Two Roads
and the protection of small entitlements
I told my wife over supper last week that I thought I was going to stop writing. Used to my dramatic announcements, she did not overly react, just leaned in toward me and listened.
I think she knew I wasn’t going to stop writing.
I have stopped for awhile: a week or two. No big deal, I will return to it shortly. I sent some stories out, did some editing and some organization, and entered a contest.
Mostly, I did a LOT of walking. Even more than I usually do (I walk a lot). I visualized myself with large round nets on either side of me, gathering sights and people and ideas. I tried not to put much form to them, tried not to write in my head (a bad habit that always takes me out of the moment), but just observe and let things collect in the nets.
Most of my walking in the last few years has been in my neighborhood. Several apartment buildings, nice cars, upper-middle-class homes, a grocery store, a Starbucks. All the streets have sidewalks, and there are lots of pedestrians, many whom I know from my previous walks. People walk their dogs, or push their babies in strollers, or walk for exercise and inspiration, like me. Cars are respectful of pedestrians, and if a car pulls in front of me at a crosswalk, they’ll often—after a warning glare from me, during which eye contact is made—back up so I don’t have to walk around their car. I wear sandals and shorts and a Mets hat, and often my tee shirt is a little eccentric (e.g. “Of course it happened. Of course it didn’t happen.”), but not overly eccentric for my surroundings. The wired headphones plugged into my ear scream, “I’m listening to NPR.”
I’m wearing a uniform that identifies me as one of the tribe.
Because I had more time for walking than I usually do, I walked home from the doctor’s office that week. I punched the route into my phone and saw I could walk it in a little more than an hour, so I had my wife drive me there, but told her I’d walk home. It wasn’t part of my normal routes, so I looked forward to the new territory.
What I didn’t know until I was well into the walk: a large part of the route involved a busy highway and no sidewalks. I picked my way along the shoulder of the road as best I could. Where the shoulder had eroded away, I avoided traffic and slopped through mud and wet grass (it’s been raining here a lot lately).
I came to an impasse, where no shoulder existed. It was at the beginning of a right turn lane, and I was on the right side of the street. There was no special “Walk” traffic light button for pedestrians. The broken asphalt had fallen into the mud and swampiness, so there was no shoulder to walk on. The only way forward was stepping into the right turn lane of this busy highway.
Remember that glare that is so effective at stopping cars in my neighborhood? It has NO power outside of the few streets surrounding my home. I turned to the cars that were making right turns, sure that my glare would allow a break in the traffic and I could continued.
No one let me through. No one even made eye contact with me. They ignored me, and ignored my obvious need to step into the roadway for two or three seconds.
I realized why. I was no longer the nice man walking along the sidewalks of my upper-middle-class neighborhood, giving an inordinate amount of attention to clouds and interesting rocks. I was some annoying guy, without a car, standing along the side of a sidewalk-less road, asking them to stop their progress forward. I looked down at what I was wearing: sandals, shorts, tee shirt. To most people I looked homeless, or at best someone whose car had broken down. I was unknown, and potentially dangerous. I was a stranger picking my way through the littered and muddy side of a highway, built without pedestrians in mind. I’d lost all power of community. I wasn’t where I was supposed to be.
I waited until all the cars made their right turns, then waited endlessly for the traffic light to cycle through again. When the right lane was empty, I stepped onto the roadway to continue my walk home. Eventually I got to a neighborhood with sidewalks, and soon after that I was in my own neighborhood again. People smiled at me. Cars stopped for me. I was home, and protected by small entitlements.
I finished my walk, opened the door to my house, took off my muddy shoes, and received a long, much-needed hug from my wife. I plopped on the couch, fired up my laptop. One of the cats trotted over, ready to be petted.
I was home.
What is a sort of uniform in the streets where I live is stripped of meaning outside that area. I’m seen as human, but not a member of the same tribe.
Yes, I was home. But home is a smaller place than I had thought.
Peace.
