Walking needs no publicist. The simplest, most accessible form of exercise has been around since humans first foraged and traveled on the ground.

But today, walking seems to have entered its influencer era.

It’s the subject of countless viral videos, of people doing it silently, collectively, for their mental health, for their physical health, for “hot girl” reasons (lawsuit pending), and yes, even for their gastro needs.

There’s something more to these micro trends than fitness personalities looking to make a quick buck off of brand-name water bottles or $30 socks. A new wave of fitness personalities—many of them women of color, of a variety of body types—have been able to reach people who, due to numerous factors from safety to layers of systemic discrimination, have historically shied away from the activity. This is exemplified by the explosion of walking groups in the U.S. in recent years, with headline after headline chronicling the rise of these meet-ups across the country, which has encouraged hundreds of strangers to come together each week and exercise.

This isn’t the first time a diverse group of influencers has widened the scope for walking. In the 1870s and 1880s, an unlikely assemblage of Americans became some of the nation’s earliest celebrities with the rise of the pedestrianism movement.

These professional walkers traversed hundreds of miles, around tracks and across state lines, to compete in the nation’s first spectator sport. Though the craze was short-lived, it left behind a legacy that challenges the stereotypical face of fitness to this day.

American pedestrianism began with a fateful bet: In 1860, the door-to-door bookseller Edward Payson Weston wagered a friend that Abraham Lincoln would lose the upcoming presidential election. Were Lincoln to win, Weston declared, he would walk the 478 miles from his home in Boston to Washington, D.C., for the inauguration—and he would do so in under 10 days.

After Lincoln won, Weston set out to make good on his promise, publicizing his itinerary in local papers along the Eastern Seaboard. People waited for hours in the cold to watch him pass through their towns. A run-in with a debt collector left Weston four hours and 12 minutes short of his goal; Lincoln, who was following his progress along with the rest of the country, was still so impressed by the feat that he offered to pay the latecomer’s fare home. (The press-savvy Weston demurred, seemingly knowing that the refusal would only earn him more coverage.)

Following the Civil War, Weston took his walking show on the road. Thousands of spectators lined up to buy tickets and place bets on whether he could beat the clock. In a divided country, his walks were a unifying event. “He’s so apolitical, and I think that helped his popularity,” Matthew Algeo, the author of Pedestrianism, told me in an interview. “He could go anywhere and walk, and people wouldn’t object to it.”

Walking was not a popular form of exercise in the U.S. when Weston began staging his exhibitions, but he and the competitors who rose up to challenge him spread “pedestrian fever” among the public. “A Plea for Pedestrianism,” published in the New York Times in 1878, was a typical literary endorsement of leisure walking. The op-ed supplied readers with a sample walk they could do around Staten Island, recommended attire (“easy, yet, stout, laced boots with broad soles and low heels”), what to eat (“a sandwich and some hard-boiled eggs in your pocket”), and how to prepare (“Those not accustomed to much walking ought to practice it moderately during the week before marching a whole day in the country”).

Celebrity, long reserved for royals and political figures, was expanding—allowing pedestrians, or “peds,” to gain real influence as some of the country’s first mass-market stars. They used their platform to promote not just the sport, but also everything from shoe brands to trading cards. They even were the first to sell advertising space on their competition outfits.

One of the reasons pedestrianism resonated with so many, Algeo suggested, is that these athletes took an activity that was relatable—an “expression of the everyday”—and pushed it to the extreme. The result, he said, struck people as “personal,” “genuine,” and “real.”

Professional walkers reflected an array of Americans, too. Because these walking matches were largely unregulated, there were no clear rules excluding certain groups from competition. One of Weston’s greatest rivals was Daniel O’Leary, an Irish immigrant who became “Champion Pedestrian of the World” in 1875 after defeating Weston in a six-day race. O’Leary took multiple athletes under his wing, including Frank Hart (born Fred Hichborn), a Haitian immigrant. Hart became one of the sport’s great stars and winner of the second-ever O’Leary Belt in 1880, where he earned more than $21,000 total, the equivalent of two-thirds of a million in today’s dollars.

