Peter Stavros

“I used to like the holidays,” Sadie says between sips of peppermint hot chocolate at the new coffee shop that just opened up down the street where the sad bar used to be. “At least…I think I did,” she adds, a tilt to her head as if the answer is written in the sky, as we are sitting outside on an unseasonably mild November day.

It was the first Saturday in December and the annual Santa Sprint, a 5K run to benefit a local ministry. The Olympic Trials it was not. It was a fun run. It was a fun run. People dressed in red and green, wore festive caps, jingle bells — some brought their dogs nattily attired in plaid sweaters or bowed beneath felt antlers — and dashed, or strolled, down and back on quaint Frankfort Avenue before the road was reopened to traffic to release the barrage of Christmas shoppers.

Sadie puts a bottle of white wine in the fridge before she goes out for a long run. She figures that if the run doesn't help purge her of the toxins from the day, then maybe the wine will. And if that doesn't work, she always has that fifth of bourbon on the bookshelf that girl from work gave her for Secret Santa, red bow taped to the top, and a few oxy left over from her thumb surgery last summer stashed at the bottom of the clothes hamper that she thinks she's hiding from me.