The International And National Gauntlet
I love running through cities. Brighton isn’t exactly a city, but its sidewalks are usually filled with enough people to make a decent moving obstacle course. It rarely gets better than decent though, as the obstacles are usually weighed down with age and its accoutrements- walkers, small wire grocery carts containing 15 cans of catfood and a package of ground beef, crumpled partners, arthritis. Today, at the junction of Beacon and Summit Ave, a man with matchstick legs and bulbous knees tipped a royal blue newscap at me while his wife scowled through straggly garnet whisps and fiddled with the fastners of her kelly green suspenders. Outside Bazaar, three generations of Russian men unloaded cartons of beets and great loaves of potato bread from a Honda minvan. The portly Lubavitch scuttling down Harvard Ave looked ahead at no one until a tiny man in a Yarmulke called out a greeting as he swept the entry to the Butcherie.
I stopped running once i got to Comm Ave, and walked the mile and a half back to where the Reservoir begins. At the closet-sized International and National foods co (157 Sutherland Rd), I bought a container of what appeared to be beets and peas and cabbage.
“Health salad,” the dimpled women manning the cashier told me. “It will give energy.” She blushed as she said this, and the young girl behind the deli counter, all frayed yellow hair and window-sill cheekbones, rolled her eyes.
She was right though; it did give me energy. And pink pee, which always brightens my day. Brightons, in this case.