Women “pedestriennes” also made a significant impact on the sport. At a time when conventional science held that strenuous athletic activity did lasting harm to female bodies, wiping them of their “vital energies” and their ability to reproduce, athletes like the Englishwoman Ada Anderson rose up as powerful counterexamples, showing what sportswomen were capable of.

“It is good for women to see how much a woman can endure,” Anderson told the New York Sun in 1878.

But there was a dark side to women’s pedestrianism. The sport was largely promoted and organized by men (including one of P.T. Barnum’s own PR people). A majority of women came to professional walking out of desperation, to escape poverty or abusive relationships. Then they pushed their bodies to the limit. They did what men did—24-hour walks, 100-mile walks, six-day walks—but also attempted even more extreme stunts, like walking 3,000 quarter miles over the course of 3,000 quarter hours.

“This was a really tough life,” Harry Hall, author of The Pedestriennes, told me. Women walked in hard-soled shoes, he said, because saboteurs threw rocks, tacks, and glass on their track, hoping to fix race outcomes.

The same laissez-faire setup that had allowed the sport to evolve so organically also led to it becoming synonymous with exploitation and scandal. Pedestrianism saw race fixing, early steroid use, and an extortion attempt that ended with a manager’s suicide. With the rise of bicycle racing in the 1880s, the public moved on, leaving pedestrianism to fade into a historical footnote.

“There was no way pedestrianism was going to last forever,” said Algeo. “But it’s a shame it kind of killed itself.”

Today’s walking influencers have different aims and goals, not to mention more agency, than the stars of the sport a century and a half ago. But both walking waves can be seen as promoting “physical activity in spaces where they’re not traditionally or not as easily done in the past,” as Damon Swift, an exercise scholar at the University of Virginia School of Education and Human Development, told me.

For those looking to hop on the trend today, but aren’t ready to commit to a 10,000 daily step count—let alone a trek from Boston to D.C.—you might find some wisdom in that 1878 Times trend story, which advised readers to “walk as long as [you] like.”

Do just that, it promised, and you’ll return home “healthier and happier.”

The post America’s Earliest Sports Stars Were … Professional Walkers? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Kiara Johnson, 17, lives at the Regal-Hi apartments on High Street in East Oakland—for now.

She doesn’t have the money for next month’s rent, which her landlord is doubling. She can’t rely on parents—her dad’s dead and her mom’s in prison. The bus pass she uses was stolen.

For work, she begs for more shifts in a liquor store. But that’s not enough for her to support her older brother, who won’t get a job, and to take care of Trevor, her 9-year-old neighbor, who is living alone because his mother has disappeared. So lately, Kiara has started doing sex work along the International Boulevard corridor.

How does she go on? How does she cope? She walks around Oakland, with Trevor or her friend Alé accompanying her. “When there is no choice, the only thing you have left to do is walk,” she says, later adding: “Out here, there’s a kind of stillness that comes with having nowhere to go.”

Kiara Johnson isn’t a real person. She’s the fictional central character and narrator of the novel—newly out in paperback—Nightcrawling, by Oakland native Leila Mottley, who turns 21 next month.

With the imprimatur of the Oprah Book Club, Nightcrawling has become a bestseller, with a page-turning plot that feels very of the moment, involving sex trafficking, housing displacement, mass incarceration, and a police scandal closely modeled on a real-life case in which an officer’s suicide exposed cops’ sexual abuse of a young girl.

But the book’s real magic is how, in a story full of so many horrors, Mottley, who served as the city’s youth poet laureate, manages to convey deep affection for Oakland and the people who struggle through life on its streets. Much of the book consists of Kiara, and other characters, taking buses or walking around the city.

