But that was not the metaphor that stuck in Jake's head. It was quite the contrary. It was a brake, to be sure, but it was frozen in time, and not going anywhere. We'd stopped in the suburbs for repairs, and just plain rusted out. We broke down and stopped forever.

When Jake got home he walked off the sweat a bit before heading inside. And between the curb and his desk was a wash of a thousand little tasks: consider what had to be unloaded and loaded into the truck for the day, get next week's orders in, return a few phone calls and type up those all-important invoices, clean the coffee carafe, pick up the kids' toys -especially the wheeled ones at the top of the stairs- and fill his water bottle for the work day, change into his boots, figure his schedule and get out. It was another busy day, and he'd already blown an hour of it running around the neighborhood. 

As he pulled the truck out of the driveway and headed out of the cul-de-sac, he saw the Naked Runner coming in, full stride. They didn't make eye contact, but Jake remembered that he hadn't gotten around to writing any of it down that morning, and he intended to catch up on it later that night after the kids were put to bed. But he was afraid he'd know just how tired he'd be by then, after a day of digging up old dead grass, and he knew no words would get down on paper tonight either.

Past the elementary school, where his genius daughter was in the second grade. The school had boring, angled, eighties-style architecture, though it was probably built in the nineties. There was a one-way, circular driveway for drop-off and pick-up, and the front office, two doors back, with the attractive and spirited single woman who ran the show, the Principal. She was sharp as a tack, creative, and filled with new ideas, but the task of managing careless parents with high expectations and low personal family discipline always got in the way of her fulfilling the vision she had for the school. She agonized over it.

Up a short hill. Someone had put out a perfectly serviceable reclining lounge chair for the garbage man to haul off, but he never did. It had a worn leather on it, and Jake had noticed it for weeks now. So had a 6th grader. A plump little kid who sat in it every morning with a book and some headphones. He looked as if he was early for school, and just passing the time. Parents must have rushed off to work, and shoed him out of the house, Jake thought. Jake considered that the kid was a reader, and that perhaps he was a bit lonely.

Keep going, hit the first mile, and assess how tired he was. Round another corner and there’s a long, straight stretch, gaining some elevation. Inevitably, he would pass an older Asian woman, in cream pantsuit and a pair of large, old-style headphones. She would walk fast, and Jake would smile and give her a slight wave every time, but the woman never looked at him, even though they passed each other every day.

Not so for the old man making his way in the walker. Always smiling, and moving slow, the man would see Jake coming, lift his arm in greeting, and Jake would pass him before it got halfway up. Then Jake would look back over his shoulder, catching his breath up the hill, and noticed that the man was halfway through turning to greet him. Sometimes, Jake wondered when he arrived home, he worried that twenty minutes later the old man was just finishing up going through the motions of waving hello, and continuing on down the sidewalk with his walker.

Reaching the water towers at the top of the hill, was the highest point in his suburb, and the halfway point on his daily jog. On a clear November day, he could see snow on the mountains to the east, and the ocean horizon to the west. He would take a deep breath and a long look, before he rounded the corner and headed back down, he would quietly thank God for the view, and remind himself what a lucky bastard he was.

Keep running, a slow decline and past an older couple, always smiling, greeting everyone. They both had plastic sacks in one hand, and mechanical grabbing tools to pick up trash. Who knew who they were? These two kind folks picking up trash in the neighborhood, getting some exercise and fresh air. Jake didn’t see them every day, but he did every Wednesday for sure, on trash day, when the garbage truck would rumble and barrel down the avenue, stopping every 25 feet to lower its own grabbing claw, hoisting the can up and over to spill into the back of the truck. It would shake the thing violently, and then slam it back down on the curb and rumble forward, leaving a dervish of lighter-than-air trash swirling in the wind, with the couple coming slowly behind, eager to get at it with their grab-nabbers.

Down the hill some more. Dog owners pulling their leashes close, often stopping entirely until Jake passed, so has not to trip him in a lasso. A woman with two-children in a double-jogger, coming the other way. The kids, bored to death. One of them missing a sock. One of them having tossed a bottle, or a binky, or a little blanket, which Jake would inevitably see on the sidewalk a hundred feet from there.

And then, often, the Beautiful One. The hot girl, bouncing up the street with intent, and a fit, flashy stride that showed off her hips, legs, chest. Jake tried not to stare. Tried to think of his wife. Tried not to smile back, as she always did at him. Trouble, he thought. Sometimes he stayed on the opposite side of the street, to avoid the temptation.

