“Let Me Tell You a Story”
A Collection of Ninety-Six Stories and Some Poems
Cliff Williams
PDF file of the whole collection
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Some of This, Some of That 2, 171–221
More miscellaneous stories, not involving students or former students (except for “Homeless for a Day”).
“Just Clifford”
I was about two years old. My mother and I were out in the playground behind our apartment building on the south side of Chicago. I had found a cigarette butt and was showing interest in it. My mother must have said something about the cigarette along with the information that neither she nor my father smoked.
I replied, “Mommy doesn’t smoke. Daddy doesn’t smoke. Just Clifford.”
That certainly was not a presage of future smoking, as I never have smoked. But it might have displayed some future character trait.
Nearly Killed
When I was a child, my family lived several blocks from the Fox River in a little town northwest of Chicago called Fox River Grove. There was a beach at the river, which is where I learned to swim—crawl stroke, back crawl, back stroke, side stroke, breast stroke. I liked the back stroke and the side stroke best, because they were easier than the other three.
At that point, the Fox River is about three hundred feet across. One day, I wondered whether I could swim to the other side. I did. And after a minute of rest, I swam back. It wasn’t too hard. I did that again from time to time.
There were never any motorboats on the river during the week, or at least there were so few I didn’t notice them. But on Saturdays and Sundays, especially Sunday afternoons, there were quite a few that went up and down the river. I didn’t swim across the river on those days.
Except once, I did.
I got across, then headed back. I heard the motorboat before I saw it. I was in the middle of the river, and so was it, heading straight toward me.
My first thought was that I could dive. But I didn’t know whether I could get far enough down or whether I could hold my breath long enough.
I waved, from a side stroke position, facing the boat. The driver did not see me. I kept waving. And then the driver did see me and changed direction. The motorboat was about seventy-five feet from me, not more than four or five seconds away from me.
I never again swam across the river on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon.
___________________________
I was driving in the third lane from the right on an eight-lane highway. The fast lane was to my left, and a tractor-trailer was to my right. I was passing it, but not fast, as I was going only a little faster than it was going.
I was about halfway past it, when suddenly it started to swerve left into my lane, fast. I did not have enough time to slow down. It was going to hit me in less than a second. Sooner than I could snap my fingers.
I did not know whether there was any car in the fast lane to my left. But I had no choice. I was just about to be pushed to the left by the huge tractor-trailer, maybe losing control of the car or being overturned. But if I suddenly veered left, I might be hit by a car coming up in the fast lane.
I veered left.
Fortunately, there was no car in that lane for some distance behind me. I breathed an enormous sigh of relief, glad to be alive.
Bill Konrad
When we were in fifth grade,
Bill Konrad and I
ended up on swings
next to each other
one day during recess.
We were swinging hard
but opposite—he high in front
when I was high in back,
I high in front
when he was high in back.
As we passed at the bottom,
we tried to spit at each other.
We never succeeded,
for one of us would yell,
“Tutti Frutti!” and we both
became convulsed with laughter—
and you can’t spit when
you are laughing.
We had never before
had much connection,
and never afterwards, either.
Thirty years later I returned
to that playground
and learned that Bill Konrad
had killed himself
some years earlier.
I am still stunned.
How can you go from
giggling to suicide?
The answer, no doubt, is
little by little:
first depression, then more depression.
But I, who do not know the interval,
cannot understand.
Bill Konrad will always
be laughing
and trying to spit.
Laundromat Soap Suds
In the days preceding my first college semester, in the fall of 1960, I attended a band camp for those who wanted to be in the college’s band. I had played trombone during grade school and high school, so it was natural for me to keep going with it.
At the band camp, there was a senior trumpet player whom I began to admire. He was good at playing the trumpet. He had poise. I looked up to him. He said hello to me when we were near each other.
Classes started, and it wasn’t long before I had to do my laundry. I bought a box of powdered soap, shoved my clothes into some sort of bag, and walked half a block to a nearby laundromat.
After putting my clothes into one of the top-loading washing machines, I opened the box of powdered soap and wondered how much of it to put into the washing machine. I must have missed the directions on the box, because I put in a full cup of soap granules. Or it might have been half a cup. Whichever it was, the predictable consequence soon occurred.
Soap suds bubbled up through the cracks around the lid at the top of that washing machine. They cascaded over the front and onto the floor, where they spread in all directions.
It would have been bad enough if no one had seen it. But right there, also doing his laundry, was the senior trumpet player I had come to admire. He saw those cascading suds, slowly shook his head, and said something like, “Someone doesn’t know what they are doing.”
I was totally, completely, utterly, humiliatingly mortified.
I nodded my head at his remark, wholly unable to admit that I was the one.
The Firefighter’s Carry
When Laura was six or seven, Linda and I took turns putting her to bed. When it was my turn, Laura and I often played “Falling Up.” I lay on the couch with my knees up, she grabbed my legs near my knees, and I lifted the lower part of my legs while she hung on. About the third or fourth time, I lifted my legs so high that she fell onto me, heels over head, with squeals of giggles and laughter. She promptly scrambled around to my lower legs, and we repeated the procedure.
Sometimes we played “Gorilla.” We pretended to be gorillas who were lumbering around the living room and knocking into each other.
After playing, I said, “Okay, time for bed. Do you want me to carry you upstairs on my back, in my arms like a kitten, or with the firefighter’s carry?” She chose my back most of the time. She climbed onto my back, put her arms around my shoulders, and I walked up two flights of stairs to the third floor, where her bedroom was.
One day she asked what the firefighter’s carry was. “I put you over my shoulder, head in back and feet in front, and hold your legs while I walk up the stairs.” She chose that one.
