An Hour and Seventeen Minutes is “Some Duration,” Right?
I noticed many things on my walk, these things include (but are not limited to) approximately 20 young couples, 12 couples with children, and 9 elderly couples. That is quite a bit for such a short period of time, I think. When I left for my walk there was a soccer game going on, I found several glass bottles, ruined gardens next to perfect ones, and hidden alcoves between buildings.
There were plazas in front of buildings, and a beautiful pond. Specifically the Alfred Caldwell Lily Pool.
Talking about the Alfred Caldwell Lily Pool, for my Experience Collection, I will start with the fact that there was a wedding going on when I was there. There were people coming and going in elegant dresses and crisp suits. This did not stop young families from entering as well, I barely noticed the wedding was happening, in fact. This experience is funny because the last time I visited the pond, there was a woman who looked like she was being proposed too, so me being curious, but not wanting to intrude, didn’t move out of the way, but in a moment of inspired genius just turned around, facing my back towards them. The man disagreed with my definition of genius, however, and yelled at me to leave. I obliged. The second experience was later on my walk when I saw out of the corner of my eye a woman pushing a stroller with a little girl in it. Walking next to the mom was a young boy who looked about ten. The mom, with notable skill, was singing, presumably from the perspective of the girl in the stroller, “It’s okay big brother! If you have to pee!” So that was an experience I guess.
I forgot about the object collection until it was already the final stretch of my walk. It was then that I decided that the empty shake cup that I had been holding onto the entire time would be the perfect symbol of my walk and would make a great object to collect. So after I threw away the one piece of trash I had been carrying around to avoid littering the entire walk, I continued on my way. Approximately four minutes later I began searching for my two objects that I still needed to collect. First, I wanted to pick up these chips and Gatorade that were left unopened on the sidewalk, but that felt like theft to me so I continued forward.
I then picked up a small petal, and decided that it had to be good enough, that will not be one of my two items. Defeated I re-entered the school grounds, and found both my items in front of the soccer field! A discarded ticket from earlier in the day, and another Chicago Quarter water bottle I found in the gutter, meaning I now have a total of three of them. I found both at approximately 5:18 on Saturday the 18th.
In “The Solitary Stroller and the City,” Rebecca Solnit writes, “Cities are forever spawning lists” (p. 202). Why do walking, lists, and cities seem to go together?
I think to describe how walking, lists and cities go together, one must recognize that lists are the primary way people contain disparate information. It is one thing when topics are connected, when things are connected one can link ideas in a tree in their head, but sometimes the ideas can not be linked like that. For all information that can not be linked, it gets put on a list. Putting that aside, we have talked at length how walking and the city are connected. It is how we move ourselves through the city, while giving us an intimate feel of the local and inhabitants within it. When you walk you notice everything around you. But all of these things you see on a walk in the city are linked, so why do they get put on lists. While that may be technically true, our minds do not experience the world that way. Our minds tell us that all these experiences are completely separate, so they get put on a list. (171)
