Walking

I walked a lot as a kid from one neighborhood to the next. Each had its own candy store and a cluster of four-story apartment buildings. I wanted to see what every subway stop in Queens looked like above ground, from Jamaica to Jackson Heights. Walking was what we did in N.Y.C. heedless of red lights and over comatose bodies. Not to linger or mosey but with purpose. Shoemakers thrived on worn-out soles.

Here in L.A. you might get arrested for vagrancy. We drive to the mailbox. At my age when I walk it is with a walker (well-named). I am still an upright ape, perpendicular to the ground. Walking the neighborhood I had to contend with the upheaval of sidewalks so I started doing my ten blocks on the level, paved path winding through a nearby park. There is a controversy of nameless birds chattering in a nameless tree. A boy is climbing to the second elbow. I can no longer tiptoe through the tulips. I leave my meandering for the page through the thickets and dunes of my inscape.

I pretend I’m on a walking tour with John Keats communing with nightingales. Walking tours were what folks did in merry old England. Maybe great writers bumped into great artists. Who knows if Coleridge bumped into Constable? John Keats walked from Hampstead Heath to the Lake District (250 miles) to present his poetry book to William Wordsworth who was probably wandering,  lonely as a cloud, while taking dictation from sister Dororthy and the daffodils. We visited the Wordsworth home in Rydal Mount and there was the Keats book with uncut pages, never opened.

As I walk my imagination runs loose. Images take shape. Just as my stride aligns with the rhythm of my body, my breath becomes the poetry line. A Russian poet spoke about a 500-meter poem and a thousand-meter poem. A walk in the woods was a probe into his unknown regions.

I am walking with an inhalation of newly cut grass in my lungs. A young woman runner zooms past me. I'm also passed by dark-skin women pushing strollers with white skin babies.   

Chuck easy, I’m hearing from the baseball diamond and jacaranda leaves sway without a gust. There goes a frisbee settling into the mouth of an Irish setter. 

I’m chucking easy now beyond the picnic blankets into a stretch of bucolic space with no one except for my daughter at my side whom I looked after sixty-years ago.

Janice is congenitally deaf; she hears with her eyes and speaks not only with her hands but is also intelligible verbally. She’s been where I am not allowed and she carries a certain wisdom I will never know. We walk together in our separate ways. I have seen her fingers in flight like butterflies. We each create our own world, walking.