I picked her up and headed up the stairs. Her stomach lay on my right shoulder, and every time I jumbled a bit, which happened rather often, she uttered, “Umph” or “Ooof.” She stayed on my shoulder all the way to the top of the stairs on the third floor.
That was the only time she ever chose that way of being carried, even though I subsequently offered from time to time to do it.
Almost Arrested
During the early 1980s I spent a night at Pacific Garden Mission in central Chicago with a group of students who were there for several days doing a mission project. I carried an old medium-sized wood suitcase with snaps that sometimes popped open.
At some point as I walked from the mission to Union Station, I encountered hundreds of people engaged in some kind of demonstration or rally or protest—I didn’t know what. I joined them, curious. After ten or twenty minutes, I learned that the rally was a protest against President Ronald Reagan’s having just sent troops to El Salvador.* I had not heard about that as I had not seen a newspaper in some days.
The mass of moving people arrived at the intersection of Clark and Adams Streets, both two lane streets. Three or four hundred people occupied the four corners of the intersection, while cars on each street alternated stopping at the traffic light. When there was no traffic going through the intersection, a small group of people rushed to the middle of the intersection. And just as quickly, police officers dragged them to a paddy wagon near the intersection. (The news that night said that seventy people were arrested.)
Meanwhile, when the traffic light turned green for one of the streets, masses of people crossed that street. I was in one of those masses. And, moreover, I was usually at the end, arriving at the opposite corner last.
One of those times a police officer pushed me on the back. I had instant visions of being dragged away and my suitcase crashing to the pavement and the snaps on it popping open, strewing its contents onto the street.
I hurried and was not arrested.
* Peter, Paul, and Mary’s protest song, “El Salvador,” is on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOAqPqt6nqU.
Homeless for a Day
“I’m tired of living,” Gary remarked in between bites of a hot dog I had bought him. We were sitting at a table outside of a cheap restaurant in the 400 block of West Diversey Parkway in Chicago. It was ten o’clock on a Friday night in July, 1988, and numerous passersby populated the sidewalk. Occasionally, Gary threw taunts at them.
“Six years ago,” he continued, “my wife was murdered. Her throat was slashed, probably because of drug stuff I was in.”
He showed me a picture of himself taken two years before. It scarcely resembled his current haggard and unkempt appearance. He wolfed down the hot dog, and as I was leaving, asked for a dollar. “I need a drink,” he explained. “My hands are trembling, and I’ll get the DT’s if I don’t have something pretty soon.”
“I have to eat tomorrow,” I replied. “If I have anything left tomorrow night, I’ll buy you some more food.”
I and a former student—Tom—had come to Chicago to live on the street for a day and a night. Our aim was to make contact with street people, find out what their lives were like, and live as they did—walking the sidewalks, sitting on bus stop benches, and sleeping in parks.
We arrived at 8:30 p.m. on Friday night. Although it was ninety degrees, we carried jackets in our hands, for that is what homeless people do. (Where else could they keep them?) We had dressed in everyday clothes—Tom with blue jeans, I with corduroys, and both with gym shoes. Each of us had ten dollars, plus identification (“Just in case,” we said).
Our first contact took place at a bus stop bench at Clark Street and Diversey Parkway, some miles north of central Chicago. The intersection was alive with night activity—individuals strolling, cars passing, couples handholding—all of which seemed respectable enough. At one of the three bus stop benches there, several sloppily dressed and dirty men were sitting, one of whom was shirtless and another of whom was holding a small brown paper bag in the shape of a wine bottle. We wandered toward the bench.
“Do you have a quarter you could spare?” one of the men on the bench asked us. “Do you mind if we join you?” I responded. They didn’t, and we sat down.
Roger, the shirtless one, explained that the reason he didn’t have a job was that he didn’t have carfare. The alcohol on his breath told a different story. Ernie raised the brown paper bag to his lips every now and then, swaying drunkenly with slurred speech. Larry, who was sitting next to Tom, apologized for the drinking, speaking gently and timidly as he did so.
Across the street, a group of college students began setting up for what looked like an evangelistic meeting. I decided to investigate. “Let’s go see what’s going on,” I said to Roger. Roger assented, and crossed the street with me. A quartet sang a couple of gospel songs, a clean-cut guy talked about how Christ had changed his life, and several from the group stood on the sidewalk waiting for passing people to stop.
A woman from the group came up to Roger and asked him if he knew Christ as his personal Savior. Roger listened as she pointed out various Bible verses to him. He evidently did not have too much enthusiasm for this, for in a few minutes he said, “Let’s get out of here.” “It was getting oppressive,” he said as we crossed the street again.
Just as I got back to the benches, Gary walked past. I had met him on two previous afternoon visits, so I said, “Hi, Gary.” He turned, and with immediate recognition bounded toward me and gave me an enthusiastic bear hug. “It’s nice to see you,” he exclaimed.
Gary, it turned out, was hungry, so I volunteered to buy him a hot dog. While he was eating, I asked him about a safe place to sleep.
“You can go to Lincoln Park at the end of Diversey,” he replied, “but a lot of bums hang out there and sometimes the police hassle you. Go up to the totem pole. Wait until after one o’clock, though. That’s when the police leave.”
We talked some more, and parted with a “Perhaps we’ll see each other tomorrow.” Tom and I walked back to the bus stop bench at Clark and Diversey, spent some time there, then walked around looking for a McDonald’s, found one, and used up some of our food money on milkshakes. Before we left, Gary came to the window near our table and peered in hesitantly. We waved him in, and I used up more of my food money on a milkshake for him.
Tom and I walked along Diversey toward Lincoln Park, found another bus stop bench with several street people occupying it, and decided to join them. It was about midnight, and we had an hour to kill before we made our way to the totem pole.
