A Walker in the Suburbs

Union Station is one of those grand front doors, a place that’s meant to be exited. Walk beneath the arched portico and glimpse the Capitol before you.

While your peripheral vision takes in the comings and goings of a bustling depot — the cab queue, the travelers with wheeled bags, the buses and cars heading around the drive — what you see first is the Capitol dome.

I was remembering yesterday the first time I walked out the doors of Union Station. I’d arrived from Kentucky with a bunch of other eighth-graders. Some of us were staying in D.C. and others were taking a bus to New York City.

I was in the latter group — by choice, I might add. Even then, the Big Apple beckoned. But when I walked out of Union Station and saw the Capitol, I had to catch my breath. There was the city’s icon visible within minutes of arrival. There was a place I’d seen pictures of in textbooks but never imagined seeing in real life.

Yesterday I walked by this spot again. I stopped and thought about the twists and turns and decisions that brought me here. What circuitous paths our lives take. Would we have it any other way?

Today the red oak that shaded the sandbox, up which a large tiger-striped cat was once stuck for hours — that tree is coming down. It joins more of its compatriots than I’d care to count. Victims of age and drought; well loved and much mourned.

The old oak won’t be the day’s only casualty. A split tree at the back of the lot is losing its lesser half. A huge branch we call the Sword of Damocles will finally meet its match. And the Venus de Milo of the backyard, our limbless wonder, will also be axed.

All of this is sad to me, of course. I love the deep and deeply shaded back yard. I think of all it’s seen, every baby and toddler it’s entertained. All the cook-outs and birthday parties it’s hosted. I think of the zip wire once strung across it, the swing set and trampoline. 

The backyard was one of the main things that sold us on the house. It’s one of the lot’s most attractive features. But the trees have died, as have many throughout the neighborhood. And though dead trees give owls a home and woodpeckers a job, they don’t exactly enhance the landscape.

And so, down the trees come, down to be cut up and carted away. There’s only one thing left to say: Timber!

There is no reason to associate crows with March, but for some reason I do. There is something in their caws that speaks of the mottled blue skies of this month, of the air that is still cold but smells of just turned earth.

Heard in a chorus, crows sound busily out of sorts, the avian equivalent of a coffee klatch. But heard in single caws, the bird sounds plaintive, his song a bleak and windswept tune.

Which is why, when I hear a crow on a cloudy March morning, I think of Thomas Hardy:

This is the weather the shepherd shuns,
And so do I;
When beeches drip in browns and duns,
And thresh and ply;
And hill-hid tides throb, throe on throe,
And meadow rivulets overflow,
And drops on gate bars hang in a row,
And rooks in families homeward go,
And so do I.
 

February is one of those months that is not improved by augmentation. In fact, one of its best attributes is its brevity.

So the fact that we have an extra day this month is less than welcome. Leap years mean you lose that lovely divisible-by-seven nature of March dates. It means things are odd instead of even. And, since February means winter and March means spring, it feels like we’re stuck another day in an outgrown season.

I’ve been thinking this morning of all the other months I’d like to see more of: May, for instance. Or  April, June, July, August, September or October. Any warm month.

But February, being low on days, is the perfect candidate to absorb another. So here’s a reluctant nod to a reluctant date. Happy Leap Year!

It’s been gray and rainy and I’ve been thinking about the beach. About the waves and the breeze and the elemental rhythms that flourish there. The sultry mornings and the afternoon thunderheads that pile up on the horizon and darken the skies.

Rain falls so heavily there that it floods the streets and sidewalk and beach, creates another world of detours and discoveries — the perfect excuse to stay inside and dream.

After the rain, the air is drenched clean, and the surf is stirred up enough to bring sand dollars to the surface. Reach down and find one, stamped from the ephemeral, the transient made tangible.

When the sun starts to set, the big show begins. This is the gulf coast, after all, and the afterglows set the western sky ablaze. Stand there long enough and it seems the sun will never leave, that it will hover on the horizon forever, perfectly in sync, perfectly in balance, perfectly in view.

