This is both my debut & final essay about walks/walking
As a writer over forty, I feel a little weird about the fact that I’ve never done my “writing about a walk” piece. You know what I’m talking about. Where my English Majors at?
But, like, I’m getting sleepy even thinking about writing about walks or walking. I am not Virginia Woolf, nor Mary Oliver, nor Annie Dillard. The aforementioned are a few writers, I can call up from memory, who wrote well about walks/walking.
Here’s the thing: I’m not a hiker. You will never find me “off on a hike” unless I’m lost or on an outing with children. And when I walk, I do so carefully and deliberately because I am blind, clumsy, and nervous.
What I’m saying is that unless we’re talking “walking for shopping” or “walking in the direction of a specific place we must walk to,” I am not about the meandering-walk-life.
I do have a dog. I walk him. We have a specific path we follow where my blind-self knows the terrain, the places where the sidewalk dips or is missing altogether . . . Seriously, I am “damn-near-disabled blind” and have had to learn how to get along as a body meant for motion.
Here is the route Abe (dog) and I follow:
left at the porch, another left, a right at the Stop sign and straight ahead until we hit Speedway at which point we turn around and walk right back on the opposite side of the street up which we came.
Tucson is sometimes hot and always scrubby, frequently dusty, and . . . well, it’s the goddamn Sonoran Desert. What do you want from it? It’s a fucking desert, and I say this as one who pines for a life in an Irish cottage on a lake, this is a very fine desert we got here in Tucson.
You gotta really look for the soft spots in the desert.
Out here, everything soft or smooth or fragile has to want to live, and know how to survive. The desert is not kidding around.
I have learned how to live in the co-existence of my nostalgia for “home” and the beauty of the home where I currently find myself rather inexplicably: the American borderlands.
At my school (where I am a teacher, not a student though, flatteringly, I am often mistaken for the latter), we open formal occasions with a land acknowledgement. I was unfamiliar with the practice of Land Acknowledgements until I moved west of the Ol’ Miss. (Where my Mark Twain lovin’ fuckers, at?) A Land Acknowledgment is where people take a moment to acknowledge that unless we are Indigenous, we are living on occupied lands. For us in Tucson, it’s the Tohono O’odham.
I think far more now, living in the American borderlands, about occupation, colonialism, theft, and exploitation than I ever thought about these subjects when I was studying them from a theoretical perspective in “the academy.”
You can’t live in a place like Tucson and not, on some level, ponder it all, and your place in it, your ancestors place in it all. I grew up approximately 30 miles outside downtown Chicago. I did not know a single Black person until I moved into the city of Chicago itself. I mean, I “knew of” Black people.
I had certainly seen Black folks on many occasions, but it wasn’t until I got out of the white-flight suburb that I really started working with, collaborating with, living with people who were Black. And that’s what matters in a community: what are we doing, mutually, beneficially together? And if we’re sharing a community and not doing anything mutually, beneficially together, how can we repair that?
Because from where I sit — very well “educated” in the classical sense, very much a tax-paying citizen, very much a contributor to society, very much a decent-and-hardworksing-person — far as I can see it? Best I know? Unless you’re Jeff Bezos, if you’re in America, you’re fucked.
And let’s be honest, at this point, Jeff Bezos is fucked, too.
You might be thinking, “Way to shit all over my sunshiney Saturday, Gruber.” (It is so, so sunshiney in Tucson today. Gloriously so. Fall and Winter are the real reason one lives here.)
But I need you to hear me out here.
Remember when Anne Sexton committed suicide and we all came together as a nation to mourn the loss of the Pulitzer Prize winning poet and life-of-the-swingin’-American-sixties-east-cost-white-folks-dinner-party?
You don’t remember this? No? Really? Too esoteric?
Let me try another example.
Remember when I bonked my head after drinking lots of liquor during the pandemic because I was “sad” and “I-have-stage-iv-cancer-anyway-so-who-cares-if-I-booze-it-up” and because “the-world-is-ending” and because “if-the-world-isn’t-ending-the-American-experiment-actually-is” and because “I-miss-my-job” because “I-really-liked-my-Old-World-classroom-jobs.” Remember that time? Yeah, me too.
America has been drunk and angsty as fuck for centuries. Drunk on white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, colonialism, classism . . . there is no -ism America is not addicted to. It’s pretty fucking gross. Damn near Satanic, if you believe in that sort of thing.
And America has bonked its head and is bleeding all over the fucking place and is totally disoriented and embarrassed and possibly-mortally-wounded and cannot think clearly right now.