Neil, a fifty-seven year old man with a bulging stomach and a gruff voice, sat to my right, skin to skin. Larry, the gentle and timid person, sat to my left, again, skin to skin. Tom was next, and a couple of other scruffy men intermittently occupied the space to Tom’s left. Nightlife traffic, both pedestrian and vehicular, was still strong.
Shortly after our arrival, an immaculately dressed woman, about thirty and clearly not one who lived on the street, sat down on Neil’s right. She was greeted by Neil with, “What have you got there?” From a grocery bag she produced cans of beer. “I take care of my friends,” she responded, as she gave one to Neil, one to a man standing nearby, and took one for herself.
“Hey, what are you two here for,” she challenged Tom and me. “Are you doing some kind of research or something?”
“No,” Tom replied. “We’re here to find out what life is like on the street, and to get to know some of you.”
“Do you want some beer?” she asked.
“Thanks, but no thanks,” each of us replied.
Ernie, the drinker, wandered along, still drinking. He swayed even more now, and at times nearly lost his balance.
Someone mentioned God, and Neil responded belligerently with, “____ the bum. He’s made the world a mess. Anybody who’s supposed to be as good as he is wouldn’t have let things get like this.”
I winced, but said nothing.
A bench occupier got up to investigate the other side of the street and inadvertently got too close to a passing car. The car screeched to a halt, the driver jumped out and angrily castigated the wayward stroller. Someone responded, and the driver yelled back. More shouts were exchanged. Finally, the woman with the beer jumped from the bench, screaming, “I’m a cop, and I’ve got a gun in my purse, so get moving. Scram.” The motorist gave her an inflamed look, got into his car and left. The scene returned to normal.
Around 1:15 a.m. we decided to go looking for the totem pole. With pleasant goodbyes, we departed.
The totem pole was about a mile or so east of Clark Street and north of Diversey. We headed east on Diversey and crossed Lake Shore Drive to Lincoln Park, then turned north. On a bench beside one of the park’s pathway, a man was stretched, snoring peacefully. Next to him, another man sat, leaning forward with his head resting on a grocery cart, asleep. The grocery cart contained clothes, bottles, boxes, and other assorted items, apparently the sum total of his possessions.
Encountering a group of teenage boys under a street light in a parking lot, we asked where the totem pole was. “It’s right up there,” one of them pointed.
The totem pole, we discovered, was no place to sleep. It was brightly lit in an open area. And a police truck, with a couple of policemen standing nearby, was parked near it. We walked past the police truck, wondering apprehensively whether we would be stopped. We weren’t.
It was darker closer to Lake Michigan, which was several hundred yards east of the totem pole. We walked in that direction, stopping finally at the large, concrete steps which adjoin the lake for long stretches in Lincoln Park. No one was in sight. Choosing a step that looked relatively smooth, not more than twenty feet from the lapping water, we lay down, head to head. Because it was a warm night, we used our jackets as pillows.
We thought we had picked an isolated spot. But soon we heard footsteps. I became tense, thinking, “What if somebody sees us?” The footsteps passed.
Shortly, there were more footsteps. I looked up and saw someone sitting on the top step about a hundred feet from us. Several people came along and sat down fifty feet from us in the opposite direction, talking heatedly. I decided that the place was too public for anyone to mug us—and too public to get much sleep.
Several hours later, we awoke to a gradually brightening, though overcast, sky. We lay there for an hour, sat up and watched the lake for another hour, and finally got up to find something to eat.
It was not yet eight o’clock when we arrived at a grocery store near the previous evening’s episodes. We bought a few things, went across the street, and waited for a Burger King to open.
After eating breakfast there, we passed a couple of hours wandering aimlessly along the streets, sitting, and watching people pass by. When sleepiness hit us about eleven, we walked to Lincoln Park and slept soundly for an hour or two, despite the noise of nearby traffic and the irritation of bumpy ground.
We decided to investigate the area around Broadway and Wilson, where, we were told, there were numerous street people. So we headed north on Broadway. Though the sky earlier had not shown signs of rain, it now threatened to deluge us. That is what it did, slowly at first, and then with great energy.
We ran to a gas station and stood next to one of the protected pumps. Feeling the silent stares of the gas station people, we ran to a partially covered narrow space between two brick buildings and sat on the concrete next to the sidewalk. We sat, partly to rest and partly to escape the overpowering odor of garbage exuding from the top of the dumpster behind us. When a torrent of water from the other side of the dumpster soaked my pants, we jumped to our feet and stood for awhile. Tiring of this, we ran to a doorway and sat watching the rain. When it let up some, we ran to a restaurant.
“What do you guys want,” the waitress asked in a not very kindly voice, as we seated ourselves at the counter. We had to save some money for supper, and all we could afford was a bowl of soup, one for each of us. The waitress plunked them down on the counter, with crackers and a check.
It was lousy soup, but hunger made it taste good. We each left a twenty cent tip, much more than the fifteen percent rule dictated, to show the waitress that we weren’t bums.
Near Broadway and Wilson, there is a daytime center for street people. It consists of a medium-sized room, two bathrooms, a table with free coffee, and a room with donated clothes. We had been told not to go there because of the knifings and fights that sometimes occurred. We went in anyway.
At the entrance, an attendant checked our pockets for weapons with a handheld electronic metal detector. We passed the inspection and were allowed to enter the medium-sized room. It contained about seventy-five straight-backed chairs, arranged in rows, almost all of them occupied. We found two unoccupied chairs and sat down.
The occupants were nearly all men. Some were watching the television that was at one end of the room, some were talking, and some were simply staring. The air was smelly and smoky, and we could not endure more than fifteen minutes. We left without talking to anyone.
After spending two or three hours on the steps of a Baptist church at Broadway and Wilson, listening to the stories of those who had congregated there, we ate a meager supper at a nearby Burger King. Darkness set in and we walked back south on Broadway toward Diversey.
