The Short-Distance Overland Blues
Pandemic Strolls with My Daughter
Wild turkeys roam the streets of Cambridge. Sure, this was true pre-pandemic. There have always been bands of turkeys in upscale neighborhoods—where the tree-to-building ratio is more amenable to wildlife—occasionally stopping traffic and becoming increasingly skittish as Thanksgiving approaches. But now they seem to have broadened their horizons just as ours have narrowed, strutting with particular relish, like they have the run of the place. Which, given the lack of human commotion, they do. The rabbits are abundant, the squirrels copious, and the birdsong cacophonous, all to the delight of my daughter, who sees each of these creatures on our daily excursions, our only trips beyond the invisible veil of our front door, and excitedly shouts, “Dog dog!”
Everything is a “dog dog” to Cece, who turned one in late March, with a Zoom party that interested her only insofar as my parents’ dogs were on the screen. The last couple of months have seen a dramatic uptick in daddy-daughter time, and a dramatic downtick in just about everything else, except for walks. Not since the weeks after she was born have we explored our neighborhood with such consistency and attention to detail. In those days we used to walk in ever-widening concentric circles, bravely going one block further each day than we had the day before (being too far away from diapers being a guaranteed crisis). We discovered the coffee shop that roasted its own beans, the woodsy grounds of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the vast expanses of Harvard campus. Then I went back to work.
Our current level of discovery has made those findings from the previous Spring seem downright paltry. Nothing escapes our notice anymore. I can tell you the location of every Little Free Public Library in mid-Cambridge and probably recite most of the book titles within them. There is no dog run or playground near which we have not hovered, awaiting sightings of our four-legged friends. I have gawked jealously outside of every single-family home on every hidden cul-de-sac, and taken notice of every previously invisible roofdeck and desirable porch. I even sniffed out a backyard hot tub in Somerville, a discovery that felt not quite on the level of Darwin but definitely above Columbus. As a philosophy major, I have long sought to understand profound truths about the nature of the world. All it took was COVID-19 for me to become an expert on a very different magnitude and scale. I now understand with profound depth the nature of my neighborhood.
Paul Theroux once wrote, “Travel is the saddest of pleasures, the long-distance overland blues.” Given the pandemic, neighborhood walks with my daughter have become the saddest of pleasures; the short-distance overland blues. The sadness is due to the circumstances; the illness and loss and seclusion that so many are enduring. But please don’t interpret the blues only in its somber connotation. There is a rhythm to our walks, a beat that has emerged that perhaps only we can discern, these daily strolls acting as our only means of expression (or, at least, excursion) these days. It is time both stolen from us in the larger sense of grandparents and birthday parties and library sing-a-longs and seasonal celebrations, and it is time given to us, to my daughter and I, who have achieved an intimacy with each other and with our neighborhood that would not have been possible otherwise. Everyday we do our little Cambridge soft-shoe.
One of my recent discoveries was that William James and e.e. cummings overlapped as residents of Irving St., where we live, over a century ago. There is a plaque that denotes James’ tenure at his residence, and a stone’s throw away a plaque that marks the birthplace of e.e. cummings in 1894. This makes me wonder how specific the plaque is — does it mean cummings was literally birthed on the grass below this sign, and, like the Buddha is reputed to have done upon his birth, immediately took seven steps to the north, proclaiming something epic, like, “i shall never use capital letters!”?
Taking a little more than seven steps to the north from cummings’ birthplace and reading James’ plaque again, I calculated that James was 52-years-old when cummings was born. Did the eminent psychologist encounter this lower-cased version of the great poet? Will my daughter one day have a plaque outside of our residence denoting her birth, to be encountered by another father and daughter on an aimless stroll in the midst of the great pandemic of 2120? These are the thoughts that arise when wandering turns to wondering.
