Recently, my wife and I started to walk together. We haven’t done so regularly since we lived in New York. We used to walk everywhere. One of our first dates was to walk from Central Park, down Broadway, past K-Town and Union Square, and Houston – all the way to the Ferry terminal below Wall Street. We held hands and talked while we walked. We discovered poetry slams on the Lower East Side, hookah gardens in Alphabet City, underground sake bars in the East Village, Cuban desserts in the Upper West Side, and all the other things that mixed, sometimes jarring, but oftentimes sublime, in the Great American Experiment.
We haven’t walked as often in San Francisco because we’re not in our twenties anymore. For people who are not in their twenties, that statement explains a lot. I have to remember sometimes to explain it to my younger self. We had a kid. We took on demanding jobs. We bought a house and a car. We busied ourselves because we built a life that demanded busyness.
But our daughter grew up and is now almost ten. She is starting to do things without us. And we have a dog. Dogs demand walks.
Our daughter recently enrolled in art classes on Sundays out in the Sunset, adjacent to Golden Gate Park. The class lasts two hours, just enough for a coffee and a meandering walk with Norah, our dog. After our first walk, my wife and I realized how much we missed just being with each other and within ourselves during our walks. I felt my mind stretched and yawned and woke up from a deep nap. We first talked about the things we usually talked about: our daughter’s progress, vacation plans, and work challenges. But after a few walks, we learned to really see each other and talked again. Here was a woman whom I had married, who is now a mom, but somehow so many many other things. And perhaps, when I talked, I was both a girl-dad but someone else, someone who never grew up but also grew into something different than the person who married her.
Our walks put us in motion. Each week, we take a different path. Sometimes it can’t be helped. The dog gets excited and goes where she wants to go. This last week, the sakuras were in full bloom. And I felt the blue true dream coming back.