Perambulate With Me

We’re deep in August. Or, as I think of it: the Sunday of summer.

From my current vantage point, I can see that our maple tree has three tiny clumps of red leaves, like age spots. I know those spots will spread, and the red bloom will be glorious enough to take my mind off what will come next. But, today, those few red leaves have made me nostalgic for the summer I’m actually living, right now. Windows open, warm breeze blowing, I’m thinking about how I didn’t take advantage of this season, and how I’ll make a point to appreciate next summer’s foods, flowers, and ferries with more enthusiasm. Our new puppy, George Washington, has bent the summer activity to his will — which means I’ve been doing an inordinate amount of walking — which has given me time to ruminate.

Perhaps my mind is searching for clear distinctions, especially as I adjust to the fact that we dropped our son off at school the week before last; an egregiously early departure. While it adds to my impression that summer is already over, my current confusion is more likely that I, like a heartsick sheepdog, am counting the dwindling number of my flock.

Change has a way of throttling our good sense: it creates a dissonance between what we know to be true, and what we feel nonetheless.

Whether it’s a shift in season, or the abrupt emptiness of a bedroom, the adjustment disorients. I should have known what to expect, having participated in the bed-in-a-bag ritual twice already. But my brain isn’t built with the logic of a calendar — dates and times happening with chronological clarity. I can only feel what I feel. Even though I know my burden is supposedly lighter, how long will I carry this heaviness that I can’t set down?

The phenomenon of the “desire path” is well worn. Collectively, desire paths are the diagonal ruts through the grass that connect two sidewalks at an inconvenient angle; they’re the end-runs around obstacles; they’re the modern superhighways that once traced an ancient route from here to there. If you haven’t thought about desire paths consciously, you’ve participated in them subconsciously. They’re the short cuts that everyone agrees work best, even if the built environment says otherwise.

These muddy trails all start out as a feeling. One person, and then a few more people, begin to trace a direction through space. Let’s go this way. Without an already established course, they proceeded instinctively — maybe getting their feet dirty — but once their footprints are followable, it’s possible to go that direction again. And when enough people agree that the direction is ideal, an enduring path is formed.

My favorite example of a desire path is the Wickquasgeck Trail, which stretches 33 miles from lower Manhattan to Sleepy Hollow, NY. The path was used for millennia by the Lenape. It’s now known as Broadway. (I wrote about its lower portion, the Canyon of Heroes, here.) As a path, it ingeniously followed the spine of Mannahatta, avoiding marshes, rocks, and would-be TKTS customers. When the Dutch and British came in to gridify the streets, the path remained; against an imperious desire to impose order, the path stands as a human inscription, and is dotted with telltale oyster shells — the artifact of the original walkers.

Less conspicuously, a desire path is started across the corner of my front yard at the beginning of each school year; archeological evidence of neighborhood kids making their way to the bus stop. That collective wisdom helps get them to school on time. Intuitive geniuses!

The great essayist, Rebecca Solnit, writes a lot about walking and its corollary: getting lost. She believes that walking is a “mode of making the world as well as being in it,” which is a high-minded way of saying that walking is cheap therapy. Finding our way through physical space pushes us to engage in a kind of reinvention, just remember to bring plenty of poop bags. Walking can also become about losing yourself — or leaving some part of yourself behind, like outward bound without the heavy backpack. Given the choice, I’d like to lose the part of myself that complains about walking, especially on hot days.

My summer forays have not taken me across the length of Manhattan, and I have certainly not gotten lost — which I see as a good sign. Usually, it’s one of four variations on the same two routes, all leading me back home with a (hopefully) tired dog. Nonetheless, I have felt lost, or perhaps not entirely whole. My summer has been leading up to the moment of drop off, which follows last summer’s drop off with another son. So far, the reinvention — the love, wisdom, grace I hoped for — has not materialized. The house is getting emptier and I don’t feel transformed, the way Solnit proposes. But I do feel older.

There is no clear-cut path through parenting — or life, for that matter. The thoroughfares crowded with the self-assured seem rutted with obvious mistakes to me. Out at a brewery the other night with friends, we witnessed a bunch of attractive young parents wishing it were possible to tow their small kids along for an evening out. The crayon-filled pink backpacks remained unopened; instead it was a nightmarish evening of chasing, flinging, coaxing, and screaming. The parents wanted it to work, they wanted to have a normal, non plussed life. But we all knew what they felt: the transformation to becoming caretaker to another human is not only painful, it’s hideous to watch. We wish they would have had the good sense to hire a sitter.

All off-road adventures require fortitude. My personal desire path often leads me back here, to writing. Getting my feet dirty in new terrain — let’s go this way— and moving in that direction is usually a good start. The meander is the thing, I think. At least that’s what I tell my sweet son who is off on his own epic adventure, adjusting to his new reality.

But my rumination persists, even though I know I wouldn’t change places with those attractive young parents at the brewery; the years ahead are long and treacherous. There are too many considerations to fathom — explaining why the leaves change, appreciating flowers and ferries, being on time for buses, the importance of learning about history and philosophy, and the pain of choosing a new path that will one day separate you from the people you love.

Hope summer has left you more fulfilled than depleted. That’s what it’s here for! Tips? Thoughts? Desire paths of your own? Say more! xox

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