A slow curve, with no houses on one side, so he could look out and see the suburban frontier, and the wild land beyond. His house was right there, facing the sunrise, and with its yard to the west. His was at the boundary of the Development, and he liked it that way. He saw it as a great metaphor, that he was on the fringe of this little society, the edge of this world, the verge of something unknown, and maybe mysterious. He liked living there, and he wondered what he would do when new builders came, and extended the suburban sprawl. He wondered if he would ever move. If he ever could. And where he would go if he did. Not that he’d be able to afford it.

First world problems. It's what Jake Burrows was thinking as he set out on his run and the music didn't immediately kick in on his iPhone. Sometimes there's a delay. He had an app that tracked his running pace, logged his miles, mapped his route, and informed him of his current progress in a friendly, upbeat, HAL 2000 sort of way. "Begin your run," it told him, and then... silence. No music. Just the rustle of the soft hair, brushing against the earbuds, the sound of his Asics hitting the asphalt, and approaching traffic in the distance. And a neighbor's voice.

"Careful. The Naked Runner's out today," Kendra smiled. He heard it loud and clear, grinned, shook his head, and waved as he ran past. 

Jake was not The Naked Runner. This was, rather, the across-the-street neighbor of Kendra, who they'd seen out jogging from time to time. A tall, well-built man in his early fifties, the Naked Runner ran shirtless in a pair of 70's era short-shorts that revealed the upper portion of his muscular, white thighs, in sort of a reverse plumber's crack. No one knew his name, just that he was out running once or twice a week, wearing the same little shorts, and always shirtless. At a cul-de-sac party one summer afternoon, someone referred to the guy as "The Naked Runner", they laughed, and the name stuck.

I'll put it on my list, thought Jake, of Things I See On My Run. This was a running tab of things he intended to get around to write about. To WRITE. As if he could. He gave up writing years ago after he emerged from the forest, and then he married his girlfriend and moved here, to the suburbs, which, somewhere in the distant past, he swore he would never do. The portrait of the artist as a young man, this Jake Burrows, was of a long-haired kid coming to the conclusion that he had no talent. He got up one day from that bistro table in the corner of the corner coffee shop, walked out down the street, stopped in and got a haircut, and then went out and got a job. That was it. And here now, fifteen years later, was he in the suburbs, running down the street, making a desperate list in his head, waiting for the music to begin.

There was the neighbor's cat, a big orange tabby that lay slovenly under a parked car, and which Jake was convinced was the one using his yard as a litter box. This cat, which had never appeared to be particularly intelligent, inquisitive, or athletic, had somehow evaded the bands of coyotes that roamed the streets at night. This earned it some respect, as other cats arrived to new homes on the cul-de-sac from time to time, and then went missing suddenly, unexpectedly, one otherwise uneventful day,

And there was the big intersection at the bottom of the hill, the one Jake used to dart out into, before they installed the traffic signal and crosswalk. This slowed his overall run time considerably, and Jake always chalked up the green light or red light to the game of chance that comes on Race Day, where you never know what the weather's gonna be, or what injuries or illnesses you may be battling.

And then up a small hill, to get the heart pumping. Quicken the pace, up and over, around the corner, ten long steps before you can slow it down and even out. 

Past the old beat-up Honda Civic with the large hand-made sign on top that read: ATTORNEY AT LAW LANE THOMPSON IS A FRAUD. Who knew? But the car paraded around town to spread the message of ill-will. 

The Naked Runner takes to the road again this morning. Who knows why. I see him from time to time. He's not really naked, per se -fortunately or unfortunately according to your tastes-  but that's the name he has in the cul-de-sac.

On July 5th, 2013, recent high school graduate, Mike Trama, posted on Facebook: "Less than a month until the greatest week of my life." Ten people immediately liked it.

Where does one obtain such lucid, confident perception? Prior experience, of course. He was referring to summer camp.

It's been 25 years now, since I first went to Camp Fox.

~

At the dentists’ office. "BRIGHT NOW! Dental." Not for me, though I need it, but for Mrs. Ditchman, who is having four wisdom teeth removed, and I suspect she will be none the wiser for it. She hasn't eaten in twelve hours. She hasn't had water in twelve hours. Don't mess with her.

“BRIGHT NOW!” implies a speedy sort of service, catering to those with immediate needs of a dingy mouth, but after we dropped the kids off at the sitter we got a call that informed us of an hour delay. Add to it the typical hour of delay you usually get at a dentist's office, and, well, you end up sitting in the waiting room, broodily ruminating over the big, sunny, illuminated-from-behind sign on the wall: BRIGHT NOW! I may be here all afternoon.

