Walking

Childhood isn’t something I think about. I have no desire returning to it and have found that I quite enjoy getting old. It probably has to do with being raised mostly by my grandparents who showed me at an early age what it meant to truly work and appreciate the things you have.


Even when I wasn’t helping them around the house or in the yard, I was playing with my toys by myself, playing outside by myself, or reading. Our neighborhood was not kind to strangers and my mother didn’t want me associating with the local kids or their families. If was playing outside and some kids asked me to play, she’d come out and make an excuse as to why I couldn’t go with them and why they couldn’t stay. Quite frankly, it didn’t bother me at all. I wasn’t the kind of kid who got along with his piers anyway. I was always more comfortable around adults because all I had to do was keep my mouth shut, be fat, and look cute.

The one thing I miss about childhood is being able to walk wherever I needed to go, or in actuality where I was meant to be at that particular time. Between certain ages of childhood, you’re allowed to walk, maybe to the end of your families property if you’re outside by yourself; and even if someone is outside with you, the furthest you can go is to the end of the block, but once I hit that age to where my family trusted me with my instincts, I was a ghost around the house. They didn’t know if I was home or not; if I was alive or dead, unless I stuck my head through the door telling someone I was home or I was going somewhere, and even then I still had no interest in making friends around my neighborhood. I liked being alone. And besides, the friends I did have were from school and both friends and school were nearly ten miles away; so, unless I bought some crack from the guy down the road that lived behind the chicken restaurant, used it, I wasn’t going to be walking or running ten miles at any time.

What I loved about walking was that I got to know the town, developing a real connection with it – and I don’t mean the people, because I really don’t care too much for those……things; no, I mean I feel like I got to hear the heartbeat of the town because we, the citizens, are the blood of a city. We make it run, we make it come alive, and when you stop and communicate with it one-on-one; when you can walk around and use the homeless people sleeping in front of department stores as hurdles, and smell the weed blowing from the skaters and thugs smoking underneath the expressway’s overpass, or know which alleys have discarded syringes from the crackheads and which ones don’t, there’s a part of your soul that melds with the soul of the city. The size of the city doesn’t matter, although some city’s designs are geared more towards driving than walking, which makes that element of that particular city something special, but there are always areas where you can walk and hear the city breathing.