Chapter 86
He did not stop working. He had not expected to stop working he had never understood retirement in the sense of stopping, only in the sense of choosing differently.
He continued with the Kingston Voices Project in an emeritus capacity available, advising, occasionally facilitating a session when Amara asked. He continued writing. He sat on two educational boards. He mentored young teachers through a programme he had helped establish at the university.
And he ran, every morning, along the paths of Hope Gardens in the warm gold light.
He was sixty-three and his body required more careful management than it ever had. He ran slower. He recovered more deliberately. He had the accumulated knowledge of forty-five years of running in this specific body and he used it with the respect of someone who understood that the body was not an obstacle to the life but the means of it.
He ran and thought. He was writing a fourth book essays, this time, shorter and more essayistic than his earlier work, circling the things he still did not fully understand. About what it meant to be old in a body you had spent your whole life in. About grandchildren and what they revealed about the purposes of your own life. About what Mama Vie had meant by carrying something heavy.
He had carried something heavy. It was the good kind of heavy the kind that held you down in storms, the kind that meant you had accumulated something real.
He ran home to the apartment and Nia was at the drafting table with coffee and he made a second cup and brought it to her and they sat for their ten minutes before the day began.
Thirty-five years of ten minutes.
He would not have traded a single one.