Around the Block

This morning as I walked slowly in a light drizzle to a meeting point with my walking partner, I noticed a squirrel making strange movements. It was running partway out into the road and then quickly back to a nearby tree. It scrambled around the tree trunk about three feet above the ground and then stopped to raise its front paws to its mouth. We have a lot of squirrels in our neighborhood. This one caught my attention. As it scampered again into the street and back, I noticed that another squirrel, more unfortunate than this one, had been crushed by a vehicle in the morning traffic just a few feet into the road beside the tree. “Was this your mate?” I queried. What would I make of a suddenly silent, suddenly still, and suddenly flattened companion if I were a squirrel on an ordinary Friday morning in September? It appeared to me that the living squirrel was checking on the status of the recently dead animal and then running back to a safe place to think about what this means, what to do next. The squirrel repeated the pattern several times during lulls in the stream of cars. Finally, the living animal sprinted entirely across the street and was gone.

It strikes me, once again, that walking around the block is nearly as fruitful for a writer as circumnavigating the globe. There is a wise saying that goes something like this: you will learn more by climbing one mountain 500 times than by climbing 500 mountains. A walk around the block might be our local version of this.

This morning on my walk around the block, my thoughts turned to many authors who have put their characters in animal personas to be taught lessons we should be able to learn in our own skin, but don’t. T.H. White (in The Once and Future King) has Merlin transform the young King Arthur into a fish to learn about perspectives other than his own. I’m reading Red Earth and Pouring Rain by Vikram Chandra, which is told by a consciousness in the body of a monkey. Is it ultimately empathy that we need to learn, and why can’t we learn it in our own skin?

This morning’s walk around the block also reminds me of W.H. Auden’s great poem, “Musee des Beaux Arts.” In the poem, Auden describes a painting called “The Fall of Icarus” by Peter Breughel. Within this painting, observers see Icarus fall into the sea, but [they] “had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.” Emily Dickinson makes a similar point in a short poem, “Apparently, with no surprise/ To any happy flower/ The frost beheads it at its play/ In accidental power. The blond assassin passes on/ The sun proceeds unmoved/ To measure off another day/ For an approving God.” And Robert Frost depicts the tragic accidental death of a young farm boy. The poem ends with a comment about the witnesses to the tragedy: “And they, since they/ Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.” Many of us lost a good man and dear friend to cancer this week, and even as we linger as long as possible to memorialize him, it is sad, but inevitable, that we, too, will return to mundane affairs—like crossing the street—in the days to come. Will the squirrel I observed this morning hear a lingering echo of the unique sounds of its companion? Will it return to this place and feel an inexplicable twinge?

My little granddaughters, Anna(5) and Teah(3½), humored me in taking a walk around the block during their recent visit. Here is what we wrote about that excursion in our journal. “After breakfast, Anna and Teah and Grandma Jo went for a walk around the block with their binoculars to see what they could see. They saw a squirrel, a centipede, flowers, and a recycling truck. Teah saw a rabbit ! They found feathers, leaves, and flowers to bring home. Anna and Teah learned to stop and stand still before putting the binoculars up to their eyes.”

Annie Dillard inspires me to say that if we raised our binoculars more often when we walk around the block (and also when we stand still) we would be exercising and strengthening our eyeballs gradually to see more and more deeply into life’s revealing details and not risk our eyeballs bursting into flames with the shocking brilliance, vivacity, and plenitude of extravagant life on my block and on yours.

For your writing:
Of course . . . walk around your block or your neighborhood. Notice something that you haven’t noticed before. Describe your observation, and then keep writing. What does this remind you of? What does it cause you to wonder about? Can you link this observation to something else that has happened in your life recently?

Quotation for percolation:
“The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” . . . - Marcel Proust