I don’t know what prompted me to pick up the book Essays After Eighty by Donald Hall. I’ve read Hall before and liked him. The book was slender, could be read quickly. I like essays.

Whatever the reason, I’m glad I did. Hall is funny and wise and drops names only occasionally. But he is an honest chronicler of old age, of its limitations and indignities. The end of driving (two accidents), the end of his blue chair (he dropped a cigarette and the chair caught on fire), the end of mobility (being pushed through art galleries in a wheelchair) — all of these are related honestly, dryly, with no self-pity.

What remains for him is writing — and rewriting:

My early drafts are always wretched. At first a general verb like “move” is qualified by the adverb “quickly.” After sixty tries I come up with a particular, possibly witty verb and drop the adverb. Originally I wrote “poetry suddenly left me,” which after twelve drafts became “poetry abandoned me.”

Someone in his ninth decade who loves revising — that’s encouraging.

The recent blizzard reminded me of this blog’s beginnings six years ago today during the snowstorm known as “Snowmageddon.” (This year’s blizzard name, “Snowzilla,” just hasn’t caught on.)

Had we not received two feet of snow in 2010 I would probably not be marking six years of A Walker in the Suburbs in 2016.

But we did, and I am.

To celebrate the day, I turn to A.A. Milne, who not only wrote Winnie the Pooh but also this lovely poem:

When I was one,
I had just begun.
When I was two,
I was nearly new.
When I was three,
I was hardly me.
When I was four,
I was not much more.
When I was five,
I was just alive.
But now I am six,
I’m as clever as clever.
So I think I’ll be six
now and forever. 

No one inhabited a birthday as Mom did February 1. “It’s the worst day in the world for a birthday,” she would moan. Cold and snowy or gray and bleak. She hated winter, especially toward the end of her life, and it seemed a personal insult that was born smack dab in the middle of it.

But perhaps because she was so vocal about the day, I’ve associated it more closely with her than I would otherwise. And in a way it suits her. There’s a no nonsense quality about it, a black-and-whiteness. It is strong, a proper reflection of her character, and like her has had to endure a fair amount of adversity.

So now we come to February 1, 2016, the first February 1 without her on this earth since 1926.  It is a mild, sunny day, one Mom might approve of.

Happy 90th birthday, Mom! It’s hard to express how much I miss you.

(Mom with her namesake, my daughter Suzanne, 1989)

Yesterday I trudged over snow banks to reach the main street in the neighborhood, which was plowed and salted down to pure pavement.

It was just above freezing and last night’s black ice had melted, so I had the confidence to run/walk my usual loop. Along the way I strode through sprinkles of salt crystals and the occasional glob of sand. My feet thrilled at their rough grip, at the surety of resistance, knowing that they were not going to slide out from under me.

Ah, friction! How overlooked you are, how simple but how necessary. How seldom we celebrate your presence, the way you connect us (people and animals) with the tangible world.

Given a chance, our eyes may stray to the slick, shiny surface.  It glitters, it attracts. But what thrills us most is the dull, the solid, that which keeps us in place in a tilting world.

The library wants its book back so I’m returning In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing and the Mysteries of Love by Joseph Luzzi. But not before noting a few passages here. One is this:

“When he [Dante] accepted that he would never return to Florence he figured that he did not have to keep writing the books that other people wanted; he would write the books — the book, actually — that he alone believed in.”

That book, of course, was The Divine Comedy.

Another passage:

“That is the real magical thinking of grief. That other life that death throws you into — the one you wanted nothing to do with — is actually one you can build upon. For it contains the gifts that the person who loved you left behind.”

As I continue to live “that other life,” a life without Mom, I’m finding that the gifts of words and writing, the gifts she gave me, bring comfort and courage. It’s not quite as tidy as it sounds here, but it’s close enough.