Walking

I am a walker. To drivers and bikers, I suppose I am a nuisance. I press pedestrian light buttons and use crosswalks. I don't run across intersections usually. I assert my legal right of way, when necessary.

I recently heard an NPR story about a man who disciplined his disrespectful thirteen-year-old boy by leaving the kid in a fast food restaurant with the angry words, "You can walk home." Other customers called the police. The man was brought up on charges of child abandonment. The fast food restaurant was only 0.7 mile away from the child's home. A fifteen-minute walk.The man should have been arrested for feeding his kid obesity-promoting junk food. Making the kid walk home seems to me doing him a favor.

I frequently walk the two miles between my house and Harvard Square. It takes me about 45 minutes at a steady pace. The smelly bus takes twenty minutes. That 45 minutes does me a world of good. I get to observe the seasons. I reflect on life's problems and joys. I make an occasional fleeting human connection with a fellow pedestrian. That walk helps me feel at home in my local geography, while improving my circulation and burning excess calories. And it gets me to where I want to go without fossil fuel consumption or having to park a conveyance once I get there.

It is common knowledge that the American automobile manufacturers colluded with Federal government to dismantle America's omnipresent trolleys and pedestrian thoroughfares in the 1950s and 1960s. Yes, the same folks you just bailed out with your tax money made your cities the inaccessible and pedestrian-unfriendly places they are today. I witnessed that transition in my own lifetime. In fact, I commuted by public transportation to both high school and college.

I prefer walking to any other form of transportation. As a grow older, I often think of old Mr. Fothergill, a retired fireman in my home city. Mr. Fothergill spent his retired years walking every day for the pure pleasure of it. Everywhere we went in my parent's car, I would see old Fothergill smiling as he walked along briskly. I believe he lived well into his eighties and died in his sleep, an unusual and happy end for a fireman. I am happy to carry on his tradition, even though we never spoke to one another.

In recent weeks, due to the repercussions of my mother's death, I have had less time to get out and walk. I miss it. My body misses it. Today I will walk. It will be my intentional delight of the day. I don't know where I will go. I will simply get out in the air and move through the streets with my open awareness and joy of being alive.