Urban Obstacle Course

Urban Obstacle Course

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My one-mile walk to Metro in the afternoon is a study in pedestrian behavior. I became interested in this when I lived in New York, where a rush-hour stroll down Fifth Avenue can be an exercise in start-and-stop frustration.

There are fewer people on D.C. streets but sidewalks can be narrower and walkers slower. So at 5:30 p.m. I must still employ some of the skills I learned in New York: looking for openings in a crowd, gauging the approach of the walker ahead of me, looking down at crucial moments so as not to engage in one of those awkward dances where no one knows whether to go left or right.

If everything works according to plan, I can make it from my office to Metro Center in the same time it would take on the subway.  This produces a lot of satisfaction, some welcome weariness and a renewed appreciation of pedestrian flow.

It’s an urban obstacle course, completed for the day.

Alarmed Dreams

Alarmed Dreams

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Lately I’ve been sparing myself one of life’s annoyances — I’ve not been setting the alarm. This is because I wake early anyway and must be at the office late. But this morning I was back to the familiar insistent beeping. An early dental appointment requires the utmost punctuality.

One difference between non-alarmed and alarmed wake-ups is that dreams seem closer to the surface with the latter. This morning’s was, ironically, that I had missed the very dental appointment I woke up early for. There was no real reason supplied, just inertia, lack of interest — which, if you’re going to miss a dental appointment is an excellent reason to do so — but my subconscious was not buying it.

So here I am, still groggy, needing to leave in half an hour. Because if I don’t, my dream will come true. And not in a good way.

Cicadas in the City

Cicadas in the City

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Out the door and down New Jersey Avenue. The familiar arching trees shade the hotel and taxi stand. The Capitol lies ahead; its scaffolding gleams in the noonday sun.

I run for every light, avoid the waits, move as much as possible. It’s the pace that does it, I think — a steady cadence does much to loosen the joints and free up the mind. But scenery helps also, and yesterday’s was perfect. Blue skies, cicadas still singing, all the bustle of early September.

For many years I mourned New York City. Washington, D.C., could never measure up in quirkiness or energy or street life. But in the last several years I’ve mellowed to D.C. I appreciate the cicadas, for instance, and the tall trees that shelter them. Their crescendo is the sound of hot southern cities, a sound that says slow down. No one heeds it, of course, but at least it’s there, mixed in with car horns and sirens.

High Season

High Season

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This is the high season for trail walking. Chilly mornings give way to warm, dry afternoons. The air has a freshness to it, which energizes and motivates. It pushes us up and out, makes us move even when we don’t much feel like it.

I feel like trail-walking this morning but new responsibilities have me in the office today. If I’m lucky I’ll pound some pavement at lunchtime, and that will energize and motivate in a different way.

But for now I’ll dream of a clearing in the forest, a hard-packed path winding out from it, oaks and maples and hickories arching over browning ferns and reddening blackgum. The trail won’t yet be covered but there will be enough leaves to provide a crunch when I walk. A soundtrack for the stroll.

Time, Place and Prairie

Time, Place and Prairie

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Last weekend at the National Book Festival, author Marilynne Robinson said some things about time and place that I’m still thinking about.

On time: She sets her books 40 to 50 years in the past, she says, because she likes to write about a period when people had less access to each other, more privacy; when they couldn’t always be reached. “I think it made people think differently,” she said. “I like people who think long thoughts.”

On space: A native of the East, the Berkshires, Robinson had to learn to read the landscape of the Midwest. “I find the prairie very beautiful,” she said. But there was was not an automatic affinity. “I wanted my soul to love the landscape.”

In time, she said, it did.

Time for place. And a place that grants time.

Step It Up

Step It Up

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I heard the surgeon general about midway through a punishing nine-hour drive spent completely on my posterior. A day of little walking for me, in other words. Just the opposite of what the nation’s highest health official was asking us to do.

Half of all Americans don’t get enough exercise, he said. And there’s a cure for that, a simple cure: take a walk. Walking 20 minutes a day can reduce our chances of getting such chronic diseases as diabetes and hypertension. It improves emotional well-being and keeps us sharp as we age.

But even with all these benefits and more, enough people aren’t walking. So the surgeon general is on a mission. Twenty minutes a day is all it takes, he says. Surely we have that much time. As for other excuses — there’s no safe place to walk in one’s community, for instance — part of the Step It Up campaign is to re-think the way Americans live and work, to call for more public transportation and walkable communities.

These are laudable ideas, and I’m with him … well … every step of the way.

(A highly walkable community in the Czech Republic!)

Place of Memory

Place of Memory

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A trip to Kentucky, one I wasn’t planning to make, has put me in the place of memory. I came to see my mother, who is improving though still in the hospital. What I found is so much more. It always is.

To be in her house without her is to imagine a future where she is memory. Unimaginable — except it was precisely what I was thinking about when I began the drive out on Monday. Perhaps because I was trying hard not to frighten myself, I arrived here unprepared for the memories this place evokes. By the time I pulled off the interstate onto Paris Pike it was as if I had flown here rather than driven. There was that same abrupt displacement, the same new ways of seeing it provides.

There was Loudoun Avenue and Dad’s old neighborhood. There were the charming cul-de-sacs off North Broadway. And then downtown, the one-way streets still two-way in my mind.

Even the summer air — breathed in deeply after leaving the hospital at 9 p.m. — even it belongs here and nowhere else. I struggle for a way to explain this that makes sense. Is it the way air currents move across old bricks? Is it the breezes that spring up in bluegrass pastureland? Or is it simply because it comes from the place of memory?

Old House

Old House

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This house was built in 1740. It belongs to my friends Annie and Pete, who laugh when they lead a tour. “It takes about 30 seconds,” they said.

The house is small and beautiful, with original beams, slanting floors, and a spirit that comes from standing long upon this earth. It is the small of age and utility, the small of cozy evenings and dark afternoons. You duck your head to go from the front room into the back, to hike up the steep stairs to a loft that was once reached only by ladder.

Being in this place gave me a taste of what it must have been like to live in the 18th century, the quiet thoughts, the belief in soil and rainwater, the everyday glimpse of mountain and field. Poor in so many ways, to be sure — but rich in so many others.

Teenage Forest

Teenage Forest

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“We call it a teenage forest because it’s messy,” the ranger said. “There’s a lot of stuff lying around that you could trip over.”

It’s not the most scientific explanation I’ve ever heard but it made me laugh, as I thought of some teenage rooms I have known. So I took a photo of this teenage forest, of the downed trees, crowded saplings and logs like random tennis shoes.

But the forest grows up too. The mature growth crowds the patchy sunlight that allows young trees to grow. The old growth forest is placid and lofty and purposeful.

Not nearly as much fun, though.

They’re Baaack!

They’re Baaack!

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A late start for me today, and a late start for school in Fairfax County this year. September 8 is as late as it ever can be. But it’s happening soon. I know this not from the clock or the calendar but from the rumble on the street.

They’re baaack. The big yellow buses. I just saw two of them roll down the road behind the house and another one has been parked on a neighborhood side street for the last week and a half.

How can school buses still incite stomach-curdling anxiety after all these years?

Must be powerful, this back-to-school dread, even though once the first day or two was behind me I always enjoyed the back-to-school earnestness of September. I think it’s not just the start of school but the end of summer that the buses signify. The end of late nights and freedom. The beginning of tight shoes and regimentation.

But … the shoes had to be tight in the beginning or they’d be too loose later on. And the days had to be regimented or we’d all be a bunch of uneducated hooligans. So as much as I hate to say this …  They’re baaack — and it’s about time!


(Big yellow bus from the inside. Courtesy Wikipedia.)