Page 4 of Past Tents

Especially then.

Especially when Ally was the sister of my good friend Jefferson, and a guy doesn’t go around naming his truck after his friend’s sister. Or her eyes.

I needed to get over her. I knew this, and I’d tried. I’d gone on plenty of dates, but I wasn’t interested in any of them.

Just her.

Even if I knew Ally and I were impossible.

It helped to get outside in the fresh air on a run or a hike, so I changed into my shorts and running shoes in the bathroom and headed out to the track that encircled the football field. Running helped my state of mind and elevated my mood, always had. If I was lucky, I could get a mile in before the track team came out for practice. Maybe two.

The students seemed to have the same reaction as I did to being inside all day, but it generally took them twice as long to socialize, change into their gear, and make their way outside.

Usually, it took a good twenty minutes for high schoolers to get theirshpilkesout after class,shpilkesbeing a Yiddish term that means full of energy, impatience, and general restlessness. I found the term satisfying.

I taught my students that they should search for the most appropriate words when they wrote, even if the words came from a different culture or language. It also gave them awareness and respect when borrowing words from other cultures. Today, I was the one withshpilkes.

Inhaling the warm afternoon air, I felt my lungs relax, grateful for the fresh air and whatever amount of time I had to myself on the track. I started at a jog, taking one of the outside lanes out of habit.

I’d made it two laps around the track before I heard the steady crunch of shoes hitting the track behind me. There had been talk for years of replacing the classic track with modern tartan composite in the school’s colors, blue and gold, but the district hadn’t approved the budget. So we ran on dirt.

“Clay, hey.” Jefferson’s footsteps drew up behind me, plodding heavily like they always did.

“You sound like a hippopotamus.”

“Only to you, twinkle toes.”

At least twice a week, Jefferson took an afternoon break from running his construction business to show up and run some laps on the track.

“What’s good, man?” I kept up my pace, knowing he’d catch up in seconds. His feet fell in step with mine and I readied myself for an update on his current construction project.

“Well, you didn’t hear it from me, but Shane’s kitchen is a train wreck.” Jefferson was a mild gossip, always blabbing and warning that the news didn’t come from him.

I laughed because Shane, my younger brother, had told me that the kitchen remodel was going swimmingly. “Of course, I didn’t hear it from you. You never spill tea.”

“Cabinets were supposed to go in next week,” Jefferson said, breathing heavier as our pace increased. “’Course we’re still waiting on a shipment of wood, and it’s stuck on a freighter in the Gulf, so it’s not happening next week.”

“I won’t tell him, if that’s what you’re worried about.” Shane, my only sibling, was a bread maker at Donner Bakery and had gotten engaged last year to his high school crush. They’d been remodeling her grandmother’s family home together. “I’m off on a school retreat the weekend after next, and he won’t be at the jam session this week.” Shane had professional French horn–playing chops, so he often skipped the local jam sessions when the Nashville Symphony needed him.

“It’s his fiancée who scares the dickens out of me. She wants us on more of a schedule. She can’t understand why construction goes in fits and starts and doesn’t happen when she’s ready.”

I laughed again, imagining Julia reading him the riot act when he veered off schedule—she liked schedules. Also a baker, she’d moved back to Green Valley after a decade of running a bread empire in California. With the slower pace around here, she’dtaken her type A personality out on the construction workers at the house.

“Don’t let it get to you.”

“Yeah, yeah. I know.”

We rounded the bend and passed by the hurdles. I felt a twitch, my body daring me to jump over one. Just one.

“Don’t do it,” Jefferson warned.

“Don’t do what?”

“Break your ass jumping over something that’s too high for an old man.” He pointed behind us at the hurdles, all raised to the men’s racing height, daring me to clear them with an easy stride.

“It’s not called jumping. It’s hurdling. And Icoulddo it without breaking my ass, but I’m choosing not to.”

“Good thinking, grampa. You’re getting smart in your old age.”

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