A Walker Turns One

A Walker Turns One

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It was Super Bowl Sunday 2010, which means very little to me but which anchors this blog’s beginnings in my memory. We were going out later to watch the game, something we usually don’t do but which good friends and neighbors had invited us for earlier in the weekend. Outside was two feet of snow; inside, the smell of yeast. I’d been baking rolls, big yeasty rolls, and we were taking them to our neighbors. There would be no work or school the next day; in fact, there would be no work or school the rest of the week. But I didn’t know that then.

What I did know was that I’d wanted to start a blog and now I was doing it. Tom helped me with the technology part and the words flowed onto the screen. (For the first post, click here: http://walkerinthesuburbs.blogspot.com/2010/02/walker-begins.html.)

Had I known then that a year later I would have 315 posts under my belt I would have been surprised and pleased. Not so much by the daily writing — that was already a habit — but by the fact that I could eke out something I felt comfortable sharing with others. And also by the photography part — snapping pictures for the blog has been a fringe benefit I didn’t foresee.

What gladdens me the most is how the blog has rejuvenated my writing life. In the last few years many essay markets have dried up, and freelance writing, while never an easy path, has become a darned near impossible one. As any suburban walker knows, when one road is blocked you must find another. This blog has helped me find my voice again.

As A Walker ambles forward I want to notice more, question myself less and never be afraid to explore the winding, circuitous path — the detour. Because often it’s the road I should have taken all along. Thanks for visiting this blog. Happy Reading!

Eyes Bigger Than Stomach

Eyes Bigger Than Stomach

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It’s a gray, rainy day, perfect for endless cups of tea and a good book (or books). I have a pile of tomes beside me now: a memoir, a biography, a book of poetry and a novel. I keep checking books out of the library even though I already have a pile of unread volumes at home. And not just one library, either — I borrow from several.

All of this has brought to mind something my parents said to us when we were kids. Whenever we went out to eat, especially to cafeterias (those monuments to overeating that I still sometimes hanker for), the rule was you could take as much as you wanted from the line but you had to eat it all. Groans of “I can’t eat another bite” were met with the adage, “Your eyes are bigger than your stomach.”

I stare at my pile of books. I’d like to inhale them, to have an immediate transfusion of their knowledge and inspiration into my starving brain. At the same time I don’t want to forgo the pleasure of savoring each page. I am sated but unbowed. My eyes are bigger than my stomach.

Analytics

Analytics

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A Walker in the Suburbs was about a month old when a well meaning friend asked,”So how many people visit each day?” It was a good question and I didn’t have the slightest idea how to answer it.

But I would soon find out.

This was before Google provided its own viewer statistics right on the blog, so I signed up with something called StatCounter, a very humane outfit out of Ireland that displays stats on page loads and “uniques” (as we cognoscenti call them!) and will break down results into days, weeks or “fortnights” (that and the fact that it’s an Irish company instantly endeared them to me).

So I would check StatCounter in the evening to see how each post was doing. And then I started glancing at StatCounter once or twice during the day, too. It reminded me of the months after my book came out, when I visited Amazon.com daily (hourly?) to see where Parents Who Think Too Much was ranked. That became an obsession too, for a while.

As you might imagine, all this checking and re-checking did little for my creative fervor. In fact, it was completely counterproductive. I began Walker to shake loose the shackles of editorial judgment — and here I was imposing something even worse on myself, a minute-by-minute tally of the ether.

I don’t check StatCounter or Google Analytics anymore. I write, submit and forget (or try to!). I hope someone is reading my posts, I hope many people are, but with billions of blogs in the world, I have no illusions.

Solar Power

Solar Power

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Yesterday at lunchtime I took a 20 minute walk to clear my head. The rain had stopped, the sun had come out, birds were singing. I felt a bit guilty, thinking about friends and family shivering in the ice and snow elsewhere, but those feelings didn’t last long. It felt good to be walking, not sliding. And the air had a freshness to it that was born of quick thawing and the faint scent of soil. The warmth drew people from their office buildings.

It reminded me of our trip to Vienna last spring when cold rainy mornings would give way to warm afternoons. The minute the sun appeared the Viennese would be eating ice cream cones. The two events were so simultaneous that advance planning seemed to be involved. How else could the ice-cream eaters have stood in line, bought their cones and already been enjoying them the minute the weather changed?

I never figured this out. But on my sun-splashed walk yesterday I decided it was further proof of human adaptability and the powerful influence of our nearest star.

Winter Sunrise

Winter Sunrise

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Some of these cold mornings the sun seems reluctant to rise. It is faraway and wan. But other days it reddens the horizon. It is the only color in a monochromatic winter landscape. Those are the days when I’m glad to have a camera.

February 1

February 1

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Ice, snow, freezing rain, bone-chilling cold — any one or several of these have kept Mom from celebrating birthdays with her family. “Can you imagine a worse day for a birthday?” she has always said. Maybe not, but neither can I imagine her with any other. The day and the person have become one. Which means that February 1 is a day of wisdom for me, a day of buoyant conversation. An incomparable and splendid day.

