I was, as I’m perhaps overly wont to do, thinking about Britney Spears. This morning was my last few miles running in Santa Fe and I was on what had become my “regular” route. With a fully charged iPod, I was sort of on autopilot. I was enjoying an admittedly slow “victory lap” off the bike path and onto Camino Carlos Rey and a slow, downbeat ballad was playing. While I love Bruce Springsteen’s melancholic working class stories, I couldn’t help but think how I needed an uptempo number to help propel me to a slightly faster pace. My wearied legs and achy, old bones needed some pep… and while the fever can sometimes only be cured by more cowbell, in this instance my mind wandered to the forthcoming Britney Spears album.
Brit-Brit, as she used to be called back in the day by fans in the know, recently announced “Glory” would be dropping at the end of August. As I made the turn off the bike path, I was debating whether I should pre-order it off of iTunes or buy the CD on Amazon. I also found my mind forever voyaging to my pace and as I was multitasking, pondering the great mysteries of where to spend my Britney money and why I was so slow in my running, my foot caught on the landscaped rock pathway of the sidewalk. My arms flailed and my ill-formed core tumbled forward. Humans are like an inverted pendulum and so it’s a wonder we don’t stumble and fall more often. What was milliseconds felt like a lifetime, my heart pounding as I attempted to recover. As I windmilled and attempted to flap my arms to somehow create a windcurrent and force a cushion of air to lift me back upright, my thoughts once again turned to Britney – would my final thoughts before hitting the rocky ground and no doubt scraping the hell out of my body really be of the Princess of Pop?
And yet in the milliseconds we have to recover, somehow I did right myself. I don’t know how… I never know what precisely makes the difference between righting a fall and falling face first into the gravelly pit.
My heart pounding, I slowed ever so slightly to take a moment to consider the near-miss. There was no soft ground around that I could’ve aimed for even if I had been thinking to do so in crash to the earth. Rocks and gravel and asphalt were the only surfaces around. Speaking from a wealth of running fall related injuries, I knew my palms and knees would’ve been bloodied, my torso torn up, and potentially I would’ve had some trouble running for the next few days or weeks depending on the severity of the scrapes and bruises. But for whatever reason and by whatever stroke of luck, I avoided that fate and just kept moving forward… albeit with a heightened hyper-vigilance for obstacles along the roadway.
And thus thoughts turned from Britney to Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” This was the fourth and final opera Steve and I caught here in Santa Fe.
Don Juan (SPOILER ALERT) gets sucked into hell at the opera’s end, a punishment for… well… maybe a lot of things and maybe nothing at all. He’s a lothario, a ladies’ man whether the lady wants to be woo’d or not, and so there’s creepy rape implications, a few murders of distraught cockolded husbands and fiances, and a general libertine attitude that threatens the moral superiority of the current social order. What I think he’s really punished for is not “repenting” his ways as his sidekick Leporello encourages and as the ghost of the murdered Commendatore demands. But what does repenting mean, really?
Just as I don’t know how I recovered from my fall this morning, I’m not sure I know what Don Giovanni could have done to repent to the satisfaction of the masses in the opera’s world. To be honest, the guy died as he lived. He was who he was. Perhaps that’s why he is punished.
Taking my final mile on Cerrillos Road, I reflected back on this week’s adventures. There’s a longer piece to be written on how lucky I was to spend some time with my big brother, luckier even than not falling flat on my face this morning. I may eventually get to that but in the meantime, we’ve checked out of the hotel and are headed to lunch.
Steve and I are grabbing a Santa Fe Bite green chile cheeseburger before hitting the road to Tucson.
Oops, I did it again… I ate another burger. It’s not breaking my heart.