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On Broadway

On Broadway

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The tune has been in my head the last few days. The tune is there because I was there. On Broadway, that is. Not the part George Benson sings about, not the place where “the neon lights are bright.” Not Times Square Broadway.

I’m talking Upper West Side Broadway. Corner grocers, vacuum cleaner stores, coffee shops. There was a time when I lived there that if I ran out of paper and had to run down to the tiny stationary store to buy some, I hesitated. I would have been on deadline then (I was always on deadline that year) and I knew I would run into at least a couple of people I knew on the way there and back. Could I afford the time to buy the paper and chat with the friends?

The answer, always, was yes.  I had lived there for a few months. And when I walked down Broadway I knew people. I didn’t need neon lights.

Saturday, during my 21-hour visit to Manhattan, I had time to walk from 114th to 77th Street. The sun was bright, the air was warm, the pedestrians were of every size, shape and color.  I didn’t know people to talk to along the way. But I had left one good friend at 113th Street and met another at 77th. My feet flew down the pavement. There was energy and street life. It was good to be back on Broadway.

Cross Walk

Cross Walk

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Yesterday I tried something new, something I hadn’t seen in the 23 years we’ve lived in this neighborhood — a crosswalk. It’s our corner’s first. A touch of the city in the suburbs. A time-out for the traffic. A vote of confidence in walkers everywhere.

I pushed the button, and I waited. And waited. And waited.

I started to run across the street against the light. After all, there were no cars coming. It’s what I usually do, wait for a pause in the stream of cars and then thread my way across.

But yesterday, since the cosmos (and the Virginia Department of Transportation) was giving me a break, I gave them one, too. I was a good citizen, a patient pedestrian. I waited my turn. But when the sign said “Walk” — I ran.

I Didn’t Take Pictures When I Lived There

I Didn’t Take Pictures When I Lived There

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But I make up for it when I return. It’s the years in the wilderness, the suburban wilderness. They have softened me, I suppose, turned me into a tourist. I snap and snap and don’t care if people think I’m a tourist. I’m easily impressed. I look up.

Every direction is a photograph. The ripple of water in a lagoon, the play of light on a brownstone, the San Remo glimpsed through a screen of bright willow green.

Maybe we should move back to New York, I say to Tom, knowing, before the words leave my mouth, how foolish they sound, the four-bedroom colonial back in Virginia filled to bursting. Knowing that life has taken me far from the person I was when I made my way in Manhattan years ago.

But that’s the point of travel. Possibilities present themselves. Life, in all its fullness, returns.

Walking in the City

Walking in the City

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A walker in the suburbs strolls the streets or ambles through the woods, but her destination is secondary. She walks for the walking and not for where it takes her.

Compare this to a walker in the city, pounding the concrete day after day. Here is walking with purpose, commuting on foot or by subway (which must also be walked to and from); walking to the corner for a newspaper, to the market for a quart of milk. Walking because it’s faster than taking a cab. Walking because, well, it’s just the way you get around. It is the air you breathe; it is the environment.

All this is to say, a walker in the suburbs forgets how much she walked when she lived in the big city. And when she goes back there her feet remind her. Her soul too. It soars.

New Neighborhood

New Neighborhood

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Yesterday, a walk in a new neighborhood: Strolling down a paved path that flanked a busy suburban byway, I crossed under the road through a pedestrian tunnel, automatically plugging my nose as I learned to do in New York, but unnecessarily, since the only whiff I got was of concrete.

The path wound along a creek, where gangs of loose-limbed kids sifted the water, looking for tadpoles. I could see the road I needed to be on, but took a chance that the path would bring me back where I’d begun.

I passed willows that gleamed with the first green of spring. And farther along there were more kids, careening down the path on too-big bikes or too-small scooters. A playground sign that said “For children ages 5-9” had been altered: “For children ages 5-59.” Young mothers threw back their heads and laughed. No one seemed to have a care.

