Walking Alone Is Our New Social Life
The birds chatter in the trees. The river hums softly.
Every day I walk alone for several miles. From my apartment, it’s just a few steps to a nearby nightlife corridor, which a month ago took me past bustling restaurants and bars, their garage doors open to the spring sunshine, tourists and locals gathered in knots all down the sidewalk. But now every window is dark, the sidewalks ghostly. Even the staunch Baptist church on the corner, overlooking a tattoo parlor, a bar, the Good Karma clothing shop, and a yoga studio, is shuttered. On the stoop in front of the church sits a solitary man, pouring something from a bottle in a brown bag into a mug. Our eyes meet, but he doesn’t ask me for money.
Soon I turn off into a residential neighborhood of small 1920s bungalows and tall, skinny, angular new houses that my 83-year-old neighbor Bing derisively calls “chicken coops.” Newcomers have infilled all the postage-stamp-sized lots in this neighborhood with these glassy, glossy new homes. I used to see the owners, hipsters with their craft beers and rescue dogs, standing out on high decks corralled by industrial railings and funky string lights. Now the decks are empty; the real estate speculators and small brewers have fled. Or maybe they are sitting in the dark, contemplating the coming contraction of an economy fueled by live music, independent eateries, and river parties in which 20-somethings in bikinis and jams tie their inner tubes together like six-packs of beer for a drunken afternoon on the water.
I keep walking. Occasionally I pass a man with a dog or a woman on a bike, head down, pedaling intently, as if she’s determined to make it before the last bottle of hand sanitizer disappears from the grocery story. And then there’s the runners, doing a solo dash along the river path, in their singlets and tight shorts, headphones in, eyes forward. They don’t look at me as they pass. I can hear the drum of their feet approaching, passing, fading out, like an ocean wave against a shifting shore.
Meanwhile, the birds chatter in the trees. The river hums softly. The sunshine sparkles off the display window of a new gallery in the arts district. And a squirrel pauses on the sidewalk in front of me, a bit of nut in its tiny human hand, then scampers on as if to say, “I’ve got this. You are no threat to me now.”
At The Wedge, a brewery with a rambling outdoor patio where I used to meet friends to get loose and play board games, three old guys sit at separate picnic tables talking to each other in low voices. They seem like the crowd that used to meet at McDonalds for coffee and Egg McMuffins, though they have nothing to eat or drink here. The guys stop talking and watch as I walk by. I think about that scene in Ray Bradbury’s famous story “The Pedestrian,” where the town’s single police car — a car without a driver — interrogates a man who walks alone after dark.
“What are you doing out?”
“Walking,” said Leonard Mead.
“Walking!”
“Just walking,” he said simply, but his face felt cold.
“Walking, just walking, walking?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Walking where? For what?”
“Walking for air. Walking to see.”
Eventually, I loop back, retracing my route, past a few more dog walkers who leerily step off the sidewalk to let me pass. It’s striking that in this time of social distancing, although we are still allowed to speak, people seem to have lost their voices as well as their handshakes. The homeless guy doesn’t ask me for money. The dog walkers don’t say hello. The bike riders don’t shout “on your left!” as they come up behind me. The runners don’t even nod and half smile as they zip past. We are all out in the neighborhood, briefly on the lam from the safe-but-suffocating confines of our houses and apartments, but like Leonard Mead, the character in Bradbury’s story, we are alone, afraid, and resigned to getting caught.
When I get home, I call my mother who lives seven states away in a graduated assisted living complex for seniors. At 95, she lives alone in a one-bedroom independent apartment on the second-floor hallway occupied by other seniors, mostly in their 70s and 80s. A month ago, her facility and her hallway were busy places. My mom held down the fort, with a constant parade of family members — four of my siblings who live in her town, grandkids and great grands, church ladies, her aqua-exercise friends — coming in and out of her apartment. When I’d call, my mother would frequently say, “Oh, but I only have a few minutes. I have my bridge game upstairs at 11” or “it’s ping pong today in the common room.” (Yes, at 95, on her titanium knees, my mother still plays a mean game of ping pong.)
But now, the whole complex, all the buildings, including the memory care unit and the assisted living units, has been on total lockdown for 17 days. No one is allowed to come into mom’s apartment. She isn’t allowed to go out. She calls my sister with her shopping list. My sister delivers groceries to the front door, where a staff member picks them up and delivers them to my mother’s door mat in the hallway. She never sees my sister or the staff member. Her old-fashioned landline telephone has become a lifeline to the outside world.
“What did you do today? Mom,” I ask when I call.
“Oh, I watched the news,” she says. I can hear CNN droning in the background. “I tried to read, but I didn’t get very far. I guess I’ll start getting to all those photos I have in the closet. I thought I might do a scrapbook about my life.”
That sounds hopeful, I think. I’ve seen the giant Tupperware bin of hundreds of old photos, some of them black and white. It will take her weeks to sort through those, a Sisyphean task worthy of the we-don’t-know-for-how-long sentence the residents have received, by email, from the front desk.
And then she says, “Last night I went for a walk.”
“What? You went for a walk? Where?”
“I went for a walk in the halls. Late at night. I just walk the halls. I saw one other person, on the third floor, stepping into his apartment. He didn’t talk to me. So far I haven’t gotten caught.”
“You mean, you’ve done this before?”
“Well, yeah,” she confesses. “I do it every night. I have to get some exercise. I can’t get outside air, but I can get different air than in my apartment. I need to see something besides my four walls.”
I hold the phone a little tighter to my ear, cherishing the quaver of my mother’s voice, my heart bursting with a deep sense of connection and companionship. The telephone has become, as the old Bell telephone ads of the 70s presaged, how we reach out and touch someone. But this is why my mother and I walk. Putting one foot in front of the other down the hall, down the street, and back again is how we witness and are witnessed.
