Friday evening

There was fog outside the windows of the train, clambering across dark fields and pressed into ditches – the stealthy movement of soldiers making for the front line. The rising sun had not gathered enough heat to burn it away and so I, taking my exit at the small town of "V" with my train pass interlaced between the fingers of my left hand, felt the damp and the chill, and stepped onto the platform. The time on my phone read 0721.  

My second-hand bicycle was where I’d left it: perched on the racks between a tangle of bicycles that looked more like wire hangers spawning their ungainly progeny in a closet than transportation. The kickstand fell loosely down more than a month ago, scraping along the pavement as I rode, and I’d secured it with packing tape because my long working hours left me little time to visit a bicycle shop or make the repair myself. What couldn’t wait, however, was my front tire, which pressed into the asphalt like a pathetic balloon weeks after the party.

The hand pump was only partially successful and took all the time I wanted to spend at the gym, so I eschewed the free weights and made quick use of the showers and hair dryer before rushing into work. I have a nasty cough these days- it’s lodged in my chest and refuses to leave in spite of antibiotics I coaxed from a local urgent-care doctor on Monday. So I wonder whether the bicycle ride is a wise decision.  But I ride anyways.

The ride from the train to work is 5.3 miles – plus or minus .2 miles (so says my GPS). It takes me 33 minutes on a lazy day and 26 when I’m racing to catch the train. I almost always listen to an audiobook. In recent weeks I’ve re-visited Le Carre after The Constant Gardner, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, there was Smiley’s People. When I first encountered Le Carre in 2011 I studied him the way some people study language: trying to understand the world he came from – hoping that he might provide the key I could use to unlock Sjors’ cage and let him out. Now, with halting fluency in his mother tongue, I realize the only truths Le Carre really tells are human ones: betrayal, deception, fallibility, and the bewildering pain of love. “In the Spy trade,” he writes. “We abandon first what we love the most.”

Now, I read about Shakespeare again. Not the Stratford-upon-Avon  buffoon who duped the world  - but Edward DeVere – the 16^th Earl of Oxford, whose sharp wit, literary genius, intemperate nature and tumultuous life generated the world’s greatest greatest literature. I read about Edward DeVere long ago and now I think I’ll make a project of him: re-read his plays, memorize his lines, and visit the places he visited: Paris, Venice, the Croatian coastline, Palermo, Sicily, Genoa, Milan.

I’m very alone here. I truly realized my isolation after visiting Lynn in Scotland last week. It was good to have people around me who knew and understood me, who loved me and wanted to touch and hug me (last night, out of desperation to be touched, I accepted a hug from a man during a festival who sported the sign, “free hugs”). Lynn and I visited Edinburgh Castle and I joined in with her husband’s family in Edinburgh and Alyth. We  had Easter dinner together and visited a nearby 5^th century church.  On my last night in Scotland, we went on a “Ghost Tour” at the Cow’s Gate vaults where I heard a howling noise I thought was part of an elaborate sound system but which Lynn and Dan refused to say they had heard. We also visited the Covenanter’s Prison where 1200 Scottish men were held after a Scottish rebellion against King Charles and who spent the Scottish winter in the impossible conditions and died from exposure.

I’m at a restaurant/bar now. Its in the city center – on my walk home from the train station. I stopped here on my way home from work, drawn like a moth to the flame of human interaction. I had a very nice beer (the beers are often very nice here) and an appetizer. But I’m impaired already and asked for something with lower alcohol content. I do want to run tomorrow morning, afterall.