A Walker in the Suburbs

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.

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.”