A Walker in the Suburbs

It’s my new mission: On days I work at home, I try to spend as much time as possible outside. If I sit still long enough at the glass-topped deck table, I become part of the furniture. Birds ignore me. I’m part of their world.

Yesterday I worked inside for less than two hours — driven indoors by a suspicious whirring sound from my laptop. The poor baby was overheated, I think. But once it (and I!) cooled down, we were back on the deck, now shaded by the tall oaks.

By then, it was dinner time. Goldfinches landed on the climbing rose boughs, in between turns at the feeder, each branch bending and straightening every so slightly with the feather weight of the birds. A cardinal hopped along the pergola beam, peering down at the hummingbird taking his evening feed. Meanwhile, farther out in the yard, a pair of robins fluffed their feathers in the bath.

Here is a world that coexists with our own, full of drama and fun. I could have watched for hours — entertained, heartened, made whole.

Today’s late post is my little birthday protest: because it cannot possibly be May 31, 2017. It was just May 31, 2016.

But it is that day, I know, and has been 365 days since the last one. So nothing to do but accept it graciously and gratefully. Which I do. Really. Besides, it’s a most luscious May 31. No rain so far (fingers crossed) and full-on summer with air that knows its mind and the roar of motorized lawn implements in the background.

A couple hours ago I heard the Overture to William Tell on the radio. Is this my soundtrack, I wondered: a madcap frolic, a frenetic dash from point A to point B? It probably is. What I need this year is a slower soundtrack. Nothing too slow or mournful, but definitely something a little less rushed and crazy.

That’s my birthday resolution, my new year’s mantra. Find a slower soundtrack … and find it fast.

Claire never thought twice about what she’d major in. It would be psychology. And since high school she’s been sure of what she wanted for a life’s work: She would be a therapist. She would help people.

Which is exactly what’s she’s done: received her bachelor of science in psychology and, today, will receive her master of social work degree from Catholic University.

As I prepare for her commencement, I think of Claire as a baby, toddler, school kid, teenager, college student and, for the last several years, grad student working on the side.

A huge wash of feelings on this day. But one that rises above the rest: You did it, kiddo. Good for you!

It’s been four years now since Dad was alive to celebrate his birthday. I wonder what he would think of the world today. He would laugh about it, I’m sure. Probably shake his head, too.

Cleaning out some files health files last weekend I came across a newspaper clipping from the ’90s, an article from the Louisville Courier Journal on how running affects women’s knees. Written across the top, in Mom’s distinctive hand: “From Dad.”

What a wonderful and unexpected find! Mom’s handwriting and Dad’s idea. He was always after me to stop running. Bad for your knees, he said, all that pounding. Dad, who apart from yard work did no other exercise I can recall.

Dad lacked the earnestness of later, highly buff generations. But he lived to be 90 and he loved life. He took what came — and kept on going, always with a smile and a quip. Can’t think of a much better way to do it.


(Dad posing in front of the house he grew up in on Father’s Day 2011.)

After-work walk on a May evening. The air perfumed with spirea and honeysuckle, a trace of lilac. I pass through waves of warmth and coolness.

I’d been thinking of this amble as I sat in meetings and on Metro. Thought of it at home when I pulled on a t-shirt and tennis shoes and left the house in a hurry, before I found something else I had to do.

The real stroll was even better than the imagined one, as I lost myself in the cadence of the steps and the sounds of day’s end: birds roosting, balls bouncing, radio rap from a passing car.

Self-propulsion is marvelous any time of year. But on a fine May evening it’s utterly divine.

Bisbee, Arizona, is a funky old mining town built into a hillside with shops and houses tucked into nooks and crannies. There are no straight streets here. Which means that if you need to get from Point A to Point B you can walk a few blocks — or you can take the stairs.

The town is criss-crossed with stairways, some with railings and some without, some crumbling and some whole, some decorated and others plain. You might head up a flight thinking it leads to the street above only to find that it dead-ends at a lavender bungalow with Buddhist prayer flags flying.

I walked the Bisbee stairs yesterday — at least 1,000 of them, maybe more. In between I heard a man strumming a guitar in his carport, and a bird (a hermit thrush?) singing in a shiny green-leafed tree. I wandered into a church built a hundred years ago by men who worked a full shift in the mines then spent four more hours a day building a house of worship.

Stair-climbing builds character, as does life on the frontier. Arizona was the 48th state admitted to the union, which means its frontier days aren’t far behind it. Maybe that’s why it’s easy to imagine an earlier way of life here: a time when things weren’t quite as easy as they are now.

Thirty years ago today, Tom and I were married in a snowy Lexington, Kentucky. We came here to Arizona to celebrate the day, and found colder than normal temperatures — but at least no snow!

A marriage is not just the union of two people; it’s also the beginning of a family, and today I’m thinking about the wonderful family that Tom and I have created. Three beautiful daughters, a new son-in-law — and a host of friends and connections.

It’s a web of relationships that sustain and nurture us, that make this day special in so many, many ways.

When I was a kid we drove along Interstate 10 on our way to southern California. I can remember seeing Saguaro cactus out the window, but there was never time to get out and walk among them.

Yesterday, there was time. Yesterday, the Saguaro were the destination. We learned about them, hiked around them, took pictures of them.

Saguaro are 20, 30 even 50 feet tall. They might be 70 years old before they grow a branch. Though  they’re found only in southern Arizona and parts of Mexico, they’re icons of the American West.

I wondered as I walked whether that’s why they seem so familiar. But there’s something else at work. Some of them reach out with open arms, others give a stiff salute. They look a little human out there, and in fact the Tohono O’odham Indians treat them as revered members of the tribe, not quite people but not quite cactus, either.

After just a few hours among the plants I can understand why.

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.