Loitering in Twilight

I. Field

Here in Vermont, summer begins when the snow melts—anywhere from April to June—and winter frequently reasserts itself with an iron fist even after the first thaw. Still, I call it the beginning of summer, at least that’s how I see it.

Every morning at 5:30, I take my Welsh Corgi, Hannah, to the upper playing field at Lamoille High School in Hyde Park. No formal track, no asphalt or Astroturf—just a huge, expertly mowed grass field surrounded by tall trees, Mt. Mansfield looming in the distance. We watch the sun rise as we jog. She runs ahead, making frequent detours, then rejoining me, making it look easy.

I’ve bought a stopwatch. Every day my timing improves. Twenty-two minutes around the field, then twenty, then nineteen. It had been years since high school cross country. Years since I could run without my knees protesting.

I run before the phone starts ringing from New Mexico.

I’m fifty-seven. My doctor says I’m a few pounds overweight. This hits me like a ton of bricks. Me, who was always underweight? The body, it seems, has its own calendar, and I’m no longer setting the pace.

If I can make the body move, time might loosen its grip.

II. Invitation

The email from Eli arrives the same week: our 40th high school reunion. Port Washington, New York.

I hadn’t graduated from Harriman High. I’d left after fifth grade when my parents divorced. It had been a painful rupture—leaving my friends, our Tudor house, the surrounding woods.

“Will any of our elementary school classmates be there?” I ask.

Eli assures me they will. Then he mentions the organizer: Julia Bellafonte.

Julia Bellafonte. I’d been in love with her since third grade. One day she sat cross-legged on the classroom floor. “I’m going to sing a Māori love song,” she announced. “It’s a saying-goodbye song, so I’ll row a canoe.”

She began to row an imaginary boat. Softly, in a strong clear voice:

Now is the hour
For me to say goodbye
Soon I’ll be sailing
Far across the sea
While I’m away
Oh please remember me
When I return
I’ll find you waiting here

The sadness was uprooting. I could smell the sea, see what she saw, feel what she felt. In that moment, I fell in love with Julia Bellafonte.

I hadn’t seen her in over forty years.

“Of COURSE I remember you!” she writes via email. We exchange pictures. I confess I’d been in love with her. “WHO KNEW YOU HAD A CRUSH ON ME?” Would I like to see her in July?

Yes, I write back.

III. Fitting

I decide to buy actual running shoes—not the $14 Costco sneakers I’ve been buying for a decade, but brand-name shoes that will make me feel prosperous, motivated, younger.

The sports shop in South Burlington is a maze of neon colors and space-age soles. The young clerk is dark-haired, pretty, cheerful. “What kind of running shoes are you looking for?”

I don’t know how to respond. “Seven,” I say.

Sometimes I say “seven” when I’m unsure. Word-putty to fill conversational cracks. To my surprise, she nods and leads me down a particular aisle. I remember being that young, when appearing to know everything was paramount.

I confess that “seven” doesn’t mean anything.

“Oh,” she says, smiling. “You could try this pair or this pair or this pair.”

I’m out of my league. The sneakers are in blistering arrays of color—neon, primary, pastel, speckled, dappled—with soles that look appropriate for a moon walk. “I don’t want carnival sneakers,” I say, hearing myself sound old. “Do you have anything simpler? I’d feel embarrassed to wear these.”

After a dozen pairs, I find gray New Balance that fit. But my foot still lifts in the heel. The clerk frowns, thinking. Then she brightens. “An athletic consultant showed us a special way to tie laces for a snug fit.”

She kneels at my feet, tying slipknots at the end of each lace just after the last eyelet.

I feel a curious stirring as she attends me. Not sexual. I realize I haven’t been touched by a young person in a long time. A wave of sadness washes over me. The sneakers hug my feet tightly.

That’s what I wanted. A tight hug.

I buy them for $150.

IV. Warren

The phone call comes in late June, just as summer settles in. My sister-in-law’s voice is tight with exhaustion. “It’s gotten worse,” Cheryl says. “The cancer’s in his sternum now. His lungs. His throat.”

Warren. My oldest brother. The gentle, soft-spoken hippie who’d been fighting lymphatic cancer for three years.

“Do you want me to come to Albuquerque?” I ask.

“Not yet. Soon.”

Of the six children in my family, I felt closest to Warren. He had an openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions that approached the world as if seeing everything for the first time. He’d been my reading teacher when I was ten, feeding me Salinger, Vonnegut, Kafka. Those books took me out of the turmoil of my parents’ screaming and my father’s abuse. How much a part of him I was. And now he was dying.

He’d tried everything: Ayahuasca ceremonies, Gonzalez enzyme therapy, flying to Brazil to see John of God. For seven months he stayed at a friend’s house in Los Angeles, receiving radiation treatment. Dr. Wolfstein was in his eighties, doddering. At the end, they stood examining the final scans.

“Your cancer has spread,” Dr. Wolfstein announced. “It means you’re fucked.”

