Saturday, October 1, 2011

A Pedestrian Fragment on Interstitial Ecology


It’s just the way we roll: on our walk today Vassia and I detoured from our habitual walking route and instead of going east towards the lake and then north along the lakeside trail, we went east and south towards Chicago.  No particular reason; sometimes strollers, flâneurs, a pair of peripatetics such as we are, are just called upon to delicately subvert the normal course of things.  Who does the calling?  To whose invitation do we respond? 

We do most of our living in the margins.  Between our workaday world and the wilderness of sleep, a few hours of respite, between the orderly abodes of our little city and the wilderness of the lake, a margin of grass and sand; between the end of one week and resumption of our same old travail, a couple of days to be very mildly wild, and by wild I include the exercise of our animal limbs: we walk. 

We walked along the beach where we could, or marched along the path by the beach and looked out over the grey-green water.  The waves were high and surgent and crashed against the wooden posts driven into the sand.  Groins, I think they call these; wooden groins driven in the sand to calm the lake.  In the crack in our town between the houses and apartments and the lake, are trees and grass and weeds.  In the cracks in the pavements, small weeds grow, no less lovely for being common as the rind of muck they grow in.

On our return we walked across the graveyard.  The dead have no plans.  Between those monuments to the plan-less, geese shat and walked, and honked.


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