Walking With Myself

I joined myself for a walk yesterday.  We live, Kathy and I, in a new world. A little more than a year ago we left the city in which we lived for forty years to a town 200 miles away. But I wonder, after yesterday, if we ever really moved.
Our little street in Detroit, Warrington Drive, borders Livernois Avenue, a boulevard in the center of which was for decades traveled by streetcars, its rails and wooden ties unearthed just four years ago in a landscaping project. Livernois stretches from Historic Fort Wayne along the Detroit River to the south to Eight Mile road, the city limits on the north, and even wider thoroughfare running east and west between Lake St. Clare on the East and well, eventually Lake Michigan, with thousands of towns and a few cities in between. But in the shadow of the noise of traffic on Livernois, Warrington is more like a village. And that
village, I discovered yesterday, remains my home.

During the sixteen months that we have lived on a quiet street in Traverse City, there have been perhaps a dozen times I have driven down Warrington while we visited Detroit for events at UDM or attended Mass at Gesu Church. But yesterday I had left my car around the corner behind the parish house at Gesu, attached as it was to a little trailer that contained a long-promised altar for their daily chapel, one of the first fruits of my new workshop in our new home in our new town. I had walked south a half block on Oak Drive, a block west on Santa Clara, and turned the corner of the sidewalk onto Warrington to meet my friends Bob and Bill for a 7 AM appointment. I carried a bag of bagels from New York Bagels, real bagels that have crust that makes your teeth honest, crust that is formed by the process of boiling the bagels before baking, the starch bonds making a shell of the outer layer, restraining their rising in the oven so that their texture is firm and dense. Bill was picking up coffee on his way from his new home in Brightmoor a few miles west. Bill had rented the upper flat of Bob’s house, right across our little street from where Kathy and I called home for thirty years. On Friday mornings like this I’d walk across the street at 7 AM at push open Bob’s unlatched front door to meet with him and Bill for “fellowship” and prayer. Now Bill drives in weekly, but I’m out of range, and so this return to the warmth of their company had my mind in a very grateful place as I turned that corner, a place that some might call “holy”. And this time I was not driving, I was walking.

I think it was that walking that made the difference, why as soon as I turned the corner moments of memory surrounded me like kids running from school to the playground, gripped me and surrounded me and covered me like monkey bars, its galvanized pipes worn shiny and smooth by all these hands gripping, climbing, holding on tight. Every house I looked at started a high speed video of a sequence of neighbors who had lived there, some who had come and gone quickly, some who had grown older, slower, looking more like the sidewalk than the grass they were limply watering. The videos ran simultaneously, their frames mixing and blending and rolling over each other like those kids, but I was walking, and they were moving with me down this path I’d walked, literally, 12,000 times back and forth from work all those years.

I was struck by the soft intensity of the experience even as I was having it, and I wondered why it was so powerful. This thought found a grip on my mind and a home in my heart: part of me remains there, on that street, at that University, in that church, even as I think I am entirely present in Traverse City. I walk Warrington even now, feeding and fed by those who think they are totally present there, who think I am retired, and we are gone up north.

I think that when I turned that corner, the videos ran to bring me up to speed, to give me the gift of being totally present yesterday morning, on that street that was for thirty years so much a part of me that it is so much a part of me, that part of me remains there, always.

I think that in that moment I touched the fringe of God’s garment. The soft intensity of that moment leaves me with a faint but enthralling sense of what it is to be spirit, unfettered by time and place, free to be here and there, now and then. I think, as I write, how even as I am here at this keyboard this morning, my spirit is fully present with Kathy, and with our kids, and with Bill and Bob, and with you.