A late walk, not timed for sunset but finding it anyway. There at the end of the street, the end of the neighborhood, the end of the day.
The newspaper headline caught my eye: “Your Socks are Showing Your Age.” The accompanying photo shows two people who both look young to me, one wearing ankle socks barely visible above their shoes and the other wearing crew socks.
Apparently, Gen Z is embracing the sort of tall, dorky socks that everyone wanted to leave behind two decades ago, the kind you see on old guys mowing the lawn. Young folks now sport crew socks with sneakers and even with high heels. Take that, Millennials, they say as they flaunt their now-trendy tube socks.
How old do you have to be before you start seeing fashion as a game? Not very. The youngest Millennials are turning 30.
As a walker in the suburbs, it only figures that I would have an opinion on socks. They are, after all, the interface between foot and shoe. A well-fitting pair puts a bounce in my step; an ill-fitting pair drives me crazy. With socks, as with so much of life, the best approach is one of moderation: neither too high nor too low is the recipe for happiness.
(Photo from Wikipedia’s page on Socks and sandals, considered a “fashion faux pas” in some places)
Yesterday felt more like a weekend with a daughter and two granddaughters here. At a visit to a nearby farm park, I found myself on the merry-go-round with Bernadette (pictured here with her mama a year and a half ago).
Yesterday I was the one holding way too tightly to the rider, too tightly being a relative term, I suppose. Bernadette will be 4 in October, but hold tight I did. And as we made endless rotations to patriotic favorites like “Stars and Stripes forever,” I thought about how many times I took Bernadette’s mother on carousel rides, and how particular she was about her mounts — her favorite being the rainbow pony at the National Mall carousel.
Now Suzanne was standing on the sidelines with her newborn, and I was back on duty. The circle of carousels. The circle of life.
For so long this has been a loaded phrase for me — “blooming where planted.” It carries with it more than a hint of compromise. Or maybe it’s wistfulness, that I didn’t stay where I was planted but moved several times as a young adult before settling where I did.
And then there’s the fact that I’ve ended up in the suburbs. Heaven knows I carp enough about that.
But today, the angle of the light striking the grass on the lawns I passed, the scent of the air, rich with loam and honeysuckle, made me think that there could not be a much better place to be planted. And that whatever the mixed emotions with which I’ve traditionally viewed the saying, there is a nobility in trying to flourish wherever you are, in contenting yourself with the situation at hand.
(Pebble people frolic along one of my favorite routes.)
Back from a long drive, I take to the road. Not as a motorist but a pedestrian. I’m not often walking during the “golden hour,” when the sun slants low and bathes the landscape in soft light, but I was yesterday, and I reveled in it.
I first learned of the golden hour traveling with photographers. While writers can ply their trade at any hour (observing, interviewing, soaking up the local color), photographers prefer mornings and evenings to snap their shots. I see why. The world looks better then, and so do the photographs.
I didn’t intend to stroll during the golden hour yesterday; that was just the time available. But once I was walking through it I realized my good fortune. Here was beauty to soothe the nerves and still the mind.
(The golden hour in Khulna, Bangladesh.)
Walks lately have been wedged between errands and hospital visits, brief escapes into light and motion. Still, they have worked their magic, have loosened muscles and mind.
A photo I snapped on Tuesday’s stroll captures a truth. A sky that seemed mostly cloudy, I see now, was bluer than I remembered.
Isn’t that the way of life, the way of survival? We leave the hospital or nursing home, and we want to shout hallelujah. Yes, we are sad, but we are still here, still walking upright, and the ones we love, they don’t blame us for rejoicing.
What do you write about when one of your oldest, dearest friends lies full of cancer in a hospital bed? The same thing you write about when your parents are dying, when you’re sick or confused or worn out. You write about the world around you.
It’s the second day of May. Roses are budding, birds are nesting, clematis is blooming. Last night, the first hummingbird of the season made its appearance. It’s a perfect spring morning.
Not perfect for everyone, of course, but at this moment, I feel its perfection. And I take comfort in describing it, parsing it, moving it from the real world onto the page.
Walking is witnessing, a way to be present in movement and in time.
Yesterday’s stroll took me from the oldest part of Reston to the newest, from a community center to a commercial plaza, from a small cafe to a bustling bakery.
And all along I’m thinking spring. The dogwood, the azalea, the first green of the oaks and poplars. How lovely it is to see it unfold along familiar paths, how grateful I was to witness its unfolding.
I first read Robinson Crusoe as a child. I can still see the book’s binding, dark green spine with a mottled green-and-gold cover, and I still remember the joy of losing myself in the novel for hours at a time.
Here was a shipwrecked man on a desert island, abandoned and alone. Here was a man forced to build a life for himself from the ground up, to find or make food, shelter and clothing, outfitted only with his own strength and wits and what he could cobble from a sinking ship.
Back then, it all seemed like great fun, an extended version of fort-building in the woods. Now, I’m struck by the hopelessness of Crusoe’s situation and the emotional adjustments he made to cope with it. At one point, having satisfied his immediate needs, he sits down and makes a list (with pen, ink and paper salvaged from the ship) of pros and cons, which he called good and evil, things like: I’m banished from human society but there is food here. Or, I have no clothes but it’s so warm here I barely need any. Talk about looking on the bright side!
“Upon the whole, here was an undoubted testimony that there was scarcely any condition in the world so miserable but there was something negative or something positive to be thankful for in it; and let this stand as a direction from the experience of the most miserable of all conditions in the world, that we may always find in it something to comfort ourselves from,
and to set in the description of good and evil on the credit side of the account.”
— Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
The ultimate Pollyanna statement, but not a bad idea to keep in mind.
(I realized only after posting that “Credit Side” is an interesting title for April 15th, Tax Day.)
The rain has stopped, the sun has peeked through the clouds, and I have in mind a piece of music I always hum this time of year: “God So Loved the World,” by John Stainer.
Not knowing much about the composer I looked him up this morning. He’s not as contemporary as I thought. His dates, 1860-1901, mark him as a Victorian through and through.
Though his choral music output was prodigious, nothing much is performed these days except “The Crucifixion,” from which this piece emerged as an Easter and Passiontide favorite.
Give it a listen, if you have time. Maybe you’ll agree with me that to be remembered for one piece of music — if it were a piece like this — would make an entire life worthwhile.