Halfway to our destination we met Ellen and Tim, friends of mine who were out walking. (Broadway is the kind of street that people walk along on a warm summer night.) “We thought at first you were street people,” they exclaimed. That delighted us, since they both work with the homeless and can easily tell the difference between them and everyone else. We weren’t dirty enough to fool the street people, though, because we were asked several times along Broadway for spare quarters.
By the time we reached Diversey, we were tired, broke and hungry. Instead of staying another night as we had originally planned, we decided to go home. (“That’s when you were ready to see what it is really like to be homeless,” a friend remarked.) After sitting around for another hour, we set off toward my car, which was parked about a mile west on Diversey.
Neil, the God-curser, came along just then. “Hi, Neil,” I said. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going to the grocery to buy whatever I can with this sixty-seven cents, and steal the rest,” he replied, showing us a handful of change. “I haven’t eaten in two days. Do you have any money you could spare?”
I had two cents left, which I gave him. “See you later,” I said.
Three blocks further, we approached a police truck that was parked by the curb. A plainclothes police officer was joking with someone, posing with flippant imitation as he said, “He would make a nice trophy over the mantel.” The “he” was Ernie, who was sleeping soundly on the street, several feet from the curb. We stared with astonishment at last night’s drinker. “Everything is under control,” the police officer said to us, meaning for us to keep walking. We kept walking.
Two blocks later, we encountered a grizzled man of fifty or so sitting in a doorway, reading a book. Behind him was a full grocery cart, and in front of him was an upturned hat with a few odd coins in it.
We sat on the sidewalk as we listened to him. “I’m trying to get out of this gutter,” he said. “Up until two weeks ago, I was doing cocaine. Last week I slept in an alley and someone stole all my money from my pockets. As soon as I get enough money, I’m going to buy some tools so I can get back to being a mechanic.”
I had nothing to give, but Tom gave him a quarter.
We left and got to the car without further encounters. I put on my wedding ring (On a previous visit, Gary had advised me to take it off), and we drove off, arriving home around eleven o’clock, glad not to have to sleep on concrete beds or huddle in wet doorways, yet unsettled and depressed by what we had observed.
I could not help wondering how we would have obtained money for breakfast if we had stayed another day. I tried picturing myself panhandling, but shrunk from the thought. I also wondered about the reception we would have been given in church if we had stayed to Sunday morning. We were not too dirty, but we were not entirely clean, either. Nor did we smell too well. Would the church people avert their eyes, not get too close?
In addition, I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out what it was like to be bored most of the day, to feel like a reject, worry about where I would sleep at night, with little sense of purpose and no one to care about me. Our first day was a novel learning experience, but our second would have been a little too real.
“I’m Dying”
“I’m dying,” Michael said on a recent Monday morning. “Can you come see me?”
I checked the train schedule while he was on the phone and found that I had time to make a lunch for myself and walk to the train station to catch the 11:27 a.m. train to Chicago. “I’ll be there at 12:20,” I told him.
I had met Michael a year and a half earlier when I had been walking north on North Michigan Avenue a few blocks south of the Chicago River. I had stopped to talk to a homeless Black women for a few minutes. Just after I left her and headed north, a tall Black male swung in beside me. He had found it astonishing that a White person was talking to a Black person.
We talked as we walked. Then we found a spot to sit. I discovered that he was sixty-five and living on the streets in Chicago. I told him that I couldn’t help him from a distance, but if he wanted to call or text me, he could. I gave him my cell phone number.
During the next year, he texted me from time to time and occasionally called. When I asked whether he had a place to stay that night, sometimes he said he did and sometimes I picked up that he didn’t. I visited him a couple of times at the train station in Chicago for lunch, which I bought for him at one of the station’s fast food places.
Then, several months ago, he started texting me more often, several times a week, sometimes five or six. He called occasionally just to hear my voice, he said. The calls never lasted more than two or three minutes.
But the call this past Monday wasn’t just to hear my voice. He was crying. A doctor had told him he had eight months to live. Another doctor had told him nine months, and still another had told him ten.
During lunch that day, he said that he had a virus of the brain, prostate cancer, and Aids. He told me the last of these in a whisper not more than three or four inches from my face. He didn’t want the people at nearby tables to hear.
He also told me that a priest had abused him as a child between ten and fourteen years old.
It was often difficult to discern what he was saying because his voice was so hoarse. It was not difficult, though, to tell when he was crying.
He didn’t have a family, he said. I was the only person he knew.
He pulled down one of his socks to show me his hideously ravaged skin. He pulled down the other sock. The skin there was also just as ravaged. It did not look like skin.
At one point, I took his hand and prayed.
After we finished lunch, we went to a men’s room at the station and went into the large stall for people with disabilities. He pulled up his shirt and sweater to reveal a back with spots spread around it and more hideous skin near his shoulders. His stomach also had those distinctly inhuman spots.
We walked for a bit outside the station, then parted with a handshake and a hug.
The Swollen Eye
Some years ago I visited a church service at Jesus People USA, a Christian commune on the north side of Chicago. At that time about ten percent of those who attended their Sunday morning services were street people—mostly alcoholic, homeless men. They usually sat by themselves on a row of chairs in the back of the large, basement-like room where gatherings and common meals were held.
On the Sunday I visited, a street person sat one row in front of me and three chairs to my left. Like most of the street people there, he wore ill-fitting, dirty clothes. Unlike the others, he was noticeably hurt: his right eye was completely swollen shut. The areas just above and below his eye had become so puffy that they covered his eye entirely. A bloody gash above his right eyebrow explained the presence of this hideous sight.
