A Walker in the Suburbs

Dad has been gone three years now, which is in itself an explanation for how one lives through loss — the speedy passage of time means the years without those we love fly faster than we originally suppose they would.

Thinking of Dad so much yesterday as I decked myself out in blue to watch the University of Kentucky Wildcats in post-season play. It was a tight game, which required much yelling at the screen.  I’m typically a quiet viewer, someone who sniffles quietly into a tissue at a tearjerker. But all restraint crumbles when I watch U.K. basketball.

I learned from Dad that a game be watched as enthusiastically as it’s played. So if Wichita State sunk a basket, I sighed — loudly. And if U.K. claimed a three-pointer, I shouted. And when the boys in blue pulled out a three-point victory at the end, I whooped and hollered.

It’s the way Dad would have watched the game. And I was watching for him.

It was blustery and cold yesterday, and the planes were taking the alternate runway to Dulles, something they only do in the heartiest of breezes, and which sends them right over our neighborhood. I felt like walking but the howling wind and jet noise was unsettling.

Still, the story I was writing was emerging slowly, if at all, and I was feeling that familiar knot at the base of my skull. It was time for a stroll.

The first few minutes were tough — I purposely walked into the wind at the beginning so I’d walk away from it at the end — but once I acclimated I immediately felt the relief that only being outside can bring.

The jets that seemed a menace from inside the house were great gliding gods when I saw them from the street. Dulles handles many international flights, so I imagined where these planes were coming from, the far-flung places — Bangkok and Seoul and Rio and Paris. Maybe they held people who had never been to the U.S. before. I imagined their excitement as the jets prepared to land.

Suddenly I wasn’t just out of my house — I was out of the mindset I’d had when I started. It was a welcome change.

A year ago today I sat at an outdoor cafe on another warm March afternoon and gathered my thoughts for an interview at Winrock International. This is what I saw.

It wasn’t Paris. It wasn’t even D.C. There was no limestone monolith, no Capitol dome. Instead, there was corporate America, stone and glass, with the name of a major defense contractor emblazoned on the facade.

But in that strange way that a landscape sometimes becomes the emotions we experience in it, this view became a mountain vista, a red-rock canyon panorama. Because as I sat there sipping raspberry iced tea, the neighborhood stirring to life after a long winter, I thought about how the world I inhabited at the time, one that had shrunk to a series of difficult duties, didn’t have to be my world anymore. There was a way out.

The realization hit me like a thunderclap. I hadn’t even interviewed for the job yet. I had no idea if I’d get it or want it. But something would come through. I would have possibility in my life again.

I walk past this spot most every day now. Sometimes I’m lost in thought, other times I’m worn out after a long day. But every time I pass, I think about the feeling I had that first day. What a gift it was, unbidden and unbound — an hour and a day of pure possibility.

Seven years ago on this day there were several feet of snow on the ground in northern Virginia. I had been housebound for two days, had cleaned closets and made soup, caught up on work and phone calls. So I did something I’d wanted to do for years: I started this blog.

It was a leap of faith and of certainty. It was a grand adventure. Could I post daily? Well yes, I could. Could I post pictures as well? (This shows my lack of technical confidence!) Yes, I could do that, too. Has this become what writers are told they must have now — a platform? Of sorts, I suppose, although being a walker hardly sets me apart!

What the blog is most of all is a continuation of the almost daily writing I’ve done since I was 15. It’s an outlet, one I protect and carve out time for, and it’s a collection, now almost 2,100 posts. I feel motherly toward it. Like my book, the blog is a child to be loved and nurtured.

Sometimes I have nothing much to say here, sometimes I can’t type fast enough. But I keep plugging away at it. And there’s something to that, I guess.

On a day that would have been Mom’s 91st birthday, I wear her earrings and a pair of socks with Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.”

Mom loved that painting, and she loved the name Vincent, even gave it to her parakeet.  She was a creative person, Mom was. A lover of words and ideas. A dreamer. She would bet the house on a dream — and  did several times.

