{"id":2811,"date":"2013-04-08T20:21:51","date_gmt":"2013-04-08T20:21:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=2811"},"modified":"2013-04-08T20:21:51","modified_gmt":"2013-04-08T20:21:51","slug":"blue-sky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2013\/04\/08\/blue-sky\/","title":{"rendered":"Blue Sky"},"content":{"rendered":"

As part of the New and Improved Lifestyle I’ve tried to establish over the past year, I’ve been taking afternoon walks every day, workflow permitting. Most days I seem to end up wandering through the Avenues, one of Salt Lake’s oldest residential neighborhoods, which is little more than stone’s-throw from my office. It’s a lovely place for a stroll, with lots of big trees and an eclectic mix of housing styles: turreted Victorians, cozy bungalows, mid-century ramblers, even a few art-deco apartment buildings.<\/p>\n

I was up there earlier today, in fact, walking through a steady rain with one hand jammed deep into my pocket and the other growing cold on my umbrella handle. I could smell the faint but distinctive odor given off by my leather jacket when it gets wet, and water was seeping through cracks in the soles of my worn-out sneakers. A pretty young thing on a bicycle smiled at me as she rolled past, a tiny diamond stud winking from the side of her nose while raindrops glittered in the thick, flat braid of chestnut hair that ran down the center of her back.<\/p>\n

My iPod chose that moment to summon an Allman Brothers tune<\/a>, one that sounds cheerful on the surface but always evokes an unaccountable bittersweet feeling in me, and it occurred to me that if I kept walking in this direction long enough, I’d end up on the campus of my alma mater<\/em>, the University of Utah. And suddenly my head filled with half-remembered emotions and half-forgotten ambitions, the flavor of a time in my life 25 years past. I found myself thinking of other springtime rainstorms, of a girl who meant everything to me until the day she didn’t, of stories I’ve never written and places I haven’t gotten around to visiting.<\/p>\n

Then I had the weirdest sensation that my younger self was nearby, not just metaphorically but in close physical proximity<\/em>, as if he was walking along this same sidewalk, beneath these same trees, smelling and sensing all the things I was, but separated from me by some kind of membrane. Something permeable enough to detect a presence on the other side, but unbreakable. A time barrier, I suppose, if we want to get all Doctor Who<\/em>-ish. I could feel his restlessness, his idealism, his curiosity about the world and his naive certainty that he’d someday get everything he wanted, just because he was him. I wondered if somehow he could feel me too, and what, specifically, of me he felt. My disappointments and regrets? My banal middle-aged anxieties about health and money and getting old too soon? Would he even recognize me as the person he was to become, or would I just seem like a stranger to him?<\/p>\n

To be honest, sometimes, when I’m walking in the rain, I seem like a stranger to myself…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As part of the New and Improved Lifestyle I’ve tried to establish over the past year, I’ve been taking afternoon walks every day, workflow permitting. Most days I seem to end up wandering through the Avenues, one of Salt Lake’s oldest residential neighborhoods, which is little more than stone’s-throw from my office. It’s a lovely […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-ramblings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2811"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2811\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}