A good Monday in Boston, marathon Monday, with some forty thousand people running some forty thousand meters in the glorious sunshine.

Here, the same sunshine was calling everyone out of buildings into the open greens and empty streets of the holiday. Time to head downtown for lunch with friends, and sip coffee on the sidewalk, and inevitably there I was, my eyes undecided: people-watching, or eyelids shut aiming for the sun? The sun won most of the time and I was little again: my mother laying me naked on our veranda in Rio, getting my skin used to the Brazilian sun, one minute each side first, and every day double the time.

I briefly longed: for Rio, my dream-torn city, for my faraway friends, one of them dead, for mid-August in Buenos Aires.

Back here, outside, the beauty and the irony and the plain richness of life beckoned. I risked it all: I went back into the monstruous building and broke the writer's block and made progress.

Yet, at five-thirty the sun was still there and ran with me around the football stadium, and the beauty was still there, in some men covered with mud from their games, in women running with dogs, in kids trying, so strangely, to study-play the soccer one is born around, as if it admitted explanations.

A good Monday.

Cris Pedregal Martin
Amherst, Mass., 1996