In that way she inoculated her children against risky ventures. None of us will ever start a magazine or a museum. And yet … Mom left her mark. Which is why I found a scene from the new musical La La Land so touching. It was an audition scene, when the character Mia is asked to tell the casting director a story.

Mia sings about her aunt, who lived in Paris and once jumped barefoot into the Seine. “She captured a feeling, the sky with no ceiling, sunset inside a frame.”

… So bring on the rebels, the ripples from pebbles
The painters and poets and plays.
And here’s to the ones who dream …

Here’s to you, Mom.

Here I am, back from the 18th century and (despite yesterday’s snarky post) feeling a little bereft, truth be told. It was nice back there. It was quiet. A world without cars and sirens and power tools and amplified music.

It was inspiring, too, with talk about the republic and the founders’ ideas and ideals. In fact, there was so much to see and do (and so much exercise running and walking around the place), that I happily gave up Pilates fusion.

This morning’s organ concert in the Wren Chapel featured an instrument as old as the carols being played. To sit there with the music swirling around, natural light pouring in the high windows, was to feel as far away from my suburban life as I could possibly feel three hours from home.

It was more than space travel; it was time travel, too.

I’ll admit I punted this year. Because our Christmas card features a family wedding, I figured the biggest news needed no explanation. Of course it wasn’t the only news, but I’ve been too busy working a new job to write much about it (or anything else).

But the incoming cards, ah, they’re a different matter. They come with doves and angels and Currier and Ives-like prints of snow-covered barns. They come with messages heartfelt and funny, with invocations of peace and joy. Prayers not just for us but for our country.

And then there are the messages. “Rage against the machine in 2017.” “When they go low we go Facebook.” “We live in interesting times.” “Wishing you a better 2017.” One friend said it had been such a tough year she was just sending cat pictures.

And then there was the story one friend told about his fishing trip off the Florida Panhandle. Once the captain and guide learned that he and his family were supporters of the “Nasty Woman,” he wrote, this news ignited “random guffaws among anglers and guides alike. … We were surely at the bottom of the Gulf Coast food chain. Fish bait. Yet with their friendly advice, counsel and live minnows we reeled in some edibles.”

The cards this year made me laugh and smile. They were comforting and encouraging. They were proof, I think, that we’ll all be better off if can laugh at ourselves and admit that we need each other.

So this year, instead of my usual appreciation, I’m sending this one, full of gratitude for what matters most: friendship and love. I’ll end it with a quotation from the same movie I wrote about before: “Remember, no man is a failure who has friends.”

Every year I’m more touched by our neighborhood’s light displays. The tiny fist they shake at the night — and their individual ways of doing so.

Some are fairy-tale-like — white pin lights dripping from overhangs and eaves. Others are almost garish — bright colors strung from limb to pole, like a carnival or fiesta.

There are spotlit wreaths and a blow-up nativity scene.

The key thing is that today, almost at this very instant, we turn from the darkness to the light.

Still in a post-election whirl and funk, I board the Northeast Regional for two days of interviewing in New York, the first leg of a long trip that will ultimately take me to Asia and back.

It reminds me a little of Suzanne’s departure for the Peace Corps. Though she was embarking on a  three-and-a-half-year sojourn in West Africa, her first stop was Philadelphia, where she’d have a brief orientation before shipping off to Benin.

Claire and I were the only ones in town that day so we escorted Suzanne to Union Station, tried very hard not to cry (and mostly succeeded) and waved as our precious daughter and sister made her way through the low-key boarding gate.

Only later did Suzanne tell us that a fellow passenger had come up to her and said that the size of her suitcase and the reaction of her family made him think she wasn’t just going for a quick jaunt to Philly.

I look at the travelers around me now and wonder at their final destinations. Are they, too, at the beginning of a grand journey? Where will they be this time Saturday?

I’ll be past Qatar, on my way to Jakarta and points East. Still can’t believe it’s happening. A good way for adventures to begin.

(New York City sunrise, October 25, 2016)

A perfect fall day. The trees have flamed up and light streams into the yard.