As the first day of the month, February 1 is a natural leader — and this is another way the day and the woman mirror each other, since Mom has founded two magazines and now, at an age when many people dwell only on what they cannot do, she is starting a museum.

One year when I was a high school English teacher with summers off, Mom and I traveled through Europe and the British Isles together. We took separate flights and Mom arrived ahead of me. She found her way into London, booked us into a quirky B&B and by the time I walked into Victoria Station was standing right where we said we’d meet, under the clock. I’ll never forget that glimpse of Mom; she was younger than I am now and looked so eager and hopeful, so completely herself. It was as if I had seen her as a young woman, before marriage and motherhood and grown-up cares. Though I’m a middle-aged woman with grown-up cares of my own now, I have never outgrown our closeness. I never will. Happy Birthday, Mom.

Comic Relief

Comic Relief

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My brother Phillip and I were talking about the mood-altering power of a good laugh when something I said reminded him of a scene in the movie “This is Spinal Tap.” He popped the movie into his DVD player. We watched, chuckling so hard we almost doubled over. I think of the medicinal power of “Seinfeld” episodes (we all have our favorites, the Soup Nazi, the marble rye) and of the long-ago experiment of Norman Cousins, who kept cancer at bay by making himself laugh long and loud.

This photo makes me laugh whenever I look at it. There’s a street in Lexington, Kentucky, called “The Lane.” It’s a very exclusive enclave, the sort of place that sniffs at actually needing a street name. Until recently the city went along with it; the street sign simply said “The Lane.” But the new signs require some sort of designation to be printed in small type beneath the name. And that means that The Lane, that once la-de-da thoroughfare, is now a street called “The.”

Every time I see this picture I have to laugh. Comic relief on a cold, gray morning.

A Book, A Namesake

A Book, A Namesake

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In a few days this blog will be a year old, so the other day I picked up my copy of A Walker in the City by Alfred Kazin. The name of my blog was a conscious tip of the hat to this title, but I hadn’t read the book in a while and I had forgotten that it begins with Kazin’s walk through the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, where he grew up. “Every time I go to Brownsville it is as if I had never been away,” he says in the first line,echoing a feeling so many of us have when we return to our hometowns. He admits that he has not moved far from home. “Actually I did not go very far; it was enough that I could leave Brownsville.”

As he walks through his old neighborhood, he recounts the sour smells, the shapeless old women sitting on stoops, the “dry rattle of old newspaper,” the end of the line. Brownsville is a place to leave, and even though it’s no more than an hour from Manhattan, it seemed like the middle of nowhere to the young Kazin. He describes the tiring subway ride back home after a day in the city. “When I was a child I thought we lived at the end of the world.” He knows every station, “Grand Army Plaza, with its great empty caverns smoky with dust and chewing gum wrappers,” Hoyt, with its windows of ladies’ clothes, then “Saratoga, Rockaway, then home.” Kazin is lucky in that his new life and his old one lie so close together — they are miles yet worlds apart.

Re-reading A Walker in the City surprised and encouraged me. Writing about place, in particular those places we call home and those we call hometowns, is something I plan to do more of in this blog. Kazin has set my mind to spinning.

A Pot of Soup

A Pot of Soup

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A few days ago I chopped two onions, peeled three potatoes, assembled a soup bone and stew beef, canned tomatoes, celery, carrots, beans and corn. I set about making vegetable soup the way I learned to as a girl. It takes the better part of a day to do this — but it’s not concentrated time, of course, just whenever you can edge it into whatever else you’re doing. When you’re done, your refrigerator may look a bit like ours above, empty and used up.

I boiled the meat and the bone first, skimmed the broth, then added vegetables according to texture and flavor — onions and celery for seasoning, potatoes, then tomatoes, carrots and so on. It takes a couple hours before it’s bubbling on the stove and the vegetables begin to soften and blend into each other. To become less themselves and one with the soup.

Because I started making the soup in the evening I knew we wouldn’t eat it till the next day. And more importantly, I knew that the soup wouldn’t be at its best until we’d cooled and reheated it several times. There must be a chemical or gastronomical explanation for this but I don’t know what it is. I do know that vegetable soup is at its best about three days after you make it. And in fact, soup is one of those slow foods, and making it harkens back to an earlier time when things worth doing took time and patience.

Thundersnow!

Thundersnow!

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It came in with a whoosh and a bang and a crackle of light. At 2 p.m. it was raining, at 3 it was glopping (gobs of slush falling from the sky) and at 4 the snow was falling sideways at two inches an hour.

Through the quick-darkening afternoon and evening we heard claps of thunder, saw lightning flash. By midnight it was over. The west-facing flanks of trees were smeared with white, as if from a wayward paintbrush. Our bamboo was bent with the weight of the heavy snow. Today it is quiet, no plows, no cars. Just the whiteness of a spent world. Until yesterday we’d had a cold, dry winter. The thundersnow made up for it.