A Walker in the Suburbs

My companion for a good 120 miles of yesterday’s trip was a gray Ford Focus with Ohio plates. The driver was a young woman, about the age of my daughters, I think. She was careful. She allowed herself to go five miles over the speed limit, maybe seven or eight on a steep grade, but she never nudged up to 80.

I first became aware of the car when it passed me a minute or two after I passed it. Not good, I thought. We’re going to have a competition. But she didn’t venture far ahead of me, and I was content to follow her. So this early skirmish morphed into a steady companionship as we took the ups and downs of I-64 from Beckley to Lexington in tandem. When she passed, I passed. When she slowed, I slowed.

It’s a lovely stretch of road, high country with rows of blue mountains receding in the distance. But it’s also lonesome; I appreciated the vehicular companionship.

I often do this when I’m driving alone. Pick a car and stick with it. That automobile becomes my  personal pace car. I keep it in my sights, use it to measure my speed. And I make up stories for the driver. In my white-line-fever-addled brain, my car and the pace car become friends.

Personification makes the miles melt away, and we reached I-81 in no time. I pulled into the left lane to head north. Somehow I knew the Focus would travel south.

I drove three more hours to get home — but I never found another pace car. I missed the Focus.

I’m about to drive east, loading the car before dawn. The ten-minute span between one load and the other is the difference between darkness and light.

As morning comes, remnants of night stay behind. A stray star gleams in the lightening sky. Bats scour the air for one last feed before sleep.

For me, breakfast is down the road. For them, it’s dinner time.

Dad was in the 95th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force. He flew two tactical support missions on D Day. But it wasn’t until a 50th anniversary trip to the  beaches of Normandy that he realized what the ground troops had endured.

“I don’t think the American people appreciate what some of those men did,” Dad told a newspaper reporter interviewing him about the offensive. “Those guys, they deserve all the honors.”

Typical of Dad to say the other guy gets the glory. But he knew as well as anyone what it meant to climb into the cramped tail gunner’s compartment of a B-17 bomber and take off in darkness for the battlefield continent. He did it because it had to be done. They all did.

Now Dad is gone, and D Day has become less a personal war story and more a historical event. But it was a historical event Dad was part of — and he never forgot it. “You were part of this great, massive undertaking,” Dad said in that same newspaper interview. “You were part of history.”

(Photo: Lloyd Wilson Collection of the 95th Bomb Group Horham Memorial)

Back in the salad days of freelancing, I made routine trips to New York City to visit my editors. We would have expense-account lunches or just chat in their offices, and in between I would walk up and down the streets and avenues.

It was rejuvenation in more ways than one. I usually came back with a few assignments — and even more important, with a lot of creative energy.

I no longer make my living as a freelancer, though I still make my living from words, and today I’m attempting to rekindle a bit of that excitement. There will be a conference and editors — and more to the point, there are still those streets and avenues (to say nothing of Central Park).

So while I will listen and take notes and learn how others are weathering the changes in our profession, I will also pound the pavement. I’ll be a walker in the city instead of the suburbs.

That’s how it all began.

If greening is here, then mowing can’t be far behind. And indeed it is not. Where I live, the mowing season has definitely begun.

Mowing is one of the yard chores I like best — in part because I can zone out while doing it. But also because of the wonderful aromas it stirs up.

I’ve been conducting my own little fragrance test lately, and in a highly unscientific fashion I concluded that the cut bluegrass I inhaled deeply while in Kentucky last week smells better than the cut grass I know at home.

As it turns out, the explanation for this must lie in my head — not my nose. A few minutes online convinced me that the lawns in Virginia are as likely to be composed of bluegrass as the lawns in Kentucky.

So it’s not the grass type that’s making the difference. There is something else here. A whiff of nostalgia, perhaps?

As it turns out, Parker’s Mill Road does have a sidewalk, at least in part. And today I took that sidewalk out into “the country,” which is surprisingly close to this part of Lexington. The fences are black instead of white on this road — though less than a mile away are the famous white fences and red accents of Calumet Farm, home of many Derby winners.

But today I was the one doing the running, not just the thoroughbreds. I trotted down Parker’s Mill into Cardinal Valley Park, following the signs that said “Walking Trail,” and found myself on a beautiful paved path that ran a mile or more. Trees arched over the trail and it was pleasantly busy with dog-walkers, amblers and what appeared to be an entire high school track team.

It was late afternoon. The sun was warm and slanting, the air cool and refreshing. And there settled on me that kind of well-being that it’s tempting to call “runner’s high” — but is more than that, I’m convinced; is some amalgam of fresh air, exertion and the mind-jostling that comes with movement.

Whatever it is, today it was made possible by the cut-through. As I climbed back over the fence toward home, I gave a silent cheer.

The rain has been heavier than forecast and the temperature colder.

Birds like it, though. They’re glad to have moisture and birdseed in the feeder and, best of all, a nip of suet.

But for the rest of us it’s a day to stay inside, count our blessings and be grateful for small pleasures.

That’s what I’m doing.

The roses are gone but the trellis remains.

It’s the order within the chaos. The frame inside the thicket. The brown beneath the green.

It’s a glimpse into the essential order of things.

Summer obscures the trellis. Winter bares it, softens it, gives us a chance to admire it, too.

A postscript to “The Coverup” below.

Last night I covered my Dad, who’s in the hospital. I thought of all the times he covered me.

I thought about how life comes full circle, and how, even in the sad times, there’s a fullness to it. Something deeper than joy or sorrow.

To have two parakeets in a cage that hangs from the ceiling is to have a complicated relationship with feathers.

Feathers are, of course, beautiful to look at, whether on or off the bird. They come in iridescent yellows, blues and greens — hues that might be garish elsewhere but seem perfectly natural on a bird. And feathers are fun to collect and hold: the sharp peak of the long flight feather and the soft fuzz of the white down.

But when birds molt and feathers fly, well, then you have a lot of cleaning to do. It was while cleaning after a recent molt that I began to wonder:  How would it feel to live with feathers, to fluff them and preen them, to see them piled on the cage floor?  How would it feel to lose them, one by one?

Would we be lightened? Would we be freed? And when new growth appeared, would we know then what it means to begin again?