America is a nation of communities, and we as communities have some big choices to make about our addiction to -isms, and brands, and the Old World which is over.
Forward and onward. There is no reverse.
America got drunk, fell, and is bleeding out.
America has some hard choices to make.
America has some unpopular choices to make.
America has to train what’s left of its critical-thinking skills on what we, as a nation, have become blindly loyal to. Who is your master, fellow Americans?
My master is Life. Capital “L.”
I met my next door neighbor while walking Abe.
The home he lives in has been in his family since 1947. His grandmother and grandfather built it. His grandmother died last year at 101. My next door neighbor is Black, and because he is her grandson I am presuming she might also be Black which means she was born in approximately 1920. And if she was born in this country, that probably meant her parents had been enslaved human beings. And in 1947, she and her husband came to the Wild West, the mean-ass desert and build a home in the hopes, I would imagine, that they too could have some semblance of the American Dream which is also, as I presume we all know, dead and gone. Or is that just me?
All down my street are small adobe and brick homes built and owned by I assume Black and brown people in America in the 1940s (think about this — think of all that has happened, in this country alone between when my neighbor’s grandparents built that house in 1947 and today in America alone. In Arizona alone. In Tucson, for God’s sake!),
and all down my street they are being razed to make room for student-and-rich-people housing.
Not better housing.
Not safer streets.
Not cleaner neighborhoods, but better “homes” for people who do not live here currently, will not stay in this community, and/or for people who had the good-fucking-luck (and that’s all it ever is — it’s called the Myth of Meritocracy, study on this) of either being born into paper money
or having been given a fair shake at amassing lots of it.
And right now I’m talking about Black Americans and White Americans.
I’m talking about this because I lived most of my life in Chicago, Kenosha, and Milwaukee where the segregation between White American and Black American peoples — in housing, schools, access to employment — was, and still is, as deep and pronounced as the body of water these cities share.
My wife and I are White and we are renting a home in a neighborhood built, likely by Black Americans and Indigenous people in the 1940s. Most of my nearby neighbors own their home or inherited it from family. Most of my nearby neighbors that I’ve spoken with have insisted they will never sell their home to flippers and developers, and that makes me happy. Selling a home to an individual, or a family is one thing. Selling a home to American Realty Corp is . . . well, I would argue, not good for the nation as things currently stand. So if you are White, and you are thinking of purchasing property in a non-White part of America, maybe consider not turning the property into an Airbnb (no hate, but Airbnb is destroying this country while “ostensibly” serving to “help” by letting “average-ol’-Americans rent out property and make a buck to pay the bills.” Uh, no. Unfortunately it ain’t all that simple, and I think we all know this, don’t we?).
Think of it this way — what if someone was cutting up your neighborhood and turning the places where you Lived-Your-Actual-Life into Best Westerns for people from Phoenix. (What’s up with my “dash work”? I don’t know either. Where my literary critics at?)
This morning I took the last pill in my current Ibrance cycle.
At this point, I could Ibrance all of you under the table.
I was only really-truly-down-for-the-count on one day of the current cycle and that’s a fucking miracle.
“I have cancer”: I am becoming more and more frank and casual with this sharing this fact, because it’s been a really time-consuming, scary, unwanted part of my life since approximately 2010 and like, why should I be ashamed of this? I didn’t bring it on myself. Not entirely. No one “gives-themselves-cancer.” Sometimes people engage in corrosive habits and the behavior results in certain cancers, but no one — not even my beautiful, wild, chain smoking Uncle Al — gives themselves cancer. Because no one wants that shit. (Yes, Millennials, I’m sure there is some weird fetish/hangup/kink where people give-themselves-cancer, and I’m not being inclusive of those people because if such humans exist I really do hate them.)
So I speak freely of my cancer issues.
As people like me, with metastatic breast disease, start to live longer and longer our numbers grow. Perhaps other women are, like me, beginning to see themselves as humans living with a uniquely limiting condition. (Right, because it could be argued that all people have a “limiting condition” owing to the fact that, theoretically, our bodies are dying from the moment of our birth and so I used the term “uniquely” because having to take medication/have surgical procedures for the rest-of-your-natural-life-as-you-understand-it beginning at the age of 34 is not, contrary to some contrarians, the experience of most reasonably healthy human beings. Not even in the Long Time Ago when Lord Byron was drinking blood from skulls with the Shelleys — where my Frankenstein-fans at? — were women routinely coming down with cancer in their early thirties. It’s uncommon.