I found the novel so compelling that I spent the better part of a day and a night walking the very same thoroughfares the fictional Kiara roams in East Oakland, a diverse and struggling side of the city that stretches from Lake Merritt down to San Leandro.

Nearly four years and a global pandemic have passed since Mottley wrote her manuscript, in the summer of 2019, just after she graduated high school. But the streets where Kiara spends her time have not much changed.

Starting from the Fruitvale BART station, I headed over to High Street, where Kiara lives.

It was just as Mottley describes it:

High Street is an illusion of cigarette butts and liquor stores, a winding rail to and from drugstores and adult playgrounds masquerading as street corners. It has a childlike kind of life, like the perfect landscape for a scavenger hunt … It is everything and nothing you’d expect with the funeral homes and gas stations, the street sprinkled in houses with yellow shining out the windows.

In the 2900 block, I came across a ramshackle apartment building with a name suspiciously similar to Kiara’s—the Royal-Hi, rather than the Regal-Hi of the novel. The Royal-Hi seemed in better shape. It didn’t have a swimming pool at all, much less one filled with poop, like its fictional counterpart.

At the top of High, I cheated, taking a rideshare to San Antonio Park, which is as lovely as Kiara describes it in the book. Then I began a long walk, heading more than 50 blocks down International Boulevard, deeper and deeper into East Oakland.

I didn’t spot any sex workers. I did encounter various men, some of whom appeared to be living on the streets. And I saw the mix of taquerias, churches, liquor stores, and housing Mottley depicts—”International Boulevard is a weave through every kind of East Oakland living,” as Kiara narrates it.

I didn’t see the wide variety of people that the novel describes on the sidewalks. Business owners told me that street traffic hasn’t really recovered from COVID.

By early evening, I was feeling tired, and hot, even after a day far cooler than what I’m used to back home in Southern California. But I kept walking, as Kiara advises: “I think about each step and repeat to myself: heel, toe, heel, toe. Makes it easier.”

The setting got rougher when, still on International, I crossed 70th Avenue, entering the part of Oakland the locals call “Deep East.” The sidewalks were riddled with cracks. There were more people living in tents, and far more trash. Damaged cars, some obviously undrivable, seemed to take up every available street parking space.

When I turned down 75th Avenue, on my way to my walk’s conclusion at the Coliseum BART Station, I was literally walking on broken glass. I couldn’t take more than a step or two on the sidewalk without having to dodge it. And so, I started to walk on the street, trying to stay out of the way of cars driving past.

There were people around, mostly on the corners or sitting in front of small homes, but I felt isolated. I could understand why Kiara describes a walk not far from here as “the closest thing to being a live ghost. Disappearing into roadside trash and trees that somehow figures out how to grow in California’s eternal drought.”

Why can’t these streets be in better repair? Why can’t these neighborhoods have more resources? Why do we tolerate so much pain in the lives of others? In the novel, Kiara, when asked such questions by a friend, is dismissive. “Life won’t give you reasons for none of it,” she says.

She has walked every street of her city, and she knows that danger and desire are all just facts of life. “Oakland contains it all,” she says. “Heartbreak and yearning.”

The post Heartbreak and Yearning on the Streets of East Oakland appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Can you get closer to art by walking?

Grand Tour is an art project of the Contemporary Art Center Nau Côclea in Camallera, Catalunya, Spain, where I work. The tour consists of a 250-kilometer, three-week walk shared by people and artists of all kinds.

Every day people walk about 15 to 25 kilometers along with an artist or a group of artists who have prepared something for them. The path follows a topographical spiral down and around the region, crossing urban and rural areas, natural landscapes, and seaside or mountain trails. Both during the walk and at stops, the artists perform and make their artistic interventions—poetry, dance, installations, music. Day and night.

