A Walker in the Suburbs

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.

For the most part this has been a warm, muddy winter. The backyard is a squishy, soggy mess, and the sections of living room floor not covered by carpets bear little brown doggy paw prints that must be constantly wiped up.

The warmish winter means that gloves spend more time in pockets and skin stays less chapped. It means that I’m not pummeled by bitter winds or enervated by long commutes in sub-freezing cold. I like these things.

But now that temps are in the teens and 20s, I’m remembering that there are advantages to seasonable cold. For instance, the ground is frozen. I can throw Copper the ball and neither one of us needs to wipe our feet when we come in.

And backing down the driveway past the two other cars is no longer an obstacle course — because there is a strip of frozen ground on either side that gives me more leeway than I usually have. It’s the winter shoulder. And I’m glad it’s here.


(We’re not quite as frozen as the photo above would have you believe — not yet!)

As the temperatures plummet, my pace picks up. I don’t walk from parking lot to Metro and Metro to office, I run. It’s not the most dignified way to move from place to place, but it’s how I travel in sub-freezing weather.

The body is a furnace, something I discovered when I lived in New York, a walkers’ paradise. I wore a long black coat then, the warmest coat I’ve ever owned, toastier than any down jacket or fleece. But the coat was heavy. Putting it on was like suiting up for battle, which in a way it was.

So every workday morning I slipped into battle gear and made my way from 94th and Central Park West to 45th and Park Avenue, right near Grand Central Station. In 10 blocks I would be warming up, and by the time I reached the Plaza I might have to loosen my scarf.

I didn’t run those 50-plus blocks, but I kept up a brisk pace. It was a surefire antidote to cold — and now that I think back on it — pretty much everything else, too.

Having the piano tuned is a cause for celebration. And what better way to celebrate than playing the darn thing. This is a practical as well as an artistic matter. It doesn’t stay in tune long, my poor old spinet.

So I sat down last night and started with what I last played — “The Messiah.” Picked out the tenor part for “Every Valley,” but found it a bit passe. So I dug deeper for some Bach, pounded out the first prelude, then the second fugue.

Emboldened that I could still read the notes (long-term memory is a wonderful thing!), I pressed on, ending the session with a few tunes from the Gershwin songbook.

By this point, the feeling had entered my fingers again, that proprioception that tells me my index finger is about to strike F sharp and my pinkie is hovering over E natural — and if I want the melody to sing out, I’d better work that pinkie.

They used to call it “touch.” Maybe they still do. It’s what turns notes into music. I got a bit of it back  last night.