45 degrees. Cloudy.
Thirty. This photo pretty much sums up how I'd been feeling about this day in the ones leading up to it. Bewildered.
I started my thirtieth year the way I wish every day could
begin—a half hour on Pinterest and eight cups of strong, black coffee.
At ten I drove to Mason to meet Jennie for a Pure Barre
class. For my birthday, I had given myself the luxury of a day off work and I
felt the rush of not working on a weekday. I took a picture of myself pretending
like I was independently wealthy and could go to exercise class in the middle
of the day any time I pleased:
After Pure Barre I changed out of my yoga pants and into my
running tights. Donnie and I parked near
Short Vine and took off. Not ten feet
into our run, Donnie shouts, “Crap I’ve got my shorts on backwards.” Yes, he did:
We ran down Short Vine and were happy to see that Café de
Wheels now has a proper restaurant with tables and chairs. I love the idea of food trucks for the flexibility and vitality
they bring to an urban area, but honestly, they’re just not for me—I need to be
seated to properly enjoy anything that takes two hands to eat.
At one end of Short Vine is the Corryville Library—another Carnegie. As Donnie mentioned when wrote the route for
this post, Maggie and I once came to the Corryville Library during a summer
break from college to attend an informational session for the Peace Corps. Obviously
neither of us were cut out for this.
We ran through several residential blocks which are dense and
lined with housing that is a good mix of turn of the century single-family
homes and new student housing for undergraduates who want to be close to
campus:
We passed the Highland Café where Donnie and I once
attended a poetry reading in our more literary days:
And the Corryville Recreation Center:
Set back a bit from Martin Luther King is the award-winning
Stetson Square development:
Note that here Donnie has turned his cap around to match his backwards shorts.
We passed several healthy-looking medical students crossing
MLK to get from Stetson Square to the UC Medical School campus across the
street. On the corner is Frank Gehry’s
Vontz Center for Molecular Studies, the form brilliantly alluding to
the function:
We made a loop through the medical center, where I once received
and subsequently talked my way out of a parking ticket.
Donnie had a small park mapped on the route, but when we got
to the spot, we found that either 1) our geography skills had failed us, 2) the park is soon
to be something else, or 3) world's worst park:
Back on the other side of MLK, we were perplexed by this
building and its advertisement for –wtf—“Aviation Medicine”?
I took Donnie’s picture in front of the old (before his
time old) Public Allies building:
And then Donnie took my picture in front of the Corryville
sign. Notice how the dry winter has had
the same effect on the landscaping as it has had on my hair. Also, I learned this pose from Toddlers and Tiaras:
On Burnet, we ran past the bright, new murals in front of
the school board building:
And then we made a quick loop through the triangle park
before wrapping up our shortest Run 52 to date:
Back at home, we found that an intruder had broken into our
apartment while we were gone and decorated our living room with a lifetime’s
worth of photographs that showed my many looks over 30 years. The good looks:
And the not so good ones:
Maggie had also left me a large Diet Coke, Big Mama’s new
book, and my own pair of “Sparkly Green Earrings”:
Later that evening we left the city limits (gasp!) to visit
the Rivertown Brewery in Lockland, where I was granted my wish of spending my birthday on
a factory tour “like Mr. Rogers.”
Although Mr. Rogers probably would not have worn his
snakeskin booties. Or made the tour guide take this photo:
In the end, I understood about 71% of what Randy taught us
about the art and science of beer making.
This is pretty good because while I never scored so low in my actual art
and science classes I also never had the distraction of a delicious “Unit 6”
wheat beer or a spiced winter seasonal during the lecture.
This was a great birthday and mostly made up for the dread I
was feeling about leaving my twenties behind.
At twenty I could not have guessed where the next ten years
would take me and where they would not take me. I could not have imagined
leaving New York, moving to New Mexico, then back home to Ohio. I would not have guessed that a Midwestern city
could hold me. When I was twenty,
Cincinnati didn’t tug at me madly like the places I imagined I would live: Cincinnati felt gentle and familiar and I
wanted something wild.
At twenty I did not foresee what running would do for my
mind and my body. At twenty, I plodded
tediously on the treadmill—four miles in forty minutes a few days a week. I was only beginning to understand that
running could cure me of the hypochondria that kept me up at night, that it
would give me confidence and focus.
At twenty Donnie and I had not met and when I thought about
my future he was there in theory only.
But at thirty, this city is home and every evening Donnie
and I run through it together.
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