The trip is open to the public and offered in all possible formats: People can walk every day, or they can just do two or three days, or they can simply show up at a meeting point and enjoy the performance. Walkers can start or stop their journey at any time and adapt their trip to their personal plans. Grand Tour is a project for all types of audiences—families with children and solo travelers, old and young, experienced walkers and beginners.

Grand Tour was the name of the trip made in previous centuries by young artists and wealthy non-artists to discover Europe’s heritage. Every traveler had their own “Grand Tour,” an itinerary that combined visits to inescapable sites—the ruins of Rome, the streets of Paris, the paintings of the Flemish Primitives in Amsterdam and Bruges, the palaces of Florence and Venice—with stops that were more personal and idiosyncratic. The Grand Tour had a sense of initiation and ritual; young men and women were leaving home for the first time.

Map detail showing the walking route taken by participants of the Grand Tour, in northeastern Spain, near the border with France. Image courtesy of Grand Tour.

Today, tourism can be disappointing and leave you feeling impoverished. Why does it seem that the farther we go, the more we encounter the same globalized culture and environment? But there are still a thousand places and a thousand corners to discover in an intense and deeply experiential way. We each can make a real personal trip of artistic discovery. And that’s why the Grand Tour is still alive.

Today we make the Grand Tour on foot because we think that traveling is much more than just getting yourself to a particular place. Travel and touring bring us closer to everything external to us and thus make us see the world from the outside. Inevitably, we contrast the places and arts we encounter with our daily realities, and observe ourselves anew.

Discovery has an important role in this process. It is one thing to go to a place where you expect to see something. But it is something else entirely, something more transporting, to interrogate space and time because you guess that at any moment some wonder might happen.

The most characteristic feature of the Grand Tour is the creation of a process in which time does not count. There are so many places and people—artists, artisans, craftsmen, and other walkers—who may be very close in proximity to us, but we do not know them because we cannot give them the necessary time. The road offers time to the walker. This is often the greatest gift.

There is more: When artists and the public walk together, eat together, get tired, and rest together, creation becomes part of daily life, and the boundaries that separate artists from their audiences are completely blurred. A community that shares a path for a few days is neither a group of artists nor an audience but something halfway in between. It is a nomadic caravan that modifies, at least temporarily, the behavior of all participants. When all the members of a group commit to the same experience, the group changes. It becomes a provisional but solid society able to create and to produce art. Each work of art needs its audiences, its community.

The openness to receiving creation and art was what I sought in creating the Grand Tour. After many years of curatorial work in sound art and visual arts, I was feeling worried about the low level of reception at the Contemporary Art Center Nau Côclea. People walked through the exhibitions looking here and there and seeming a little distracted; their experiences lacked moments of intensity and intimacy. We detected a very great distance between the passion in the work of the artists and the relatively weak emotional capacity of the public. “To consume art” is not the same thing as being close to it. And “to consume quickly” does not allow for capturing the tempo or the soul of the art. Something had to be done.

We began to imagine site-specific presentations of art, bringing art to different locations, outside the museum. This would require a kind of pilgrimage by the visitor, a form of displacement. That was what we sought. We suspected that the act of going to the art had the power to transform the people’s approach to art. We had some clues in the work of artists such as Alícia Casadesús or Perejaume, who work in nature and who lead the public to the places where they want the work to be discovered. Some walking practices like those of Deriva Mussol (by Eva Marichalar-Freixa and Jordi Lafon in Catalunya) or Francis Alÿs or the more communitarian approach of Walking Women point in the same direction.

I myself have made many trips on foot—in the Pyrenees mountains, walking the border between Spain and France, in the Andalusian Sierra de Aracena, following the paths of the shepherds and the muleteers of the old times, or just walking from the home of one artist to the home of another and allowing them to lead me through their favorite paths and places. From walking I know how wonderful are the transformations the journey produces in the mind and the traveler’s gaze. The Grand Tour idea was exciting from the outset.