I didn’t listen very well to the sermon that morning because I kept stealing glances at the unshaven face with the unseeing eye. In addition to pity, I felt a bit of revulsion. How could anyone be attracted to this unkempt man or think there was anything beautiful about him?
The sermon finally ended, and we sang a song, prayed, and stood to leave. The street person with one good eye turned and walked straight toward me. He extended his hand, smiled broadly, and greeted me with a gravelly but genuine “Hello. How are you?” I was too astonished to respond with anything more than a weak handshake and dull smile. But his face—dirty, unshaved, and battered as it was—had a real smile on it.
From Singleness of Heart: Restoring the Divided Soul (Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1994), 131–2
Anthropologist in Church
When I do not feel like
going to church,
I go as an anthropologist—
to investigate the strange ways
of quaint Christians,
who sing old hymns,
listen to inept sermons,
smile unaccountably.
I cannot make it through
a whole service, however,
without being moved
by those words and smiles,
and invariably find
my heart strangely warmed.
On Praying
I do not pray very well in churches.
When I need to pray,
I put on old boots and dark clothes,
Take a piece of cardboard, folded up,
And drive to a freight train yard.
There I find an empty boxcar
And, laying out my cardboard, sit or lie.
Words come slowly or not at all—
Mostly feelings or desires,
Sometimes vague longings.
No one knows where I am
Except the one toward whom
The longings are directed.
After an hour I fold my cardboard
And find my way out of the yard.
Later, when I am in church,
I pray when others pray
But not with them
Or with their words.
Published in The Penwood Review, Fall, 2007
Singing at an Anti-KKK Rally
In the mid-1990s I went to an anti-Ku Klux Klan demonstration in Rockford, Illinois. I went partly out of curiosity and partly to express opposition to the racist views of the Klan.
I arrived at the scene of the rally in time to join a group of demonstrators marching around the streets of Rockford. Just before the Klan was to speak, I passed through the metal detectors that police had set up at the entrance to the area in which anti-Klan demonstrators were allowed. This area was about two hundred feet from the steps of the Rockford courthouse, where the Klan was going to appear.
The anti-Klan area was solidly barricaded, and in front of the barricade was a line of forty or fifty stiffly standing police officers, fully equipped with helmets and anti-riot gear. I approached the line and gazed wonderingly into the eyes of one the officers. He remained staring vacantly ahead.
The anti-Klan area soon became filled with a couple of hundred protesters plus roving police with thick wood sticks and large, plastic pepper sprayers. The crowd was noisy. Though the Klan had not arrived, the protesters were swaying and shouting, often with obscenities. The hate exuding from them was palpable. Prior to entering the protest area, I had seen a man walking around with a loudspeaker saying, “Crush their bones. Spill their blood.” The protesters, it occurred to me, needed as much protesting as did the Klan.
When the Klan members arrived, the crowd’s shouting increased dramatically. Someone near me threw a sock, and the police moved vigorously to arrest him along with a few others. I moved away a bit, and later moved away even further so I could hear what the Klan speakers were saying.
They spoke from the middle of the Courthouse stairs, in front of a row of eight to ten fellow Klan members, and between a U.S. flag and a Christian flag, without their customary white hoods. They included both women and men.
One of the speakers appealed to the Bible to support his points. Another gave the Klan salute several times with raised right arm and clenched fist: “White power! White power! White power!” He ended his speech with a prayer.
I returned to the swaying crowd. It was then that I happened upon a group of five or six singers. They were arranged in a circle and were singing “We Shall Overcome,” one of the prominent protest songs during the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s. I joined them, but they stopped singing and disbanded after only another half minute. Our voices could not be heard more than several feet away, so loud was the yelling of the surging crowd.
I resolved to form a band of singers at the next anti-Klan rally I could attend. That opportunity came when the Klan came to nearby Skokie, Illinois. I found the verses to “We Shall Overcome” in a hymnal, copied them out, and duplicated them on quarter sheets of paper. I also copied the words to “Peace Is Flowing Like a River” and duplicated them as well. Then I asked a few people to come with me. None could, so I went alone.
The scene was the same in Skokie as it was in Rockford. Angry demonstrators milled about, chanting and yelling. The police had again set up an area requiring people to pass through metal detectors, but most of the demonstrators chose to stay outside that area. I went in. I asked a few people if they wanted to sing. They showed no interest. I asked someone who was carrying a sign that said, “God loves everyone.” He wanted to. So we sang, he holding his sign and me standing beside him.
I waved people over to us as we sang. Another one joined us and a third got close but did not sing. Someone with a tape recorder recorded us. Everyone else, though, ignored us. The noise of the crowd drowned out our singing. We probably could not be heard for more than four or five feet from us because the angry chanting of the busloads of protesters was so loud.
Many of the onlookers were from political groups. Some, perhaps, were Klan sympathizers, but they certainly could not have let on that they were without risking injury. The evening news reported that one such person was badly hurt. Overall about half a dozen or so protesters were arrested.
I had to leave before the Klan was scheduled to arrive to go to a wedding. As I walked the mile to my car, I wondered what good it did to sing in a violent crowd if no one could hear.
It occurred to me that if the busloads of angry protestors were matched by busloads of quiet singers, the singers could surround the shouters, then move to the Klan speaking area and sing to the Klan. That, it seemed to me, would have a greater prospect of changing Klan people than enraged clamor. And it would show those who watched the evening news that hate can be resisted with love. In addition, it seemed right to do even if it would not have had any evident effect.
Five Hundred Geese, One Deer, and a Dog
I was out riding my bicycle on a dead-end road one sunny Sunday afternoon when I heard geese honking on the other side of the tall bushes next to the road on which I was riding. I stopped at a break in the bushes, went through it to the large field on the other side of the bushes, and was astonished to see two or three hundred geese in that field, maybe even four hundred, honking and milling about.
