Walk Outside Yourself

I took a walk today. I had to avoid my tears and hoped I could outpace them. My trusty iPod blaring classic Jobim Bossa Novas (how hot am I), I took to the pavement and immediately felt better. I was jacketless, braving my often-debilitating old friends Joint Pain and Muscle Stiffness (I am, after all, 105 years old) to better feel the sun and the warmth in the wind. Arriving back at the house I snuck a belt of Scotch to warm up and calm down (Joint Pain and Muscle Stiffness, thankfully, are not drinkers), and a minute later my friend Red called. He was in town from Florida. I hadn't seen him since he lost 85 pounds. He wanted coffee. I wanted someone to talk to about everything but The Break-Up.

I hit the pavement again, this time chugging along to Madonna for speed, letting the fast pace and high wind bring fantasies of my happily pedestrian future. A light future full of motion. A Chicago future of nothing strange to hide or display just by being, by walking, by my red-headed, determined existence. I found Red waiting for me in Lincoln Square. Hugs, hugs. "You look great!" (He did.) "So do you!" (I didn't.) He was born-again in himself, the old days, the old Red vitality. Neither of us in relationships, which always numb the conversation into meaningless patter. Our old fire-works ensued, the jabs and barbs of two smartasses on equal footing in love with verbal sparring, knowing nothing means anything and if it does, so what. For the second time in two days I felt like a kid again. Only better. No bleak, rote future hanging over me, just a past I was free of and the absolute certainty that whatever came my way I could handle it.

On my walk I saw an old man with a pronounced limp coming out of his house with an old man's face of bitterness and complaint, an old man's plaid cap and thickly lined overcoat. I smiled at him; it seemed to take him off guard. I thought of Leonard Cohen's Book of Longing and wondered what old man thoughts ran through his mind.

I'm paying for my sins now, the cold air and activity having shot me through with mercury shudders. I sit covered in blankets sipping Scotch trying to warm my blood, trying to oil my rusted joints, scribbling to keep my mind off my various pains (which, according to the latest medical research, don't actually exist).

Whatever its costs on a failing body, walking helps. Block by block, the city is yours.