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Beating the Clock

Beating the Clock

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I don’t know when cross-walks that flash “Walk” or “Don’t Walk” turned into cross-walks that give pedestrians a countdown of the seconds they have left for crossing, but I was thinking yesterday how this development has changed my walking style.

Before, I would find my cadence and stride confidently from block to block. My feet were on auto-pilot while my mind was free to wander. I stopped and started when needed.

Now if I spot a flashing “20” halfway down the block, I play beat the clock. The natural gait is gone. Instead, I race to the corner and dash across the street.The flow of thoughts is replaced by strategy. If I keep up the pace another block I can beat that light, too.

Do I get where I’m going any faster?

I doubt it.

Frying Pan Park

Frying Pan Park

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As soon as I pulled into the gravel parking lot, I knew it was a mistake. I hadn’t been to this farm park since the girls were young. I was missing them enough as it was. What was I thinking of?

Some sort of therapy, I suppose, the kind where anxious folks expose themselves to ever-increasing doses of what they fear. So I hopped out of the car and started my “treatment.”

There was the big barn where we’d admire the baby pigs and the field where we’d watch the young goats rut and run. There was the chicken coop, the old tractor, the field where the pardoned Thanksgiving turkeys (given to several American presidents, who chose not to slaughter them) now run free.

Mostly there were the shadows of my three daughters. One running ahead, a second clambering on a fence and the third holding her nose because “this place really stinks, Mom.” For a moment the memories overcame me and I had to stop and compose myself.

As I stared at the light on the early fall fields, a young father raced ahead of me, his two children pulling on his arms. He looked harried and hassled — and seeing him helped me remember the high drama of those days, the endlessness of them. My trips to this park were often out of desperation.

But I also recalled the way it felt to pull in the driveway after one of our outings, secure in our togetherness, feeling, as I rushed to start dinner, that everything was exactly as it should be.

“Fists to Knives to Guns”

“Fists to Knives to Guns”

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I looked it up first thing this morning. The Navy Yard is a little over two miles from my office. I could walk there in 40 minutes. That’s how close it came this time.

But despite how close it came, despite how horrific it was — the worst loss of life in a single violent incident here since 9/11/2001 — what’s most notable about this tragedy is how routine it has become.

At least there were no children killed this time, I caught myself thinking. Yet undoubtedly children were affected. Children and other innocent people. The 12 victims all had loved ones — husbands and wives, kids and parents, brothers and sisters, friends and colleagues — and their lives will never be the same.

There has always been anger and hatred in the world. But anger plus gunfire is a potent combination. As Janet Orlowski of Washington Hospital Center said as she updated reporters on the condition of the wounded: “I grew up at a time when people were mad at each other, they put up their fists and they hit each other. And for some reason people have gone from fists to knives to guns.”

(Photo: Wikipedia)

Waist-High Weeds

Waist-High Weeds

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I found my neighbor, Teresa, weeding in the woods. “It’s Japanese stiltgrass,” she said, “and the only way to get rid of it is to pull it up.”

Tell me about it. I’ve been pulling it up all summer, but have never felt sufficiently ahead in my own yard to take on the common land.

But Teresa has. And does. She and her husband, David, often take a bag along on their walks to pick up trash in the neighborhood.

I do not bag and neither do I weed. Instead, I ponder the stiltgrass as I walk, notice the height of it, waist-high in spots, think about this wild vegetation taking over the woods, the fields, the yards.

It’s a green wave, a green sea, rolling ever forward. We can try to stem its tide, but we are powerless in its wake.

Big Sky

Big Sky

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It is a day of clarity and blue sky, a day that makes me dream of the West with its forever-faraway views. What would it be like to live in the open, to give up the canopy we Easterners hide beneath?

In Wolf Willow, Wallace Stegner has some answers:

Over the segmented circle of earth is domed the biggest sky anywhere, which on days like this sheds down on range and wheat and summer fallow a light to set a painter wild, a light pure, glareless, and transparent. The horizon a dozen miles away is as clean a line as the nearest fence. …

The drama of this landscape is in the sky, pouring with light and always moving. The earth is passive. And yet the beauty I am struck by, both as present fact and as revived memory, is a fusion: this sky would not be so spectacular without this earth to change and glow and darken under it.

