Happy New Day

(This piece is for my book-in-progress titled See How We Run: Best Writings from 25 Years of Running Commentary. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from January 2000.)

No one alive today will ever again see two zeroes at the end of a new year, let alone 000. Yet the much-ballyhooed, and in some circles feared, passage of 1999 to 2000 came without any help from me.

I chose to sit out all celebrations of the 2000s. Only once will I type the word millenium here – not because it was so overworked during the rollover to triple-zero, but because it’s too big a chunk of time to get my mind around. So is a century.

A month is just the right size for me. I ended December the same way as all months – by listing all runs taken (and their daily averages), races run, illnesses or injuries suffered, writings published, trips taken and work done on the road.

Even a month is too big for my daughter Leslie to grasp. She thinks of time in smaller, less precise terms.

Leslie doesn’t fit the stereotype of kids with Down syndrome, who are thought to live in the eternal present – with no memory of the past and no future to anticipate. My girl knows the days of the week, but mainly deals (with sign language, because she’s also deaf) in terms of now, before, after, yesterday, tomorrow, long ago and next week.

Leslie also knows signs for the months. But she can’t conceive of how many days or weeks make a month or how many months add up to a year, let alone the years in a decade, decades in a century and so on.

The handicapped, along with the very old and very young and the primitives, don’t know what year it is. Their days run by the sun, not the calendar.

Leslie skipped the party at our house that welcomed the 2000s, falling into bed by nine o’clock as always. This was just another night to her, leading into a day much like the one before. 

She trusted that the sun would come up at almost exactly the same time on January 1^st as it had on December 31^st, and that she could charge into another day. No night, even one that comes but once a year, or every hundred or thousand years, was worth losing sleep over.

My daughter told me, without saying a word, about how to start the new year. On the first day of 2000 I’d be same person, doing the same things, as on the last day of 1999. The first run would be longer than usual, but it would celebrate nothing more than the end of a week when I always get to go longer than usual.

My hope on December 31^st was to follow Leslie to bed and trust the new year to arrive safely, as it always had before. Her nonfunctional ears let her sleep blissfully through the midnight hour and the explosions of celebration that greeted it.

I’d sat out the partying, but the second-hand excitement still left me too wired to think about sleeping. With the new day just an hour old, I slipped outside to run.

Runs act as the most versatile of drugs. They can wake you up when tired or calm you down when agitated.

Mine usually have the first effect, so I came home expecting to carry on with the usual daily pattern of writing after running. Instead I decided to rest for a few minutes on the couch – and promptly dozed off for what felt like less than an hour.

Leslie woke me up with the cooing she does while playing happily by herself. I thought, Why is she awake so early? It wasn’t all that early. My watch read 6:30.

Leslie didn’t know what time or day it was, or that I’d slept half my preferred amount. It’s morning, Dad, she would soon tell me. Get up so we can do more of the same good things we did yesterday.

UPDATE FROM 2014

Leslie was 17 then, a student at the Oregon School for the Deaf. She’s now 32, living in a group home with other women like herself.

She doesn’t know the number of this year, but she knows the day when dad will come to visit every other week. She sends me simple text messages about it from her own phone.

[Hundreds of previous articles, dating back to 1998, can be found at joehenderson.com/archive/. Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in  as many as three different formats: (1) in print from Amazon.com; (2) as e-books from Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com; (3) as PDFs for e-reader devices and apps, from Lulu.com. Latest released was Going Far. Other titles: Home Runs, Joe’s Journal, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Marathon Training, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]