Someone else here is named "Marci." When the name is called, two people start and one person responds. I see this as a serious problem, and nudge Marci about it, (my Marci.) I submit to her that the other Marci is gonna be pretty surprised when they hold her down, put her under, and she wakes up with a bloody mouth and fewer teeth, but my Marci doesn't seem concerned. I guess she thought it through and figured that she had nothing else to lose, since there's no worse thing that could happen here than having four teeth removed, but I'm thinking how about maybe, eight teeth? Ten teeth? It would be prudent to ask the other Marci what she's in for, but my Marci just pats my leg.

Minutes pass, with time-filling paperwork and deep, mouth-watering soul-searching, and we hear a big truck rumble to a stop out front. Someone behind the counter yells to the back, “THE OXYGEN'S HERE!” and a burly guy with a nice smile wheels some tanks in. “Oh, good,” Mrs. Ditchman muttered. “You’re gonna need that,” I add. And then another big diesel rumbles up. A paramedic. “Let’s hope you don’t need that,” I joke. She just looks at me. Unfunny husband strikes again. And then a woman in a lab coat comes and takes her away.

I have been informed that I cannot leave the room for the duration of my wife’s visit, though they don’t actually tell me why. I assume it’s a liability thing, where she will not be allowed to drive herself home, of course, but I can’t shake the thought that the next time the woman in the lab coat opens the door, she’s going to get my attention and whisper, “There’s been a few complications...” But, no, everything will be fine, I’m sure. It’s just standard procedure. That, and fresh, just-off-the-truck oxygen.

I'm not sure when it began, but I’ve always been suspicious of dentists, who demand their bi-annual checkup with rigorous enamel-grinding cleanings. Then they announce that you have a few extra teeth, that they should be removed, and that it’s gonna set you back a few thousand dollars. Why did God make me with extra teeth? Why can’t I just go on using them? Some things are left unclear, in life, but then I’m a doubter -speaking as someone who still has his wisdom teeth, his appendix, his tonsils, his gall bladder, his kidneys, et al. (If I could have anything removed it might be my libido, which has kept me from thinking clearly all my life. Just think of how much I could get done without it! -oh hey, a hot girl just walked in the waiting room...)

No, they won’t let me leave, not even for a moment. And there is no free coffee and no table and no WiFi. Just twenty chairs lined on grey walls, facing each other. And yet there is a dreamy Starbucks on the other side of the parking lot -just mocking me- whose WiFi signal I am not registering because of the dental x-ray-proof lead shielding in this building, or some such thing. But it’s not me who’s gonna leave here drooling and slurring the rest of the livelong day, so I will shut up and be grateful. Dive in full-laptop, with no outside influence.

Later.

Actually sooner than later, the dreaded person with the clipboard and the lab coat enters, makes eye contact with no one, and summons loudly, "DRIVER FOR MARCI?" and (assuming we are talking about the same "Marci") that's me. Ten years of a good strong marriage, child-rearing, business entrepreneur and all, and I have been reduced to "driver", but it's only one of my many roles, I know. I raise a finger and she motions me to follow her back, into the chamber of horrors.

And I am not kidding about that. It's a long hallway with doorless rooms, and I pass them all, failing to resist the urge to glance in. On one side of me I see, laying head-back in a long, stiff chair, a smoker (I can smell her) with no front incisors, and a masked man with heady tools stands over her with both fists in her mouth. Her eyeballs rotate at me as I pass. On my left, there's a young black girl in a tight green shirt, moaning breathlessly, with bloody gauze on a table behind her head, the surgeon is nearby, on the phone, talking loudly, above her voice. The girl in the lab coat, leading me down the hall, looks back at me and smiles cheerfully, "Right this way!" and doctors and their assistants hop rightward and forth, not making eye contact.

I reach a stark, clean room with two posters. One poster shows a soulless set of teeth and gums, and warns of the ever-present dangers of periodontal disease. The other is of a beach. The Caribbean, I presume, with its clear turquoise waters and its fine white sand. There is no life in the frame, just sand and water. Just slow, imperceptible erosion. On a bright sunny day. Like what's happening in your mouth.

Also in the room is my beautiful wife, laying back in a chair, with one of those undersized airplane blankets on her, and looking like a pathetic cheek-stuffed gerbil after a recent cat-attack. Poor thing. She sees three of me.

My wife is long-in-the-tooth, so to speak, and the dentists prefer you break these things out when you're twenty and young, and you haven't yet had a chance to break them in, so it's a trial to have your wisdom teeth removed while in your thirties. The doctor said it was a clean operation. No problems. But her eyes are shaking back and forth, like from an old cartoon.

"How are you doing?" I ask, failing pathetically at sounding chipper.