When I showed off my newfound knowledge to my wife, who has been busy trying to keep her family’s independent bookshop afloat and mostly unavailable for walks, this led to a debate: who is the more famous James, Henry or William? From her perspective in the literary world the obvious answer is Henry. From my perspective as a philosophy major and a graduate student in mindfulness studies, the obvious answer is William. Ah but the point of such wondering is not to arrive at obvious answers, just as the point of our walks is not to arrive, well, anywhere at all but back home.
This is another unique feature of pandemic strolls. Unlike pre-pandemic walks, our excursions feature no destinations, our turns occurring whimsically, or literally on the tail of a dog. I sometimes have to explain to dog owners that, yes we were following them, because my daughter loves dogs, at which point we usually strike up a friendly conversation, the baby strapped to my chest assuaging any potential stalker concerns on their end.
In the old days these neighborhood chats were fewer and farther between, but the chance for human interaction that is face-to-face and not screen-to-screen is something we are all thirsty for. And so we keep making friends, but of the most transient type, friends we learn the names of and may never see again. Then there are those faces we seem to encounter everywhere, all the time, to the point that it becomes a little awkward, like the couple I passed yesterday on both our morning and our afternoon outings, who were both wearing identical jean jackets and black pants. Were they stalking us? To most folks these days we give the benefit of the doubt, as long as they maintain appropriate social distance, but the matchiness of these two was definite cause for concern.
I sometimes wonder what effect all this distancing might have on my daughter’s conception of space. The author Robert Moor has written about the “desire lines” that form across a landscape. These are the trails that are created when people ignore proscribed lanes and veer off on short cuts or random diversions that others later follow, informally creating a new thoroughfare. They sprout, says Moor, “all over the city and all over the world, scarring pristine lawns and worming through forest undergrowth…People seem to relish discovering odd new desire lines, the more illogical the better, and theorizing about what desire they express.” What of our current strolls will become embedded in my daughter’s understanding, in which we take wide berths, carving S’s around one another, jumping off the trail and then back on once we’ve safely passed our fellow citizens? Do desire lines have neurological counterparts — desire neurons — the feet carving out a pattern of movement that then fires in the brain, a new neural pathway developed, a new normal established, a muscle memory based on avoidance? What will the sight of a mask one day invoke in my daughter? What about the rare sighting of a stranger’s mouth now?
Such concerns tend to dissipate amidst the presence of blooming flowers. I have never appreciated fine landscaping more than I do now, attractive as it is to Cece’s burgeoning senses. On our walks at this time last year, when she was days old and her vision extended only the crucial distance from chest to face, the world beyond was a blur. And so it was to her parents, sleep-deprived and obsessed as we were with the little creature nestled on our chest. Now as her sight extends outwards to this dramatic world of colors and shapes, of climbing lavender wisteria vines and blood orange tulips that stop us in our tracks, I’m re-discovering Spring, the botanical explosion that suggests vitality amidst so much vulnerability. The flowers give us everything that our leaders and our policies and our scientists cannot right now: a sense of renewal.
Despite the lack of students, Harvard campus has revealed itself to have pristine landscaping. On a cross-country motorcycle trip years ago, prior to a mortgage and a baby, I quickly learned that any town with a college or university was worth stopping in. It was guaranteed to have a decent coffee shop and grocery store. Now I’m learning all over again the civic good that is higher education. Harvard has always essentially been our backyard, but we shared our backyard with teeming levels of students and tourists, and so we largely avoided it. Now we share it only with squirrels and other neighborhood kids, stumbling around vast courtyards and marveling at the size of their new playground. We have become so familiar with Harvard’s campus that I wouldn’t hesitate to give a tour when this is all said and done. My tour would be of no use for prospective students, of course, but highly informative for prospective parents. “If we cut through this alleyway we’ll arrive at the courtyard of the Harvard Biological Sciences building, where the animal friezes on the exterior provide an excellent opportunity for storytime, and the beach volleyball court provides a delightful playspace in warm weather.”
