Walkers usually keep to themselves. We’re an introverted bunch. But yesterday was different.
“Can you believe this day?” a woman said to me as she came closer, gesturing to the blue sky, her arms raised as if I were a long-lost friend.
I thought for a moment we might know each other, so enthusiastic was her greeting. But no, she was just a fellow traveler, her tongue loosened by the endorphins or the trail or the fact that we were both alive and well on a glorious spring morning.
A male cardinal hops along the front walk, pauses briefly, then flies up to perch on a slender branch of the climbing rose, his crimson plumage shouting out from amidst the green.
It’s not long before he’s back on ground, foraging in the leaf meal, pecking around the forget-me-nots, glinting in the periwinkle.
He shines, this cardinal, his feathers brighter, as I’ve read they are this time of year. He’s all decked out for the ladies, of course. And I’m lucky enough to be around for the show.
(Unfortunately, the cardinal couldn’t be bothered to pose. But I did snap a quick photo from the rear.)
So far, April is proving to be as wet as March was windy. The months are playing their usual roles, in other words.
I feel a certain responsibility on rainy days: unless otherwise occupied, I should use them for cleaning closets or going through old files in the basement.
Which means that after I’ve written, and after I’ve studied, and after I’ve made today’s calls and sent today’s emails, I must get myself to the nether regions of the house … and fight the good fight.
If I’m lucky, I arrive on the Georgetown campus in time to hear the bells of Healy Hall toll the Angelus. It makes an already timeless experience feel even more so.
The bells were tolling last night as I walked to class past the old stone buildings through a cool and soggy evening.
I thought about a passage from Thomas Cahill’s Mysteries of the Middle Ages, which details a 1219 visit between Saint Francis of Assisi and Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil of Egypt, Palestine and Syria.
Some scholars think that it was then that Francis came up with the idea of tolling the Angelus bells at 6 a.m., noon and 6 p.m. — the Christian version of the Muslim call to prayer. A likely story, and maybe just that, a story. But it was easy to believe it when the bells were ringing.
The new month has crept up on me. Though it is April in reality, it is March in my mind. What to do about this? Get out and walk through it, I suppose.
I’ll be looking for the usual signs: violets nodding in the early grass, bluebells along the path. The yellow blossoms of forsythia greening along the stem. And if we’re lucky, the dogwood and azaleas will overlap enough to make the tableau you see above.
Winds will blow, rain will fall, maybe even snow. But the sun will mean business. That’s another way to know that April is really here.
Solvitur ambulando — “it is solved by walking” — is the unofficial motto of this blog. Throughout the years, the walks I’ve taken have not just stretched my legs and bolstered my mood; they have also proved, over and over again, that simply getting up and moving is the solution to many of life’s problems.
For the most part, then, despite all the physical advantages it brings, I still see walking’s chief benefit to be a mental one.
What I remembered this weekend, when I strolled outside for the first time in seven days—after being down with a cold and other annoyances—is how walking helps a body recuperate. The combination of fresh air and footfall working their magic.
The walks were not the fastest I’ve ever taken, nor did they cover the most ground. But they took me out of the house and into the wide world, and I was grateful for them.
Sometimes, the best way to start the morning is by reading an obituary. Not just any obituary, though. It needs to be one like that of Arthur Riggs, 82, who with a colleague, Keiichi Ikatura, developed synthetic insulin. Riggs died March 23.
I learned that Riggs and Ikatura developed a genetic technique that led to the first human-designed and human-made gene that would function in any organism. This paved the way for the creation of synthetic insulin, a “lifesaving development for millions of people with diabetes,” the Washington Post said.
Before this discovery, people with diabetes relied on insulin from cows, which had a high rate of allergic reactions. The synthetic insulin avoids this risk.
Dr. Riggs lived in the same house for 50 years, drove “modest cars,” said the obituary … and quietly gave away much of the money he earned from royalties on patents — $310 million — to the institution he helped to found. The name of the institution: the City of Hope.
(Ikatura and Riggs in 1978. Photo courtesy City of Hope.)
In the continuing saga of my return to grad school, I’m finding at least one part of the experience nice and easy: part of my homework this week involves watching an old movie.
It’s the 1943 rendition of “Jane Eyre,” the version of this oft-filmed classic that Jean Rhys, author of the Jane Eyre prequel Wide Sargasso Sea, would have known. I’m watching the film before reading Part One of the book, which we will discuss at the next class.
Compared with hacking my way through Postmodernism, New Historicism and various other critical theories, viewing a film seems … positively dreamy.
Orson Welles, Joan Fontaine. Homework: bring it on!
(Seeing as today is April 1, I must add this disclaimer: no fooling!)
My walking discoveries continue. Late last week I took off again through the nature center, its trails soft with beaten dirt and crushed leaves. I was looking for another way to reach the bridge I hadn’t known was there … and found it!
But instead of turning right again I turned left, and found myself once again on a path I’d never trod. This is a trail I’ve walked past hundreds of times but somehow never taken.
I marveled at the tall trees, at the winsome gait of the baseball-capped woman I saw along the way, at the family of five who passed me going the other direction. The tallest of the three children had just found a huge stick, more like a small tree trunk, and he seemed determined to bash everything in sight with it.
When I had walked a while along this new route, I began to understand where I was, knew I could take a tunnel passage underneath the road. It’s amazing what you can see when you take the “new” trail in town.
When I wrote yesterday’s post I hadn’t yet realized that I’d missed the biggest Oscar news to happen in years. Bigger than when Moonlight’s Best Picture award was momentarily and mistakenly given to LaLa Land in 2017.
When Will Smith slapped Chris Rock to defend his wife against one of Rock’s jokes, he ignited a storm of controversy that hasn’t let up yet.
What I thought not just after watching clips of that episode but often throughout the three-and-a-half-hour show is how the Oscars —and the world, too — have changed in the last couple of decades, how things have grown darker, starker and meaner.
At times like these I remind myself of what art can do when it’s at its best: how it salves wounds, promotes understanding, draws us together. What Ralph Ellison wrote of the novel can sometimes be applied to other arts: “[It] could be fashioned as a raft of hope, perception and entertainment that might help keep us afloat as we tried to negotiate the snags and whirlpools that mark our nation’s vacillating course toward and away from the democratic idea.”
A raft of hope! … I’ll cling to that.