She takes my hand, for comfort. She never does this. "All I saw was a circus," she said. I'm not sure what she means, but later I gathered that after the drugs kicked in, all she could take in was a frenzy of eyes and hands over her head. She's still not sure what happened. Before she went under, she heard a man in another room have a violent episode of gag reflex, and then a minute of chaos that followed. (She reported that he had no memory of it when he came to, happily asking how it all went.) She asked if that's why they weren't supposed to eat anything beforehand, and the doctors nodded. And then... out.

And now, here she was, my poor wife, with a mouthful of bloody gauze, moving listlessly like a sick iguana, or some near-extinct earth-bound tree sloth. She had a prescription for painkillers taped to her shoulder, making her appear abandoned, fodder for the goodwill of any potential caretaker who happened by.

"I'm glad you're here. And not my mom," she says.

I took this as a compliment, and then spent the next hour sitting quietly with her in the cold room, listening to the plaintive cries of nearby patients going unheeded, while Marci slowly came to. 

She did, eventually, and built up strength to her legs, and then her feet. I was instructed to pull the car around to the back of the building, into a handicap space, and the girl in the lab coat would take her and meet me there. Feeling helpless, I obeyed, and I exited out the front door -not without noticing the bright-eyed, unwitting patients blithely looking up to me as I entered the waiting room. I see, now, I thought. They don't want THEM to see...

We got my wife in the car and I was careful to not drive in any nausea-inducing manner, as dumb husbands are prone. I thought about how it was going to be a haul, getting through the rest of the day and then the night, and keeping the three kids out of her face. And I thought about how little Lincoln had finally gotten the bulk of his teeth in, and how I figured we were over the hump on teeth for a while, but we weren't, evidently.

When I finally got Serena in bed, she sweetly asked if Mommy was going to put her teeth under the pillow, for the Tooth Fairy. "I don't think so," I said. "The dentist kept them."

And she stopped, rolled over and looked away, to the wall. She was sad. I could see the insoluble problem on her face: why would the dentist keep the teeth?

And so began the distrust of all dentists, everywhere.

~

We do stories at bedtime. We have always done stories at bedtime. But Mrs. Ditchman is better at it than I, as I have been doing the story for Keaton lately, and we have been reading Doomworld, which is a volume of old Marvel comic books that were created after the original Star Wars film, continuing the adventures of the young Luke Skywalker and Han Solo and Princess Leia and their robot and wookie homies. They're awful, if you're wondering, and good bedtime reading they do not make. I never reconciled the cliffhanger thirty years ago, and had always wondered what happened. So I got the Dark Horse reprint off of Amazon. (Don't.) Mrs. Ditchman likes it less than me, for the record, but Keaton seems to enjoy it. I don't think he pays attention, really, but demand it he does, night after night. There are seven volumes. God help us.

Serena is reading the Magic Tree House series, which are proper books. There are about fifty of them now, and those crazy kids keep on climbing up into the tree house and finding somewhere in time -somewhere awesome and didactic- to whisk off to and explore, (while the author stays home and cashes in the millions.) But the little books are good, and the Little Ditchman reads them to us now, as it goes. Anyway, I like the history lessons, and it gets everything in school connected, as it should be. 

So tonight she asked me if the Magic Tree House books were "fiction" or "non-fiction", which was an excellent question. "They're fiction," I said. "But the historical parts are non-fiction, though they are fictionalized. Which means that the settings and the people were real, but what they did was made up." And then she asked me, "What does fiction mean?" and I realized we had to backtrack a bit. Sometimes we have the words, but we don't know what we are talking about. (I thought: This, kid, will never change, and you will encounter it all the rest of your days. But, never you mind. Anyway...)

"Fiction is not real. It's the stuff in your imagination. Non-fiction is real," I said.

"Oh," she said with an attitude that she already knew this. And she added, "The Star Wars comic books. Those are fiction."

"Yes," I said.

"And the Bible?"

And here we are. Already. She's seven. And, for what it's worth, I'm forty-three. I've got to have a good answer for this. The Bible. Fiction or Non-Fiction?

"Well, uh..."

I am not a Creationist, though I do believe in the literal power of the figurative word. And I find it easy to accept the historical accuracy of much of the biblical text, and yet it is a profound leap of faith -the most enduring of its kind- to accept that Jonah was swallowed by a whale, or that Jacob wrestled an angel, or that the Tree of Life was guarded by a flaming sword... And here I paused... (Which is a wisdom I have gained over the years.)

And the impatient child interrupted my ruminating with another question: "What about my mathbook?"

An easy one, at last. "Oh, that's neither fiction nor non-fiction. That's a book for learning. That's a textbook." And, here, I was handed the answer by my seven-year-old. 

"Like the Bible," she said with the Wisdom of the Ages.


And there we were. 

~