I know that the homes along the path sheltered bankruptcies and infidelities, rebellious teenagers and addled grandparents. It was just that, in that early spring light, these didn’t seem to matter. It seemed like a new beginning, like an Eden.

Stegner and Place

Stegner and Place

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Today is the birthday of Wallace Stegner, writer, teacher and celebrator of place. The American West was his place and he described it well, its aridity and openness, the loneliness of its grain elevators and grasslands, the way it has shaped our character.

The New World transient is a person in motion, Stegner says. “Acquainted with many places, he is rooted in none.” Because he moved frequently himself, Stegner knows “the dissatisfaction and hunger that result from placelessness.” Which leads him to this conclusion:

“A place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown up in it, lived in it, known it, died in it — have both experienced and shaped it, as individuals, families, neighborhoods and communities, over more than one generation.”

I have thought about these words often since reading them this fall, have considered their truth as I try to feel at home in the suburbs. Thinking about them has led me to the library, to books about the people who lived here before us, to local historians who’ve discovered lost roads. I’m trying my best to feel at home here. But the “dissatisfaction and hunger” remain.

Old Part of Town

Old Part of Town

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Yesterday I drove to the old part of town, to a D.C. I seldom visit, where the houses are stately and imposing and the yards settled and calm. I was struck, as I often am, by how various neighborhoods and landscapes create different moods.

How wide open and exposed is the world of the outer suburbs, how on the edge of things. I think about the medieval town, walled and protected, houses clinging together for survival. And I see in our wide yards a sort of bravado.

Openness has its appeal, but so does the fenced yard, the closed gate, the hedged garden. There is something in here precious enough to protect — to make you long to be inside.

A College Place

A College Place

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Last night I went to a gathering of old college friends. We asked the inevitable questions (where do you live? what do you do? and — the clincher — when did you graduate?) and then we told stories. I heard about some great pranks and learned that two paintings in the reception area of my freshman dorm were recently found to be worth millions of dollars.

At some point our conversation turned to why we chose Hanover in the first place. And for most of us it was the physical beauty of the place. Hanover College sits on a bluff overlooking a double bend of the Ohio River. A winding forest road leads to the classical campus with old brick buildings in the Georgian style. To unwind, students stroll to the Point to look at the river.

I transferred from Hanover after my sophomore year, decided I wanted a campus near a big city. But when I think of college it’s Hanover I remember most. The low, mournful call of the barges passing, the broad Ohio curving; it’s a view that, every time I return, seems too perfect to be true.

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McKibben on Place

McKibben on Place

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I just finished Bill McKibben’s short book Wandering Home, his thoughts on environment and place as he walked through Vermont’s Champlain Valley and New York’s Adirondacks.

Here’s one passage, about how it feels to arrive somewhere on foot: “It’s not like arriving in the car for a dinner party. On foot you arrive late or early, without excuse, and settle into whatever conversation is under way. It took you a while to get there, so you’re obviously going to stay awhile. It feels like visiting in an older sense of the word…”

And here’s McKibben on the loss of old codgers: “It’s as if someone came and knocked down a thousand-acre stand of mature timber, as far as I’m concerned.” When these people were alive, McKibben says, “there was a quality of memory that I believe informed the place. It was tangible. It was in the air, it made the place what it was for me.”

In the suburbs, old codgers, or even young ones, are in short supply. Perhaps that is one reason why there’s no “there” here.

Proportion and Scale

Proportion and Scale

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A trip through the suburbs this weekend helped me see our corner of the world with fresh eyes. Yes, we have congestion here, and within walking distance are large houses on small lots. But our neighborhood has a wooded, tucked-away feel, and my shoulders relaxed as we drove home under low clouds and a gathering wind.

What makes the difference in Folkstone is having a sense of the land we lie on. The houses work in tandem with topography rather than trying to overwhelm or undo it. We are an older subdivision, too, with houses in the 2,000 to 2,500 square-feet range rather than double that amount. How much easier it is to harmonize when you have room to do it in.

There is a sense of proportion and scale here that soothes the spirit. It’s good to be reminded of this.