That astonishment turned into yet more astonishment when a group of ten or fifteen geese arrived and landed in the field. Then another group. And another.
Those groups started out as small dark spots in a distant, blue sky. The spots became larger and larger and finally became full-fledged groups. The total number on the field also grew larger and larger.
I don’t remember how many groups of geese landed as I stood there holding my bicycle—perhaps it was a dozen or so—but I do know that I was absolutely transfixed by that spectacular event.
___________________________
I had stopped at the Appalachian Trail in eastern Pennsylvania on my way to see our daughter in New York City. After I camped for the night, I hiked a few miles on the trail. At one point, I rounded a bend and there, not more than fifteen feet from me, stood a deer staring at me. I was surprised that it had not run into the trees on either side of the trail and amazed that it was so very close to me.
I instantly froze and gazed into its eyes. It gazed back into mine, perfectly motionless. That lasted a full minute, maybe two or three, which is a long time to remain completely motionless and also an extremely long time to be gazing into an animal's eyes. Neither of us averted our gazes during that time.
I finally decided I wanted to get moving, so I moved one of my hands a little and the deer bounded off. I continued walking, feeling as though I had made intimate contact with a wild animal.
___________________________
I was out walking on a street without sidewalks near our home in Deerfield, Illinois, when an unleashed dog ran into the street and began viciously barking at me. That dog was not going to let me go around it. It might even attack me, so ferociously and savagely it was barking.
I locked eyes with the dog. It stared back at me and continued with its hostile and aggressive barking. We continued staring at each other for what seemed like minutes and minutes.
Then I remembered reading someplace that gazing into an animal’s eyes makes it think you are being aggressive. So if you ever encountered a bear or a mountain lion while out walking in mountain forests, you shouldn’t gaze into its eyes.
I averted my eyes, just enough so that I could still see the dog in the hazy, peripheral part of my vision. It instantly stopped barking, lowered its angry, uplifted tail, got a look of submission on its face, and whimpered.
I walked past it on the other side of the street.
A Physically Challenged Squirrel
Linda and I liked to watch the squirrels in the backyard out our kitchen window. One day a squirrel arrived that could not scamper along in a straight line. It angled this way and that to get to its destination—only a little, to be sure—but enough to be noticeable. And its body was angled ten to fifteen percent to the left. It was also smaller than the other squirrels and could not hop as fast as they did. It sometimes fell over while eating, though it instantly righted itself. We named it “Buffy.”
“Buffy’s out back,” one of us would call, and the other would come running. Or “Buffy’s trying to climb the pole to the bird feeder.” And, “I just saw Buffy fall out of a tree.”
The latter two were significant. Buffy could not eat the sunflower seeds up in the bird feeder, but had to eat the ones that had fallen to the ground beneath it. And she could be injured if she did not land on her feet when falling out of tree or if she fell from a top branch.
Buffy was clearly impaired, beset with some neurological impediment.
It is, of course, impossible to tell whether any particular squirrel does not return to one’s backyard. Not so with Buffy.
Barely a month or so later, Buffy did not return.
Buffy
Her tail was like those of other squirrels,
her paws and fur, too,
but she could not sit up straight,
and she ran crooked.
Several times she fell over
while sitting and eating.
Once she fell off a tree branch
and landed on her back.
We called her “Buffy”
(“Buffy came by today”),
wondering what strange malady
had afflicted her
and wanting to rock her in our arms.
Doing a Sledding Train
Somehow I had come into possession of a couple of sleds. They were left, I think, in the woodshed out back when we moved into our Deerfield house in the early 1980s. They were four feet long, thick, plastic tubs, about eighteen inches wide, and five inches deep. One was red, the other blue. You could sit in them easily with your legs bent up.
Those two tubs spent several decades unused until one day four or five years ago when I decided to carry one to nearby Northside Park in Wheaton. The sledding hill there looked terrifyingly big. The sledders were shooting down the hill at breakneck speed.
I had passed a tiny hill, no more than three or four feet high and fifteen feet long. But I was embarrassed to sled down that. A seventy-five year old man going down a hill meant for four-year olds? So I walked half way up the big hill, maneuvered the sled to face downhill, straddled it, plopped into it, then took off.
The ride was exhilarating. It was not too fast. I did not lose control of the sled.
I climbed the hill and pushed myself slowly over the crest of the hill. The ride near the bottom was, indeed, terrifyingly fast. But I did it nine more times. I learned that I could slow myself down a little by placing my large, mitten-covered hands onto the snow on each side of the sled.
I also learned that I could steer right by placing my right-mittened hand onto the snow on the right side of the sled and could steer left by placing my left-mittened hand onto the snow on the left side of the sled—a little if I pressed lightly and a lot if I pressed harder. That was important to know, as sometimes sledders who had just gone down the hill walked right into the oncoming paths of new sledders.
Plus, I didn’t want to smash into the wood fence that separated the sledding hill from tall weeds beyond the hill.
One of the those nine rides was done in a train. A ten or eleven-year-old boy asked me, as I was about to head down, “Do you want to do a train?” I asked, “What’s a train?” He said, ‘We hold onto each other in a line.” I said, “Yes!”
I sat in my sled. The boy sat in his sled right in front of me, reaching back to grab the front edge of my sled, and his friend did the same in front of him. The friend pushed off. That ride, too, was exhilarating.
That was the only time I have ever done a sledding train. But I would do it again in a heartbeat.
Close Encounter with a Wayward Tree
I spent Monday and Tuesday, May 13 and 14, 2024, camping at Starved Rock State Park in northern Illinois. During the day on Monday and Tuesday, I hiked on the trails there, visited canyons, gazed at the Illinois River, and thought about how I wanted to live.