A Building is Born

A Building is Born

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This morning on my way to work I didn’t have to cross the street and cross it again a block later. I didn’t have to walk around a construction site. It seems that finally, finally, the new building is finished.

I’ve watched it fall and rise again, gutted, framed and windowed. The old building was indistinguishable from its brothers, another stone box. This new version is mostly glass, it seems. Shiny and bright, but I’m wondering how it will hold up.

No matter, though. I’m just relieved that my path here is not impeded, that cranes don’t swing across the sky, that First Street no longer narrows to one lane.

It happens all the time, I know, but usually not so close to home. And when it does, it’s worth mentioning: A building is born.

Place, Unexpected

Place, Unexpected

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So I’m reading along in Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies, a re-telling of the last months of Thomas Cromwell’s life, riveted by her story of intrigue in the court of King Henry VIII, not expecting a discussion of place, when I find this:

He [Cromwell] is buying land in the lusher parts of England, but he has no leisure to visit it; so these farms, these ancient manors in their walled gardens, these watercourses with their little quays, these ponds with their gilded fish rising to the hook; these vineyards, flower dens, arbours and walks, remain to him flat, each one a paper construct, a set of figures on a page of accounts: not sheep-nibbled margins, nor meadows where kine stand knee-deep in grass, not coppices nor groves where a white doe shivers, a hoof poised; but parchment domains, leases and freeholds delimited by inky clauses, not by ancient hedges, or boundary stones.

 Here is a longing for place that is ancient but real, the pull of the city-dweller toward the bucolic retreat, the dream of land when land is owned but not possessed.

How many of us moderns feel the same?

Edging

Edging

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A walker notices boundaries. Often in the suburbs these boundaries are sidewalks, and often in the suburbs these sidewalks are edged.

And so … a brief meditation on edging, on the dividing line between concrete and soil, on the tendrils that can spread themselves across the border and on the neat way some homeowners have of highlighting this divide. 

The tool (perhaps it’s called an edger?!) that wedges itself between lawn and walkway or the whirring blade that separates weeds from lawn. Surely these are born of a need to cultivate, to order and refresh.

Though it’s easy to trip on edges, to twist the ankle or wedge the shoe, one has to admire the diligence with which some homeowners keep the wild world at bay.

I used to think edging was silly. Now I’m not so sure.

Sidewalks Gleaming

Sidewalks Gleaming

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Wet pavement, steam rising — an urban phenomenon I’d forgotten until I started disembarking two stops early and walking a mile through the city some mornings. It’s the ritual hosing of the sidewalk to start the day.

There is some pride of place here. The rest of the city can get by with grit and grime, but not our patch of pavement. It will be clean, rinsed by the waters of dawn, sun barely glinting above the horizon.

Some custodians, the polite ones, pause briefly to let pedestrians tiptoe through the puddles. Others dare you to cross.

Though a temporary annoyance, it’s all for the best. It’s a salutation, a baptism, a way to start the day.



(Pretend you can see the sidewalks in this picture.)

Place, Continued

Place, Continued

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I love it here. If this place was a boy or a girl, I would marry it. Maybe it’ll be legal to marry places one day. And if so, then I will marry this one.

— Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

The Interestings begins at a summer camp, where a group of artistic kids meet, give themselves the (ironic) name “the interestings” and forge friendships that will last all their lives. It’s a book that explores what it means to be talented and what it takes to build a happy life.

The line that grabbed me was spoken by a 15-year-old dancer about to be sent home from camp because of an eating disorder. She’s a minor character, the second generation the reader gets to see at the camp, but her experience mirrors that of “the interestings.”

The feeling she describes, an ecstatic connection with place, is probably as much about people as anything else. But haven’t we all felt that way once or twice, coming upon a town or a vista or an old house in the country to which we feel an immediate attraction?

It’s not always rational or easy to maintain, but it is real.