I’m sitting in the library of Taft Camp, sharing a Formica-topped table with an elderly man. He has a full head of gray hair, and he wears thin, wire-framed glasses with rectangular lenses that remind me of the type Sarah Palin made famous. He’s flipping through the pages of a National Geographic magazine.

Although we’ve never spoken, I’ve been observing him for the 30 minutes or so that we’ve been sharing this table. I wonder what goes through an elderly man’s mind on a Saturday afternoon in prison, only a few weeks before the Christmas holiday.

He’s a relatively new prisoner, or so I assume, because I haven’t noticed the man before today. I could introduce myself and ask how he’s getting along, but I’m enjoying my solitude. More than 500 prisoners share the boundaries of the prison camp, but since I keep an unusual schedule of sleeping very early each evening and rising before three each morning, I don’t always notice the daily changes in our prison population. People come and go, and when I think about that, I realize my neighbor may have been here for several weeks.

Like other prisoners, he wears gray cotton sweats–the type we used to wear in junior high PE class, and the only type the prison commissary sells. A gold wedding band is present on his right pinky finger rather than on the traditional wedding finger. Perhaps his wife left him, maybe because of his prison term, and he keeps the ring for sentimental reasons. Perhaps he is a widower, and the ring is a loving memory of his wife. He has a grandfatherly look about him, with a fleshy face and a hanging chin that rests on his chest as he stares at the glossy photographs in the magazine. I can’t tell for sure, but I think his eyes may be closed. Prison may have taken the energy out of him, or perhaps he’s taken a rest to dream of happier times far away from the boundaries of federal prison.

This is what I sometimes do on slow Saturday afternoon. I come to this library, surround myself with millions of written words that fill the thousands of books around me. I pull books from shelves, sometimes randomly, sometimes in search of particular authors, just to see how much more beautifully those authors write than me. When I tire of reading, I watch the people around me, like the elderly man in the gray sweats, and I wonder about their lives.

Earlier this morning I wrote a lengthy letter to a friend, then I ran ten miles and followed with 300 pushups.

[consecutive running log: 3,186 miles over 357 days]

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