I took a walk. In Manhattan.
Driving is easy; I parallel park the car like I’m bulls-eyeing womb-rats in Beggar’s Canyon, but walking it’s just me. I used to walk there everyday, but then I retired, and lockdown, and everything. I felt a little vulnerable; I mean, I wasn’t barefoot, guess you can’t be more protected than Doc Martens, but I’m only mentioning it because I was a little nervous, which was weird.
It wasn’t my very first POCO walk, but it was the first one where I didn’t have a plan. My normal New York pace of walking is pretty direct; a couple of decades working in midtown created this no-nonsense stride from Point Of Origin to Specific Destination. The environmental uncertainties of COVID made every trip outside even faster and more direct. I was like a pinball with excellent GPS. No lookin’ around. Here to there.
But this was just a walk uptown; maybe I’d find that bookstore, get a little exercise in, see what was “goin’ on”.
(Oh, sorry: POCO is something I’m trying out for “post-covid”. Though the obvious problem is, I know, that band from the 70’s that sang “Crazy Love”. Well, and COVID still, I guess.)
I was bedecked in my new fancy mask from New Zealand, which is made of wool (but, y’know, not knitted ), and I ambled semi-purposefully north to the soundtrack of J-Hope’s first album (because the new one’s awesome but really super intense).
I didn’t need to be anywhere in the city. It was… nice. How often do any of us not have to be anywhere? In the past I never had a choice as to whether or not I wanted to engage with the world. School and jobs necessitated interaction and I had to get used to whatever the commute brought my way. This time, I think I saw a lot more, because I took the time to look.
(POCO’s top 40 hit “Crazy Love’ was from their 13th album, “Legend”, the cover of which an ink sketch of a stallion that was drawn by Phil Hartman, the guy who became a comedian later and was on Saturday Night Live; he was Troy McClure on the Simpsons, and in “Jingle All The Way”. He was actually a graphic designer before he got into comedy.)
Anyway, a great deal of the people I saw were talking on the phone, I assume, though I wear earbuds to the grocery store just to camouflage the fact that I’m talking to myself. Every block there were People Having Moments – a harried family of tourists wearing different clothes but all with the same hairstyle, a couple arguing either to each other or the people on the phones they were both holding, two inebriated fellows wearing dirty track suits but impeccably clean shoes – little worlds, three-pace-wide theme park lands. We all kind of swept past one another, stories smoothly circulating like one of those formal dances in Jane Austen movies.
I wandered. And I got a bit lost. Not in the streets, but in the past. Storefronts that I recognized were next to ones that were closed, which were next to completely new places. I had to turn off my memory and actually navigate. There was a fully operational 22 story tall hotel where I remembered a shoe repair shop. A one story shoe repair shop. A few times I just kept going down a street hoping I would recognize the next one. I only walked about 18 blocks, but by the time I did find a bookstore, I was winded.
(The band The Eagles has two former members of POCO in it. And POCO’s fans call themselves the Poconuts. I thought that was cute.)
On the subway ride home I checked the map on my phone to see how many steps I’d gotten in. Steps are my new currency, digital pirate booty meant to tone one’s own. The blue line showed my random path and wrong turns that weren’t wrong at all since there’s no wrong way to go when you’re not going anywhere particular.
But I had walked somewhere, I felt like I’d walked from 2018 to 2022. Nothing was different, everything was new. The distinctive sound of a happy teakettle whistle made when the subway takes a turn had clearly been replaced by the tooth loosening scream of a dozen 300 lb. steel discs grinding over metal bars at a force of 40 tons. That was new.
No, of course it wasn’t. I was. Am, it seems. And right here is where I’m supposed to write that “I guess I’ll have to get used to it all over again”. But I don’t really want to. I used to have a method of survival that included a series of sensory blinders that I don’t think fit me anymore, like all of my suit pants, and it’s not an issue of getting in shape (well, the suit pants are) but rather a desire to update my style, survival wise.
I used to always have somewhere to go. Now I’m still going places, but at a more human pace, I think.
Didn’t they sing “Africa”? No, that was TOTO, not POCO. Right.
POCO’s not gonna happen, is it? Hmn. Yeah, I can see that now.
Little. Walk.