If we take cancer out of the picture and pretend to be Real Optimistic, I am middle-aged. I’m gonna have problems just by virtue of having a middle-aged human body that, perhaps, has not always been treated with the utmost care by the soul occupying it. I mean, as “enlightened” as I feel in some moments, I have a real bad sugar addiction raging. Started when I made the fatal mistake of trying a Halloween themed pumpkin coffee drink thing at Ike’s (a chain here in Tucson) and ended with me eating Twix over the sink in my underwear before bed. Twix serves no purpose in my life. Twix is bad for me. Sugar is bad for all of us, but it’s particularly bad for my human body because my human body likes to moonlight as a purveyor of malignant cells.
But this post is about walking.
The first time I had cancer, back in 2011, I remember how I’d walk to work (roughly 1.5 miles from my apartment) or home from the Cancer Center (about .5 miles from my apartment), after getting real-deal-Red-Devil chemo. This was in Milwaukee, and though I like to dwell on the many terrors that lurked in that city for me, there were also a number of lessons. Pay Attention, Allison, being one of them. But I digress.
I would walk, even if I felt like shit, to prove to myself that I could do it. Because if I could do it, even if at the end I was wasted with exhaustion, then it meant that I wasn’t really dying, or at least I wasn’t dying of cancer and/or its western remedies.
And I was proud of this back then.
Proud that I was able to unnecessarily exhaust myself for what? To prove to some large, indifferent, money addicted system that I would go to literally any length for the joke-of-a-paycheck they doled out to me on a schedule that was convenient not to the worker, but to the company.
There is no word for what I feel when I wake up, every morning, into my life’s Actual Reality, when I do my “grudge math” and choose not to drink, not to sink into my despair, not to argue with what I know is True, to lean toward Light, to “play nice,” that’s a struggle, a battle, a fight, and yet none of those words — struggle, battle, fight — even come close to approximating what I’m going through, what my students are going through, and what you reader are probably going through.
I want to end this post with gratitude, because that’s a cornball practice I’ve come to make use of because when I don’t stop to feel grateful, I start getting into “drinky-thinking.” (I am sure this phrase existed before I just now used it, which is why quotes; if I’m wrong and I just coined the term “drinky-thinking” then fuck those quotes. I take them all back.)
My work, though challenging, is pretty amazing. The past couple of weeks, once I stopped waiting for some Big Answer to write itself across the sunny Tucson skies, I’ve really started to enjoy my work days. I find myself working on the weekends again, despite my Solemn Vow when I got sober that I would “no longer do paid labor on weekends” — I’m a teacher. This work is my life. This work is the work I love. I can’t simply “put it away on the weekend” as one might a retail position, and according to everything I’m hearing from the corporate world, the line between “work” and “home” has been totally obscured.
Even though my profession is so different, even though the educational landscape is so changed, the young people are still there, waiting on us adults to show up and impart to them what we can, that might alleviate their human suffering (some of which we do not and cannot ever know), and help them prevent the preventable human sufferings, and make them feel, most days, that though difficult, this life is an important, unlikely, fragile gift we have been given. And it is.
In some respects, my work is entirely about today. I wrote all day. Well, I tidied up my home office, showered, drank coffee, attended a Super Secret Alcohol Abuse Meeting, and then I wrote all day. Today was all about what I wanted to do, but I can never get here, to a Self-Care-Saturday (I just made myself throw up in my own mouth a little), unless I face the needs of my life first. And presently, the needs are pretty big and weighty. Getting them all met is often a struggle. And then there are weeks, like this one, when I did everything (except one minor thing) that I needed to do to be a decent and decently responsible human being, and so I was given this beautiful Saturday to take care of myself, to play with thoughts and words instead of teach their foundations and functions. And though I’m not paper-money rich, I sure know a lot of amazing people, and I have a job I love. Yes it’s messy. Yes it’s difficult. Yes this year in American public education sometimes feels like a Cosmic Joke at best, and a Sadistic Experiment, at worst, but what else would I be doing? Crying about how shitty it is to have cancer? Worrying about COVID? Buy season tickets to the show where the Democrat and Republican Parties devour each other on the public stage?
I want to write, and I want to teach.
At present, though the not most paper-money lucrative, I am able to do this work. For today, my soul is satisfied, Sarah is on her way home with Trader Joe’s goodies (really, we probably did move here for access to Trader Joe’s), and Abe needs his next walk. Which I will not write about, but may post (as I often do because walks can be boring to me) on my Instagram account which you can follow me on if that means something to you.
End of the walk: I throw out a bag of poop, maybe talk to a few neighbors, go back in the house and try to do things that are good for my body and soul. To quote Vonnegut (but really was he the “first” person to ever say this?), “And so it goes.”