The project started in 2015. The first voyage began from the Contemporary Art Center Nau Côclea and toured various regions of Catalunya. In 2016 a tour along the coast in a northerly direction led us to France where we walked west. We crossed the border again and finished our trip in Ripoll. So far, 200 artists and 400 walkers have accompanied us, and some 2,000 people from across Europe and all over the world have come to share some of our activities at some point of the journey.

Walkers have to register at the Grand Tour website to join the trip. They pay for their own accommodations at the camping sites and mountain huts where we stop every day. From stop to stop, walkers carry some food and water for the day; the rest they get at destinations. They also pay 10 euros per day to cover a van carrying heavy bags and tents and accident insurance. Artists’ fees are paid partly with this money and partly with sponsored funding.

Each year, the Grand Tour program offers a residency grant to an artist for a project related to walking as an artistic practice. So we have been accompanied in Grand Tour by the Romanian Paula Onet, who in 2016 made walkers into actors in the filming of her documentary about Peter, the man with restless legs syndrome, who could not stop walking and had to travel on foot to survive. In 2017 we expect a lot from the project of the Dutch artist Monique Besten. She is now doing a virtual walk on the internet and this summer will overlap that with a real physical walk. In this, she is following the practice of the explorers who prepared with books, maps, and other traveler’s chronicles before they left on their remote travels.

For this summer, a small group has already formed from the two former trips that will act as the core of the event and inspire new walkers. They have a Facebook group called “Gran Tour, participants caminants.” On August 26, we will leave the sanctuary of Núria in the Pyrenees and walk for three weeks to the mountain of Montserrat, a very important, symbolic, and polysemic site for the Catalans. We will travel 290 kilometers by mountains, industrial zones, rivers, cities, and farmlands together with musicians, poets, live artists, performers, and visual artists. We will be a nomadic art brotherhood and sisterhood in search of our own Grand Tour.

The post In Spain, a Path to Artistic Discovery (on Foot) appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I was born in Irvine and moved to Apple Valley in the High Desert of the Inland Empire in the year 2000, when I was two. My dad was working for CalTrans and my mother was a stay-at-home-mom for a year, and later on she became the Director of Patient Access at St. Mary Medical Center. They wanted to live in a place that was safe to raise a family, with fresh air, and lots of room for my dad to walk.

While it’s true that the air is fresher in the high desert, that doesn’t always mean people are healthier. A recent study found that 71 percent of adults and 31 percent of children in the high desert are overweight or obese, and San Bernardino County as a whole ranks as one of the most overweight counties in the country. Our rates of heart disease and diabetes are among the highest in California. More than two-thirds of children don’t meet basic fitness standards.

 
Fortunately for me, my parents always encouraged me to be active as a child—from little league soccer, to daily walks. When I was little my father would take my hand and we would walk and walk and walk. It never occurred to me to question all of my father’s walking—I never asked. But a couple of years ago, when he felt I was old enough to understand, he told me why.

In 1978 my dad fled his native Ethiopia during Qey Shibir, the Red Terror that mounted during Mengistu Mariam’s brutal communist takeover of the country. Fled isn’t the right word, exactly. He walked. He was 20—just a couple of years older than I am now—and a college student at the time, but my grandfather arranged for him and one of his brothers to escape with a group disguised as merchants, guided by a star-reading shaman.

My last name, Gessesse, comes from a long line of religious warriors—kings and queens defending the faith, fighting for the spirituality of Ethiopia. It was one of the earliest countries to embrace Christianity. But my grandfather could see that this was not the time to fight. It was the time to walk away. And so he sent my father and my uncle and the shaman and the rest of the group into the Ogaden Desert, and they walked, for two and half months, until they reached Djibouti.

My dad was able to make it to the U.S., win political asylum, and put his life together in America. He and my mom knew each other in Ethiopia—she is half Greek and had a Greek passport so she was able to get out on her own—and they reunited in the U.S., got married and made a life for themselves in California.

