Departures

"Was that you I saw running the other day?" asked the old guy with his dogs, "Don't you get enough exercise on that?" He gestured at the bicycle that I was straddling.
"I guess not," came my sheepish reply.
Sheepish because I could remember being a young guy, talking with my father about his physical fitness regimen. He was a racquetball player. He took his sons out to play on a couple of occasions, but since it was my father's obsession, I felt the need to question it. I felt the need to ridicule it. I never made it part of my program. Too much equipment, I asserted.
I do have my father to thank me for signing me up for my first ten kilometer run. At the time, I never considered that I would be running for thirty years. Especially since, at one point, I felt the need to question my father about his devotion to the sport. "What are you running from?" I asked in my most clever and incisive twenty-something way. I had this idea that running had become some sort of external sign of my father's pain and his search for self. I had a lot of clever ideas back in my twenties. I truly believed that I had a window into my father's wayward ways. I thought that there would be a moment of reckoning where he would turn to me and say, "You know, you're right. I've got to stop running from my fears and confront them."
Turns out I wasn't that clever after all. The last time I saw my father, just a few days after his sixty-first birthday, we went on a run together. The last time I was with him outside of a burn ward. Or in my dreams. Since then, I've been running. Including the time when that same neighbor yelled after me, "If you had left earlier, you wouldn't have to run!" Even if I left thirty years ago?