Reflections on home

4/8/2012

Today, I ate a banana for breakfast. Erik woke me at 8:20 to warn that the race times had been moved up, so I had a few minutes to grab a snack that would provide some quick sugars and digest easily. The banana is one of those foods I can’t get enough of. I often exit the dining halls with a handful of carefully selected bananas, each in line to ripen and be eaten at a special time of day between the hours of lazy and lazier in relation to my willingness to leave the 4^th floor of Mission Park. The banana can become disgusting very quickly, true. But the flavor is always the same, bruising doesn’t have a major detrimental effect on taste, and the texture is predictable to a certain degree. Williams has a relatively stable banana supply, as do most supermarkets, so when traveling, the banana, with its somewhat impermeable peel and low cost, becomes an instant staple and homely food. There’s something about a reminder of home, or Williams, in the mornings when I’m traveling, maybe just in the act of eating breakfast but perhaps more accurately in the morning exercise, of riding a bike somewhere.

While riding around the same one-mile loop may seem extra repetitive, in New Haven’s East Rock Park, the repetition felt relaxing, a couple too-often-repeated turns were the only thing that said I wasn’t on a longer ride. A river sighting every few minutes, quiet park roads, and even a monument resembling Mount Greylock’s war memorial brought me back to the Berkshires, which I try to deny mountain status to, but so far away from the Cascades and Rockies the Berkshires are getting closer to mountains, growing back from the Appalachian rubble.

I returned from the race and prepared a Breugger’s sesame bagel, a perfect supplement to the peanut butter, which was a favorite of Yogi and Milo, the family’s two dogs. When the time came for pizza, which Erik denied in a plea of vegetarian eating habits and other weird things, Milo was immediately at my side, waiting for crusts of Apizza Morderna pepperoni, from one of the many spots by which New Haven derives its fame. Some places don’t have a fame, Seattle has Starbucks, but Williamstown doesn’t have much.

4/9/2012

           Back to the dining hall for breakfast today after finishing a bit of homework in the morning. In Seattle, whenever the weather was reasonable sunny, I would position myself for a dozen minutes in the sun and look towards the lake and Mount Rainier. Something about an extra dose of vitamin D at northern latitudes with wet climates helps bring one through the rainy late fall and early winter. I have a few pancakes, yogurt, and cutup fruit, something my parents would likely have made on a reasonably nice morning. Morning light shines on the Berkshires, and I sit and wish for a moment that I could lie on the table and soak up the sun like a sponge or algae bloom. But my watch shows 9:52, and it is time to head to Computer Science, in a T-shirt and shorts despite the light rain and 40 degree temperatures. Sometimes, or a lot of the time when I’m outside groups that have seen me before, I get weird looks for wearing flip flops in the snow, or heading outside wearing just running shorts when it is below freezing outside. But what about animals, plants, and insects who do just fine in the cold?

4/11/2012

          Two trips to North Adams today, a total of 24 miles on Route 2. Shorts and t-shirt weather, though clouds threaten rain and blacken the sky to the east. I feel my back perspiring, with no ventilation through my backpack, just like when I would ride by bike school, textbooks occasionally rubbing my back raw. I miss those long rides, times to reflect in the morning, and a nice wake-up in the cold, watching the sunrise over Lake Washington and the fog rising up from Union Bay. When I ride to science quad every morning, the trek up the hill feels harder than walking, and the trek back is a brake-burning, skid-producing ride down Mission Hill. Sometimes, it feels as if I have reversed my day, and am headed home in the morning, because in the morning I used to use the same death-defying tactics to ride down 200 vertical feet with as little braking as possible. But biking is biking, and within the slight disconnect between feet and pavement lies a smooth wakeup and gentle increase of blood flow.

           The back and forth trip doesn’t bother me. A road looks different every minute, and from every direction. Taking a right onto a side street is just a curve in the road, while taking a left back onto a main highway is an opossum gingerly crossing the road, carefully planning time and movement between cars and big trucks.