Then a tree fell onto my tent when I was in it. I wrote the following account as a text message to a bunch of friends an hour or so after it happened. I have added a few details.
On Wednesday morning at a quarter to six, I am thinking of getting up. I hear a loud crack. Another one. I am lying on my left side and I instinctively cover my head with my right arm.
The tree falls onto my tent. I am pinned in the tent from the waist down.
I cannot reach the zipper and could not get out even if I could.
I reach for my whistle, which I carry on my key chain, and whistle SOS a bunch of times. I yell “Help!” Repeat the sequence.
The neighbors in a camper-trailer across the roadway do not hear the whistle because the birds are chirping, but they do hear me yell.
They come out in their pajamas and get enough branches off the tent for me to get out.
The whole tree had fallen, broken at its base. I go look at the base. The inside of the tree is rotted out, almost empty.
An ambulance comes. I wave my arms and do a jig to show that I am unhurt.
One side of the rainfly on my tent is ripped to shreds. The driver side door handle on my car is broken.
I meet a lot of nice people. Then I eat breakfast at the picnic table at the campsite. Later I walk along the Illinois River.
Despite this unexpected event, it was a good day.
Looking for Trees to Climb While Out Walking
When I was a child, there were two trees out behind our backyard. One was mine, and the other was my next younger brother’s. That meant that we couldn’t climb the other person’s tree unless we asked permission to do so.
I once asked my brother whether I could climb his tree. He said, “Yes,” in a lackadaisical way, as if he didn’t much care one way or the other. So I did.
His tree was not nearly as good as mine. My tree was taller, and you could climb it to three-quarters of the way up, where you could make it sway a bit. There was a fork there in which you could get yourself comfortable and stay for a while.
I did that from time to time, not telling anyone that I was doing so. Lots of different thoughts came to me. Now and then I saw someone walking along a sidewalk a block away. I marveled at the fact that I could see them but that they could not see me and had no idea that I was watching them. To my grade school mind, that was fascinating.
I stopped climbing the tree in high school. I didn’t climb any trees during college or graduate school, nor during the fourteen years Linda and I lived in Rochester, New York.
Then, several years after moving to Deerfield, Illinois, in 1982, where I taught at Trinity College, I noticed that the tree near the street in the corner of the front yard was climbable.
Up I went. I was forty-three, maybe a little older.
I spent time there alone—my secret place—just as I had when I was a child. I watched, hidden in the leaves, as people walked below me. They did not know I was almost directly above them.
Some years later, the city lopped off the bottom branch so that it would not hang out into the street. I had to use a wood ladder to get into the tree. It was heavy, and I didn’t much like carrying it from the shed in the backyard to the tree. So I nailed little wood steps onto a two-by-four and kept it in front of the house, where I could easily get it and carry it to the tree.
Some years later still, a big red X appeared on the tree. That meant that the city was going to lop off the next branch up because it was hanging out over the street. I could tell that if it grew much more, trucks would hit it as they rounded the corner. So the city had a legitimate reason for removing that limb. But I was dismayed. I would not be able to get into the tree with just my five-foot two-by-four.
I got out my long tree branch cutter and cut back the parts of the branch that hung over the street—way back, in fact, enough so that no truck would hit the branch for years. Then I scrubbed out the X. The city never cut down that branch. I could still climb the tree easily enough.
One Sunday afternoon, I had a class reunion at the house. Josh said, “Can we climb the tree?” After asking another time or two, I said, “Okay.” I got the ladder out of the backyard shed, as using it would be safer than climbing up the narrow two-by-four.
There were eleven of us up in that tree, all at once, at various branches. That is a record, and it is a definite indicator of how good a tree it was to climb.
One day Kendra stopped by my office and said that she wanted to talk about death, but not in the office. So I said, “How about in the tree in our front yard?” The next Saturday afternoon she and I stayed in the tree for nearly an hour.
When Linda and I moved to Wheaton, Illinois, in 2017, I no longer had my tree to climb. And I have rarely seen one in Wheaton that could be climbed. When I have, it is usually in someone’s front yard, but I haven’t worked up the courage yet to knock on their front door.
Once recently, I saw a climbable tree beside a parking lot at a nearby forest preserve. It was a tall evergreen with lots of branches, some near the ground. Up I went, close to twenty feet.
I am still looking for good trees to climb, even at eighty, partly because I still like to climb trees and partly because doing so is a way of bonding with my childhood.
Writing Books
Writing books and articles has been a major part of my life. I have spent thousands and thousands of hours, first with a pen and clipboard, then with a typewriter, and last at a computer, working on sentences and paragraphs, which I have strung into articles and books.
I am guessing that very few people I typically come into contact with, even in academic contexts, think of me as a writer. But that is a significant part of who I conceive myself to be. Here are some tidbits about a writing life.
• In the early 1970s I was proctoring a final exam at the end of a fall semester when the idea occurred to me that I could write a dialogue on free will and determinism that involved three people, not just the two that dialogues typically contain. One would be a free will advocate, one would be a determinist, and one would be a compatibilist. Each person would speak for themselves, unlike Plato’s dialogues, in which one person, such as Socrates, spoke for themselves and the other was simply a yes-person.
I couldn’t wait to get started, which I did as soon as I had graded my final exams. Over Christmas break, I sat at a typewriter and wrote out a draft of a section for Free Will and Determinism: A Dialogue. Then over the next several years, I did the rest of the book. I still remember the afternoon I was trying to get one of the paragraphs just right—the handwritten page was a mess of crossed out words. I finally succeeded after some agonizing hours. That night I typed out the mess so that it would have a clean look. The book was published in 1980 by Hackett Publishing Company. It gets used in philosophy courses around the country and has sold over fifty thousand copies. It is still in print.
