The kid with the Roman candle couldn’t have been more than 4.

It was lit. He was waving it, standing next to a gas station just before midnight on the Fourth of July.

Which is why I tripped. I was running and must have stared in momentary horror. My toe caught an off-kilter piece of sidewalk. I fell, rolled and got up bleeding from the hands and elbows.

“Hey, buddy, you OK?” the man who had lit the 4-year-old’s Roman candle shouted from across the street. “Got to watch your drinking, man.”

And I stopped a minute, letting it sink in that a man who gives explosives to preschoolers had decided to lecture me on my life choices.

But I don’t make a habit of arguing with strangers in the middle of the night. I kept running. I had a few miles to go.

I’ve run about 600 miles though Lansing this year, training for the Detroit Free Press/TCF Bank Marathon, which takes place on Sunday.

Because working as an editor at the Lansing State Journal involves long and unpredictable hours, and because hanging out with my kid is more compelling when she’s awake, I’ve done most of that running between the hours of 11 p.m. and 1 a.m.

I’ve seen a lot of Lansing late at night. It might surprise you.

I can tell you, for instance, that the enclosed soccer field in Ferris Park is probably better used between 11 p.m. and midnight than at any other time of day and that the games don’t stop when the lights go off.

I can tell you that Sunday nights in the summer are often livelier than Saturdays when it comes to folks talking and drinking on their front porches, reluctant to admit the work week starts in a few hours.

I can tell you about the woman in fairy wings blazing up and down dark streets on a Lime scooter.

It might not surprise you that most of Lansing goes to bed at a sensible hour. On residential streets after 11, you’d hardly know anyone was awake but for the occasional flicker of a TV screen and the smell of marijuana smoke. After midnight, you could stop and read this column start to finish in the middle of Saginaw Street without having to dodge traffic if you timed it right.

Which makes the human dramas that spill into the streets that much more astringent - the teenage runaway badgered back into his mother’s minivan, the woman lying drunk and incapacitated on a Capitol Avenue sidewalk (when the paramedics arrived, they knew her name).

Or the guy with the bat.

Now I’ve been careful about running up on people in the dark ever since I accidentally chased down a senior citizen in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood.

It was the mid-1990s. I was running home. I didn’t pick up on the fact that he’d started running because I was coming up fast behind him. “Why the hell were you chasing me?” he shouted as I passed him.

He was choking for air. I felt awful for days.

But surprising the shirtless man holding a bat in the middle of Catherine Street seemed like a bad idea for other reasons.

I shouted out.

“Somebody stole my vehicle,” he replied, his voice clotted with anger.

I was a block over when the banging started.

Running at night in Lansing seldom feels dangerous. I know there’s privilege at work there. I’m a middle-aged white man. The people I encounter don’t seem to find me particularly interesting or particularly threatening.

But it’s also about familiarity.

Run enough and streets become routes: 1.3 miles to the Grand River, 2.2. miles to Old Town, 5 miles to Spartan Stadium, 11 miles to Benjamin Davis Park and back. Lines on a map become neighborhoods: houses and community gardens and late-night laundromats and tiny parks and dirt roads.

Run enough and you meet people, even at night: Late-night soccer players, stranded folks looking to borrow a phone, people helpless in the face of the primal urge to shout when someone runs by them. I’m looking at you, Capitol Commons teenagers who’ve clearly read “The Gingerbread Man.”

Mostly, the nights here are quiet and empty. You can get lost in the rhythm of your feet hitting pavement and dull calculations of distance.

Just watch out for broken sidewalks and kids with fireworks in their hands.

Contact Matthew Miller at mrmiller@lsj.com or (517) 377-1046. Follow him on Twitter at @mattmillerlsj.