In one such courtyard (next to William James Hall, of course), a modest tree is the centerpiece around a square gravel path. It is here that Cece and I engage in the Tibetan practice of khorra; the ritual circumambulation of holy objects. As a college student studying Buddhism in India I once wrote a research paper on khorra. I would sit for hours in the Himalayan foothills of Northern India, watching Tibetans-in-exile walk clockwise around monasteries, muttering “Om mani padme hum” under their breath and spinning hand-held prayer wheels, accruing merit and thereby improving their karma. Since one’s karma directly influences their immediate sphere, and since one’s sphere is intricately connected, via the principle of co-dependent origination, to all beings in all times and all directions, the small act of circling a tree while muttering a mantra is in fact no small act. And given the state of the world right now, in which the interconnected nature of our spheres has been exposed in harrowing ways, it seems like the least we can do, my daughter and I, offering up this merit from a little courtyard in Cambridge.
I have a fantasy that sometimes dictates our direction. Having mapped out the location of all nearby single-family homes that seem deceptively modest and thereby attainable, we sometimes aim for them. I hover outside, imagining an older couple emerging to work on their blood orange tulips, and noticing the adorable little girl and her father gawking nearby. We’ll get to talking and they’ll mention that their kids have grown up and moved out, and that they’d love to downgrade without all the fuss of finding a realtor and putting their home up for sale. I’ll mention our quaint little condo and express our desire to upgrade as our family grows, and, heartened by the idea of helping a local young family stay local, we’ll work out a trade, no realtors, no fuss.
When I shared this fantasy with my wife, she said, “Oh sure, the elderly couple that will want to move to a way less valuable property with a bedroom on the second floor and a precarious open staircase.” I looked off wistfully at the wisteria.
In, “the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls”, e.e. cummings wrote, “the moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy.” Clearly, he was portending the collectively fretful state of our pandemic nights, the waking each day to a newscycle full of woe and the unfolding of indecipherable days. But my little Cambridge lady is developing despite this angry moon, and taking shape in a world whose strangeness she is indifferent to, her soul furnished merely by the sight of dogs and flowers. There is a lesson in this, to be sure. The most famous James brother, William, wrote, “The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will.” My daughter’s attention seems to wander only as far as her feet, and though she will soon learn to anticipate the future and reflect on the past, strolling with her in the present has done wonders for our judgment, character, and will. Our senses have become sharper, our days spiked with possibility, our discoveries endless.
Lately, she has taken to pointing in the direction she would like to go, and protesting loudly if I turn the wrong way. Invariably, her pointing leads us to Cambridge Commons, where a great mass of dogs tends to gather (along with their owners), and where we often meet my parents for socially distanced walks. The fact that she is able to direct us to Cambridge Commons is astonishing, and every time she does it I feel like she’s just spelled something profound with a Ouija board. My sense is that she doesn’t remember the whole chain of turns, but presented with the visual of each intersection, she knows which way will lead to the promised land.
In the last couple weeks she has cultivated the ability to walk on her own, though she chooses not to. Ever since her first birthday she has acted like Bambi on ice, able to stand and even take a few tentative steps, but very uncertain about the surface beneath her. Her latest trick is walking hand-in-hand with me, confidently high-stepping her way down the block with preposterous strides, yet miraculously staying aloft thanks to the gravitational pull of my arm. Though I’m excited for this new phase, and for the ability it will give her to explore her own whims, I know it portends an era in which her attention will wander beyond the immediate confines of her feet. And so I still strap her in the carrier if she’ll tolerate it, where she hangs from my chest, bravely pointing the way, undaunted by wrong turns and pandemics and ever-hopeful of meeting other creatures who share her passion for the present.
My mom once gave me a paper weight inscribed with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s quote, “Every wall is a door.” Emerson lived in my hometown of Concord, and, it turns out, was William James’ godfather. Those words popped into my head recently. We have undoubtedly encountered the most imposing wall our generation has faced. In such times, perhaps the best thing we can do is look for the nearest door, and venture out.
The narrowing of our horizons has brought with it the expansion of our appreciation for what is directly in front of us. Each day Cece and I set out on foot, engaging in the saddest of pleasures, one step at a time.