Warren still believed he could heal himself. He read Wayne Dyer, did affirmations from Unity Church, forgave our father over and over for the emotional abuse.

Now, on the phone, Cheryl tells me Warren weighs 103 pounds. He was 150 before. The tumor on his neck is avocado-sized. He’s in constant pain. He can only eat mashed potatoes and protein shakes. He’s taking Vicodin around the clock.

“Physically, he’s still declining,” Cheryl says.

I hang up and sit in my kitchen, Hannah at my feet. That evening, I lace up my new running shoes in that special technique the salesgirl showed me. I run until my lungs burn, my knees ache, and I can’t think about anything except breath and motion.

V. Stowe

Julia rushes into my arms in the circular driveway of the Stowe Mountain Lodge. “You’re so thin! No pot belly!”

We drive to The Crop. I’ve brought my photo album from Vanderfeld Middle School. There she is at my bar mitzvah, seated to my left.

“Tell me about your life,” I say.

Her mother died five years ago—she wanted to wake her up in the coffin. Her daughter Angela is pregnant. Her younger daughter Lucia got addicted to prescription medications; Julia staged an intervention. Lucia’s been clean three years.

Then, setting down her fork: “My husband has problems with alcohol. We’re separated. Two years ago he hit someone with his car, went to jail. He says he’s seen the light. But I’m done.”

When it’s my turn, I condense forty years: the divorce, Israel at sixteen, two marriages, two divorces, a son struggling with addiction, two years in the Northeast Kingdom, now living with someone I met online.

Julia reaches across the table and squeezes my hand. “We made it,” she says.

My pulse steadies. Outside the window, Mt. Mansfield holds its ground against the summer sky.

VI. Threshold

I sign up for the Montpelier 5K. I’ve been running on grass every morning. But race day is different—thousands of people, pavement instead of soft earth. My joints wheeze and crack. The twenty-two minutes I’d expected expands to thirty when I cross the finish line, limping. Back at the doctor’s: “Good news: you lost weight, you’re in shape. Bad news: your knees will hurt for six to eight weeks.”

VII. Twilight

It’s mid-August now. Late afternoon. I’m alone on the upper field with Hannah, the sun beginning its descent behind Mt. Mansfield. My phone vibrates.

A text from Cheryl: He’s asking for you. Maybe come soon.

I call her back. She answers on the first ring. “Hold on,” she says. Then Warren’s voice, thin as paper: “Hey, little brother.”

“Hey,” I say. My throat closes.

“I’m reading Dyer’s Your Sacred Self,” he says. “Still got my sense of humor. That counts for something, right?” A dry laugh that turns into coughing.

“That counts for everything,” I say.

“I forgave Dad again this morning,” he tells me. “Two billion and one times now.” Another laugh. “How’s the running?”

“My knees hurt.”

“Welcome to the body,” he says. “It’s a hell of a ride.”

When I visited him last month, he was sitting in the Albuquerque sun with a book open on his lap, too weak to hold it up. “I’m still here,” he’d said, grinning. The tumor pressed against his throat when he swallowed.

Cheryl takes the phone back. “Come when you can,” she says quietly.

Another text arrives from Julia: Thinking about you. Can’t wait for the reunion next month!

I stand there between these two messages—one pulling me toward the past I’m trying to reclaim, one pulling me toward what I know is ending. The light is that particular Vermont gold that happens only in late summer, when you can feel autumn waiting.

Hannah trots back to me, tongue out, ears perked. She has no idea time is passing. She just runs.

I kneel down to retie my laces, using the special technique the young clerk taught me. The knots hold. The shoes hug my feet. I think about Warren in Albuquerque, his body failing despite all his belief, all his hope, all his beginner’s mind openness to healing. I think about Julia in Sarasota, rebuilding her life after so much damage. I think about my own body—aging, protesting, but still capable of running these circles around a grass field in Vermont.

While I’m away, oh please remember me.

I start running again, Hannah alongside. We make another lap, then another. The light shifts from gold to amber to the first edge of dusk. My phone vibrates again but I don’t check it. Not yet. For now I’m just here, in this body, in this moment, loitering in twilight between what was and what’s coming, between the person I was at ten years old singing songs in a classroom in Port Washington and the person I am now, fifty-seven, running in circles, waiting for news I already know is coming.

Hannah runs ahead, then circles back, tongue out, her whole back end wiggling. I keep running, watching the light fade, feeling my knees ache, tasting my own breath. The field doesn’t care. The mountain doesn’t care. Time doesn’t pause.

When I finally stop, breathing hard, I check my phone.

Cheryl: Call me when you can.

I sit down in the grass. Hannah settles beside me, her warm weight against my leg. Above us, the first stars appear.

That night, I book a flight to Albuquerque for early September. Then I run one more lap in the dark.

By October, the first frost arrives on the upper field. The grass crunches underfoot. Dark comes earlier now, but I still run most mornings, slower in the cold. Hannah still circles back, waiting. I kneel to retie my laces using the special technique. The knots hold.