In this new life, my father kept walking. He walked, of course, to stay healthy. But also, I think, to remember that long desert journey, feeling heartbroken to leave, but grateful to survive when family and friends were dying, horribly, at the hands of the new regime, not knowing if at any moment they would be found out and punished or killed.

As early as I can remember—long before I learned the painful details of my father’s life-changing journey—my parents, especially my mother, taught me about love and generosity and helping the community. For the people who live in the high desert, life can be hard. Some people don’t have enough money to buy food. Or they may have grocery money but no car, no way to get to the market.

Every weekend when I was little we joined a group that would make care packages for the hungry and the homeless people who lived in our community. We would meet them at the local park and talk with them and give them lunch. Not like, “here take this food and go away,” but like “hi, how are you, what’s going on with you today?” When I was very small I remember trying to get them to come join me on the swings. Sometimes they would.

As a kid I struggled sometimes to fit in. I was Ethiopian, but “only” half, so not truly habesha. I wasn’t white either. I struggled with the image of the white, skinny ideal, with long, straight hair and blue eyes. I’m melanin-blessed. I have a bigger bottom and a small chest and curly, frizzy hair. My mother taught me to appreciate myself and see my self-worth and self-value. I struggled to strike a balance between a face at home, and a face at school. Volunteering—community service—was an environment that fostered a safe space. I loved it, I felt a purpose, and I felt appreciated, not judged.

Fast-forward to me as a high school student, outgoing and restless. I was such a “do-gooder” that my friends would sometimes laugh at me, but then I would say, come along and see for yourself, and many times they would wind up joining me. Everyone knew about me, and so a teacher told me about the Apple Valley Legacy Trail and how a small group was trying to save it.

The trail runs through the center of town and leads right up one of the highest points in Apple Valley. But it wasn’t what I’d really call a “trail.” I’m a runner, and the path is near my house, so I’d explored it on my runs. It was overgrown, covered in trash and graffiti. It was so neglected most people my age didn’t even know it existed. Which was a shame, because even with all the mess, I felt it was a spiritual place. Up there you cannot hear a car horn and there are no billboards in sight. The view is beautiful, the air is fresh, and it’s free to anyone who wants to go.

 
Sometimes Apple Valley has a reputation, either as very boring because we are so far from the city, or very bad, because people hear about the part of town near the trails called “felony flats.” But this was a chance to clean up blight, to change people’s perceptions by creating something special that you could only find here.

My mind was in full motion: a local project that needed help, to restore something beautiful, that would get people outside and bring them together. What could be better? There’s a historic house there, the Hilltop House, which was privately owned, and a bunch of volunteers worked very hard to raise the money to get the city to buy the house to turn it into a museum.

I got together with some of my classmates and we sacrificed sleep and some study time and organized an old-fashioned steak fry, in conjunction to the Hilltop Legacy Project Team/Town Council to help with the fundraising. We got dressed up in old-timey costumes and decorated with hay bales to give the night a vintage feel. People loved it.

There’s a lot of community support for the trail and it’s working its way through the city approval process. I spoke before the city council to explain why this trail is so important. Sometimes I go up there and just imagine what it’s going to be like, a smooth, easy trail that kids can run up and down, that will become such a part of the life here that everyone will know about it and use it.

This fall I started college, away from home for the first time. I imagine how one of these days, once the trail is ready, my mother and father will walk out of our front door, and up the trail. They will stand at the top and see the all of the valley, with a feeling of nostalgia, but this time, with pride and hope as a reminder of their new beginning.

The post Walking Runs in My Blood appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In a neighborhood full of community, I like to walk alone.

Yes, I will walk into the hills with my husband when the kids are asleep and we have a babysitter. Sure, I will walk to get an orange balloon and a three-pack of strawberries with my sons on a farmers market Sunday. But walking with just about anyone else? Sorry, but no.

These walks write my life. They blow out the static of last-minute lesson plans and frozen turkey meatballs and towels on the floor. They regulate my mind, step after step accruing into calm.

