How to Eat a Tire in a Year

We always talk about breaking our record—going for a hundred thousand steps—but now I worry that we might be too old, and how weird is that? I was nineteen when we met in the front hall of our dormitory at Kent State, and Dawn was a year younger. We know each other’s siblings, and before they all died we knew each other’s parents as well. Dawn’s father was a jazz musician who fell to his death in a skydiving accident when he was fifty. Her mother was a former flight attendant who doted on her two sons but constantly picked at her daughter’s appearance, though I’ll never understand why. Dawn dresses like a Swiss person. That is to say, she looks at all times as if she is headed to the airport, where she will fly business class. Everything matches or is color-coördinated, usually in earth tones. When I tell people that her wedding dress was brown, she corrects me, saying, “Not brown—driftwood.”