The Value of Taking a Walk/Monster Machines

For the majority of my life, I hated walking. I would win about having to walk. I would much prefer to ride my bike or take the car. Walk to the park? I'll just stay home. Walking seemed so slow and took so long.

Humanity had evolved past walking. We trained animals to let us ride them. We created new modes of transportation. We had bicycles and cars and scooters and skate boards and so much more. Why would any chose to walk. Walking a mile seemed like thumbing my nose at hundreds of years of ingenuity and evolution.

Then a few years ago, I left CHS Field in downtown St. Paul and started walking. I had just planned on getting out of the crowded downtown and the ride share services surge pricing after a Saints game. A couple blocks, check the pricing. Nope. Walk a couple more. Then at some point, I realized that I was maybe a third of the way home already. Maybe I should just walk. I even wrote a whole blog about it when I got home: I Took a Walk.

That walk changed my perspective some. But going without a car for 6 months in 2019 after totaling two vehicles in the span of 5 months was a seismic shift. I walked to the bus. I biked. I utilized ride share services. And on occasion I would just walk home from work. All the way. Walking a mile didn't seem so long anymore. Even 5 miles just took time, it wasn't a stress or even difficult.

It was during these walks that I started to realized how much I had been missing. Driving a car is a full sensory job. You have to be focused on the road, the signs, the signals, other cars, pedestrians, bikes, the condition of the road and a million other things. Noticing any thing else can be a danger to yourself, or to others.

But wow, you miss a lot. Landscapes fly by without a second look or a thought. Homes, buildings, how fast the leaves change. Today I dropped my car off to get the AC recharged. The service station was along the route I used to walk home. So instead of sitting inside or arranging a ride home, I decided to start walking home. Figured if it took a long time, I could make it home. If the fix was quick, I'd just turn around.

I got about a half mile away from the service location and there was a construction project for a new subdivision underway. In what was previously a heavily wooded lot, they were deforesting it as quickly as possible. Passing by in the car, I would probably not have given it a second look. Walking by, the machines were incredible.

One had an attachment that would grab onto a full tree as the blade at the base cut through it in seconds. It would lift 30 to 40 foot pieces and drop them. Another tractor would pick them up in its claw and drag them to what was seemingly the world's largest wood chipper. The chipper fed into a full semi trailer. It was efficient and honestly kind of terrifying.

Another bobcat looking machine had a saw blade that would have seemed more appropriate on the set of Mad Max than in suburbia. This smaller mechanical monster was roaming in the wake of the larger tree eater. The blade constantly spinning and grinding up anything that the tree eater had left behind. These machines, which looked like the characters from Bob the Builder got the Lovecraft treatment were decimating the former forest in an impressive and yet disturbing dance of efficiency.

It was a scene that is burned into my mind. Even now, nearly 8 hours later, it stands out and I am transfixed. I decided to drive by this afternoon. The mechanical monsters are gone. The field looks almost naturally barren. There is no indication that those giant Snorts did this. Just a sign foretelling of condos and town homes in the 300s coming soon.

Is this the weirdly comforting and yet perverse modern cycle of life? That land was barely used, in a first tier suburb, it was likely simply a matter of time. Yet if I hadn't been walking by, the sheer force of the change, the mechanical monsters would be unknown to me.

The Fortress of Solitude.

In 1995 my parents built a house. They let me choose which bedroom I wanted of the three upstairs. I choose the smallest one, because I was convinced that I would eventually move to the one in the basement.

The basement was called The Fortress of Solitude among my friends. It was the scene of countless sleepovers, games of pool, movie marathons and hours and hours spent playing Legos. There is no doubt that of all the hours I spent in that house in the past 25 years, the vast majority of them where spent in the basement.

It was a versatile place. The summer I was dumped for the first time, I cried and listened to Paul Simon's Like a Rock album on repeat - the basement was my safe space. It served as the sound stage and film studio for so many home made epics, like the Storming of the Bastille. It was a killing field of a war zone during the Lego-GI Joe-Playmobile conflicts of the late 90s. It was there at my surprise 18th birthday party took place.

Even after I moved out in college, the basement was still my space. When I would return home, it was where I would go. Every party thrown in that house had parents upstairs and kids in the basement. The basement was always there.

I finally got to move into the basement bedroom in the two months after I got married. The basement was our first apartment. I even got to finally paint the room to a blue that I chose. I moved away to Boston and then to Kentucky and then back. When my marriage ended the basement was there as a nursery and home for my kids and their Mom. My son went through a period where he would fight bed time with all of his might. So many evenings walking around that pool table, singing to him as he tried to cry himself to sleep.

The Lego table returned and my kids played on it then. The Fisher Price castle that had been the set for the Bastille became a castle again. The storage area turned into a kitchenette. My kids played in the shower that once was the preferred after soccer practice locker room. They moved out and the basement waited once again.

In 2008, my financial house of cards collapsed. I got laid off. I was in so much debt. I got dumped. I returned to the basement again. The bedroom was set up with two bunk beds for the kids and a twin bed for me. The little TV that hung in the corner had a VCR. We watched so many movies before bed, Disney classics, Star Wars and more. I set up my computer as a wine rack and searched for jobs. I "cooked" us meals in the kitchenette. We played so much pool.

Again, I moved away and the basement returned to the place I would go when I visited. Each of my children got to have sleepovers there with their friends. They both wanted one more this summer but Covid took that possibility away.

Today, I moved the pool table out of the basement. The house is devoid of most furniture. What is left was put here by the home stager for photos. The house has been sold.

Today I stood in my safe space and cried. Tears of pain. Tears of happiness. So much. Memories. Ghosts and visions hang in every inch of that basement. So many times that basement was there for me, my family, my children.

The basement was always a way that my parents could show me they loved me. It was always there as a refuge. From the dreams of pretend, Legos and camcorder movies. It created safety for a broken hearted teen, foolish newlyweds, broken hearts again. It was there - all the way through to the laughter of my kids and their friends.

I cried for the last time in my safe space today. It is empty. Soon another family will fill it with their own memories. The Fortress of Solitude will now belong to someone else.

Those Eyes

I read or heard or imagined a quote once that eyes where the window the soul. Maybe I took it too much to heart. But those eyes have always opened the door to my heart.

At first maybe it was the challenge in them at recess, a glint of competition at the four square field. Or maybe later at the middle school camp when truth or dare seemed the most dangerous game that could be played.

Later those eyes were wide and innocent within a theater production, I was tasked to ask them to put on a happy face, to shake off the gray skies. And I desperately wanted to make them happy. Through life and misfortune, I wanted to make those eyes smile, even if i couldn't fix the reality of life and death and burdens too heavy for most teenagers.

Then they were eyes that were focused on the future, on results, on potential on anything but what was in front of them in their last semester. I wanted those eyes on me, to see me so much. I hijacked the plan those eyes had. And in the end, didn't live up to the promises my eyes had made.

A read through isn't supposed to change a life. It's but words fumbled through with rarely any connection. Yet I found those eyes in that first ready through and I couldn't escape the connection. A read through is the first run through of living someone else's truth through your own lips. But in that moment I found an accidental, unavoidable truth.

Eyes maybe the window to the soul. But that soul in my experience is my own, I have learned so much about myself from falling into the depths of another's eyes.

Love, pain, confusion, lust, terror, trust, disappointment and hope. What I saw in each of those eyes will never leave me and in a way I will never truly understand what I saw.