Down the driveway we share with our neighbors, onto the sidewalk recently repaved by the city, and I’m already breathing better. Up the block with the Japanese maples, past the cactuses in the median. Right onto Broadview Drive, with its old-fashioned street lamps, its corner houses with party voices spilling over the hedges.

Sometimes, if the dust of the day is taking too long to clear out, I write to-do lists on my phone. E-mail Dad. Screen DVD for class.

Other times I choose a soundtrack to shape the night, listening without headphones, lowering the volume if someone gets close. It might be Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” and “Out in the Street” if I’m bursting to get outside. The Indigo Girls’ “Watershed” and “Closer To Fine” if I’m looking for answers after a crazy day. John Denver’s “Rhymes and Reasons” and “Leaving on a Jet Plane” if I’m feeling quiet and want to remember doing errands with my mom when I was a kid.

Sometimes I don’t listen to music or take notes. The phone sits in my pocket only in case my husband needs to call. Then I try not to check it.

Tonight the moon is full and low over the sloping Glendale hills to the east, beyond the 2 Freeway that flows downhill toward Dodger Stadium. At 8 p.m., the temperature is almost 80, like bathwater. My 9-year-old said at dinner that he waits all year for nights like this—nights when he can stay up late, and it’s light late, and our cat frisks around.

As I walk east onto Ocean View Boulevard, the houses turn to businesses. The strip mall’s munched-in parking lot is packed tonight. Mathnasium is closed, but La Cabañita with its smoky mole sauce is doing its usual heel-kicking business. Through the window framed with pink and green fabric, a man on his phone nearly drops his chin into a half-full salt-rimmed margarita. Did his friends leave? Did they not show up?

EmbroidMe has a sign saying the delivery entrance is on the other side. A pizza guy peels up Ocean View. Lights reach out from the back of Berolina Bakery, carrying the smell of rosemary loaves. There’s rosemary everywhere, it seems, in someone’s yard or on the sidewalk medians.

A mechanic is still open. A tan Mercedes convertible sits on the floor, a silver Honda sedan rises in the lift. With the doors up, the place seems strangely intimate, a well-lit living room with wrenches and oil.

Floodlights shine on the baseball game two streets over. A tapas restaurant is closed because of kitchen plumbing problems, says a note on the back of an envelope taped to the glass door. A 6-month-old on dad’s shoulders stares, his eyes glazed and sleepy, as his parents walk past a pizzeria. A man emerges from a sketchy bar, standing in place just a beat too long, his reflexes shot. The California dream, it still exists, if you squint a little.

On this dreamy bathwater night, I don’t write notes to myself, don’t reach for music. Instead I make a to-do list of the soul, what-ifs of the heart.

What would it look like for my boys to become good men?

How do I want to be different when summer ends?

Why do I find it so difficult to relax?

What does it mean to have walked this neighborhood almost 1,000 times over the past two-plus years?

How can I take the peace these walks drop upon me and sift it like sugar over my life?

I’m gathering up all of this, the questions without answers and the full moon and the jacked-up cars and the conversations on coffeehouse patios. I have nobody to talk to except myself, and I love it.

But as I come to the end of my daily mile and a half, heading down the street to our house, its windows open to the night and our children asleep inside, a chill drifts through me.

It’s enough to make you cry, this neighborhood with its pure aspirations that sometimes sublimate into provincialism, holding onto the small-town feel of 60 years past.

It’s enough to make me cry, the thought that my sons will grow up and leave these streets edged with rosemary. I want to embed the storefronts in my brain as I want to etch memories in my sons’ minds, building a warehouse of images against any impending darkness.

It’s enough to make me fumble for Springsteen after all, to listen to “Thunder Road” as the piano lilts: “Don’t turn me home again / I just can’t face myself alone again.”

I pass our house and keep on walking. One more loop around the block before I go home.

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