Other People's Rooms

I have a meeting I'm attending today, actually this morning, and during the week the organizer thought it would be nice to make it slightly more festive than our usual efforts and asked each of us intending to come to bring a holiday treat of some sort.

I'm hoping no one brings eggnog because even though I've never had it, I already know I don't like it. And don't get me started about the kind "fortified" with alcohol. Not that big of a fan, truth to tell; you can have mine.

I decided to shop local and get some exercise and hike over to a bake shop I've boosted constantly without actually ever buying anything in there. It opened up not that many months ago and now that I'm in my full 'support small business' mode, I figured the time was right to put my money where my mouth is and to expend some show leather to help tone the avoirdupois. Mission accomplished on both counts.

Off, I set, for the Chocolate Rose Bake Shop which is a goodly piece from my house on Lincoln Avenue and isn't improved as walks go by the dearth of sidewalks for about half the distance (I also did a lot more Rockwell to Boswell (without Samuel Johnson)and came back via Mohegan Park Road, Wilderness Road (which is the first place I saw a trail in the park, btw) and then down Mohegan Road to Washington Street  and home again. I'd estimate about five miles round trip and I have to estimate because along the way I lost my way cool super whammadyne Omron pedometer, not to be confused with L. Ron Hubbard. (unless you want Travolta or Cruise coming to your house. And staying.)

This is the second one of these things that I've lost or broken. But please believe when I tell you that I like them a great deal. I just don't know how to take care of them. The first one I drowned one morning because I forgot to take it off before showering (don't ask; move on to beyond the parenthesis) and this one I lost somewhere along the way, possibly in Mohegan Park. I'm trying to imagine a chipmunk hauling it around. Too much Disney and not enough Natgeo.

It's of small solace that the goodies I bought look delicious and I hope I get to have one by the time the meeting is over (I'm thinking the best way to guarantee that is to NOT go to the meeting but rather sit in the car and eat them all, but then I have to explain my Christmas cookie breath). I'll get over the loss of the pedometer but the most frustrating part is having no one else to blame but myself. I really hate that part.

When you walk the streets of a city, literally because, as I said, there's not a lot of sidewalks along the way (I guess we had a concrete shortage for much of the last 352 years) you see the city slower and from a different perspective than speeding by in a car. I saw far more abandoned houses than I realized were on the route because I was out during the workday and in daylight. It made me sad to see properties that people had invested so much of themselves into just left to sit unwanted and alone. Despite the still warm for this time of year temperatures, I felt cold as I hurried past them.

You can get a better appreciation of the time and skill devoted to decorating with Christmas lights when you walk past houses whose owners and tenants have felt the spirit. By the light of day, a pedestrian can see the machinery of inventive illumination without being blinded by the lights themselves as darkness falls.

During the day people have shutters open and blinds drawn back and you get a brief glimpse of the lives of the not so rich and famous with whom you share the city. I smiled at some of the placement of furnishings I could see in living rooms as I walked on by-realizing with a start that where we have shelves and couches in our house might well cause the same kind of furrowed brow I had while looking at someone else's living arrangements. 

It's called pedestrian because it's a slower pace affording those moving at it an opportunity to share, if only for a moment, other people's lives lived in other people's rooms.
-bill kenny