Caminando
My first job was a summer gig at K&W Cafeteria in Cameron Village in Raleigh. (This was back before K&W moved to its current location and Cameron Village got all upscale. Yep, way back in the day.) I was hired to bus tables, but was quickly moved into the stockroom.
I worked where I did because it was one of the few centers of employment within walking distance of my parents’ house. And walk I did, every day, rain or shine or deathly heat, about a 25-minute haul each way at best pace.
I never went best-pace, though. Most of the way there stood an apartment complex in which lived a ratty shorthaired fleabitten old ginger tom who (once he decided I was cat people) was the nicest outside-cat I can ever remember. He would come running to see me, sprawl purring at my feet as long as I wanted to stay and pet him, and look after me mournfully when I had to leave him behind.
I don’t know whether he owned anybody. I think he did, though at first I didn’t; I bought him a flea collar and annoyed the life out of him putting it on him. After that he got to looking a bit more presentable, so maybe his people took the hint.
In Bloomington, where I went to college, nothing was really more than a 20-minute walk from campus, so I walked to everything. Walked to class, walked to work, walked to Li’s apartment way up northeast of campus, walked to the grocery store in the mall two or three times a semester when I needed laundry detergent or whatever. I used to annoy the heck out of one particular yellow-shafted flicker, walking by right when he wanted to drum on something. For some reason he didn’t want to drum when anyone could see him. Probably teenaged.
The Madison apartments I lived in were walking-distance to the parts of campus I typically needed to get to. So I walked. I walked to the grocery store, too, though I took the bus back because a week’s groceries was a bit much to tote. When we moved into our house, I perforce picked up a utility cart because there was no bus from the store to the house. The Madison house was in a golden spot for walking: groceries, hardware, and the farmer’s market twenty minutes’ walk in one direction, the public library twenty minutes’ walk in the other.
I didn’t really walk around here much, aside from popping down to the store once a week for groceries. Everything felt too far away to walk to. It bothered me subliminally. An area I don’t walk in isn’t an area that I feel I belong in.
So now I’ve started walking to or from work a couple of times a week. Everyone I’ve mentioned this to immediately does their best to wipe the “what are you, nuts?” look off their faces. Honestly, it’s not all that far; 45 minutes sees me door-to-door. About half the walk is an ugly haul down one of Fairfax’s main drags; the rest is a pleasant stroll through real neighborhoods (which, of course, are entirely out of the question for me—even so, they’re nice places to looky-loo) with a riot of birdcalls, plenty of mature trees, and yes, even the occasional outdoors ginger tom.
It helps. Fairfax is slowly starting to feel like a place I know.
Ruben Blades really says it all:
Con el tiempo comprendí
Que la vida da pa’ to’
Que nada borra el recuerdo
De lo que uno caminó…