Eight Blocks

Almost every day I walk eight blocks. Janice, my daughter dear, sees to it. She doesn’t take any of my guff. I didn’t know until now that I had any guff. In fact I don’t even know what guff is except that I have it now and then. 

When I say eight blocks, I mean four blocks and back and with my walker. So in effect I’m rolling; I can barely keep up with myself when the incline is downhill. When I’m climbing Mt. Everest on the last leg, it is for the imagined throng of cheering spectators. I might pass Sisyphus on the way up that Big Rock Candy Mountain.  

President Truman used to take his morning constitutional at a brisk pace while tipping his straw hat to passersby. I try to greet joggers and dog-walkers but I probably pass unnoticed to most whose world is in their mobile phone.

Suckled as I was by radio programs I'm remembering shows like Jack Benny, Fred Allen, The Great Gildersleeve and Fibber McGee and Molly. They were all structured around the theme of the boulevardier. Each week we stared into the speakers and saw our hosts walk the walk bumping into Mr. Peavey the druggist, Judge Hooker, the Old-Timer Mrs. Nussbaum, Sen. Claghorn and Mr. Kitzel. Sadly, folks don't stroll much in L.A. One might get arrested for vagrancy. 

We take the same route every day so I’ve become acquainted with the sidewalk. It is quite a topographical experience negotiating the reptilian roots and fissures; levels change every few steps as if I am walking on the roof of an underground civilization bulging here and caving in there. Upheavals need to be attenuated or overcome with inner music, images of pretty horses or trees with red blossoms falling. Yesterday I saw a squirrel climb the drainpipe while a frond fell as if as an answering gesture.  

I wish I had even a passable knowledge of the botanical glossary. Even now in the off-season nameless flowers pop up which live off the clock. A bird of paradise sticks its beak through a picket fence and at the halfway point there is a grove of about two dozen of those orange and blue flora asserting their place in the landscape, half rooted, half in the mind of an avian. A row of eucalyptus trees preside along the way like bearded sages which have endured one folly after another in their shrugging skin. I didn’t notice those succulents before or the fern in the alley.

I walk orchestrating a commotion. I’m good with that. I am my own Dudamel finding patterns in the turmoil. I'm presiding over the marriage of everything. Not all substances are soluble. An emulsion, maybe. For each piece of precipitous breaking news I pour off the supernatant liquid. 

My doctor says I should walk for endurance sake. I walk in order to achieve transit. Some days there is more news from Mahler than from Rachel Maddow.