• Once I was at a philosophy conference at the University of Notre Dame, and while a bunch of us philosophers and students were standing around between sessions, I spotted a student holding that little book, with his thumb marking his place in it. I thought of telling him that I was the author, but I was too shy to do so.
• At a philosophy conference one year, I ran into Louis Pojman, who had edited a textbook I was using for Introduction to Philosophy. (All of us attendees had clearly visible name tags.) He exclaimed, “Oh! I’ve been wanting to meet you. I love your book on free will and determinism. I use it in all my Introduction to Philosophy classes.” I smiled and said, “I love your introductory textbook, which I use in all of my Introduction courses.” He smiled back.
• I follow Leo Tolstoy’s three rules for good writing: 1. Revise. 2. Revise. 3. Revise. If you look at a facsimile of one of the handwritten pages for one of his major novels, you will see that it is littered with crossouts and arrows to inserted text in the margins. The page is nearly unreadable because it is so untidy. That’s what one of the world’s great writers has to do to produce high-level writing.
When I do a book, I typically double or triple the three rules. First, a computer draft: edit that two or three times in the computer; print it out and go over each line with my finger moving slowly across the page; put the changes into the computer; go over the manuscript in the computer a time or two; print it out again and put the changes into the computer again; then go over it two more times in the computer, fairly fast each time. A total of eight or nine times.
Many of the changes are cutting words, phrases, and sentences so as to make the writing more concise and flow more easily. Sometimes it hurts to have to take out a sentence or paragraph I initially liked a great deal.
• The biggest cut I had to make was with the thirty-five pages I first wrote for Existential Reasons for Belief in God (Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2011). I had written those pages during a summer in the mid 2000s. For some reason I wasn’t able to do anything more on the book during the following school year.
When I got back to it the following summer, I decided that I had to throw out those thirty-five pages. That stung. But they just didn’t work. I then came up with a new organization, used a few of the pages from those discarded pages, and went sailing through the book with the new organization.
Well, not exactly sailing. But moving along at a steady, though slow, pace. I did the last forty or fifty pages during a sabbatical during the spring 2008 semester, two months of which were spent in Oxford, England, where I sat each weekday morning at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University.
I finished the first draft of the book several days before Linda and I had to return to the U.S., and I treated myself to three days of walking on trails in southwestern England. I stayed in centuries-old bed and breakfasts.
• That book was “assigned” to me by someone I met at a Jesus People Cornerstone Music Festival at Bushnell, Illinois, in 2004. I had given talks on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and Rod, who was finishing a Ph.D. in English literature at Indiana University, was in the audience.
After the talk, Rod wanted to talk. I went back to the speakers’ trailer, got my lunch, and went with him to his camper. We sat on lawn chairs while we ate lunch.
Rod explained why evidential apologetics—arguments for the truth of Christianity—no longer appealed to him. He wanted some writer to explore need-based reasons for believing in Christianity. He thought I should do it.
I can’t remember whether I told him I would—writing a book is a big project—but at some point after I talked with him I decided to look into it. And then I wrote those fated thirty-five pages.
• In November, 2016, two editors of a series of books published by Cambridge University Press in Cambridge, England, wrote to invite me to write a book titled Religion and the Meaning of Life. It would be part of a series they were editing.
My first reaction was, “I am about to turn seventy-three. Do I want to do another book?”
My second reaction was, “Wow!!!!” I had long regarded Cambridge University Press as a world-class publisher. And here they had asked me to do a book for them.
I wrote back to say that I would see whether I could get up an outline of the book over Christmas break. The two editors had said that the book could go in any direction I chose. But I had no idea what would go into the book. I didn’t know whether I could get up that outline.
After final exams, I started thinking. My first thought was that if the book was about the meaning of life, then there had to be a chapter on different conceptions of meaning. And because I had recently taught a course titled, “Death and the Meaning of Life,” my next thought was that there could be a chapter on death. The course also had a class period on boredom. So that was another chapter.
In addition, the course’s readings included Leo Tolstoy’s short novel, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. That meant there could be a chapter on how we should live so as to die well, which would include describing what prevented Ivan Ilyich from dying well. That came to four chapters.
Then there could be a chapter on the difference believing in God would make to acquiring meaning, plus one on the difference believing in life beyond the grave would make—two more chapters.
It occurred to me that maybe I could include something on obstacles that prevented us from acquiring meaningful lives, and something on suicide, since I had recently done an interview book about people who had attempted suicide. (Choosing to Live: Stories of Those Who Stepped Away from Suicide [Charles C Thomas Publisher, 2017])
So there I had it—eight chapters along with an introductory chapter, enough for a book.
I wrote out ideas for each chapter and sent a proposal to the two editors. They sent it to the publisher with their strong recommendation, they said. The publisher farmed it out to two anonymous reviewers, who responded with some thoughts. I reworked the proposal a little and sent it back to the publisher, mentioning that the main theme of the book was existentialist. A week later, the publisher emailed me a contract with “An Existential Approach” as a subtitle for the book. I thought, “Someone there is on the ball.”
That’s what you do when you have no idea what to say in a book you have been asked to write. You sit down and figure it out.
Oh, by the way, that book earned me the designation “supernaturalistic analytic existentialist,” which I gladly embraced. (Look it up!)
Sixty-Four-and-a-Half Years Later
Nancy and I were smitten with each other in high school. It lasted only a month and a half, though, as my family moved to southern Indiana from northern Illinois.
We wrote a few letters to each other until halfway through college when she wrote, to say that she was engaged and was planning to get married after finishing college.
Forty years later I learned from a high school alumni newsletter that she was a widow. Twenty years after that, half a year after Linda had died, Nancy’s name popped into my head. I wrote to her after sleuthing online for her address. She wrote back. We started emailing.
Four months later, in May of 2023, I decided to go on a camping trip for a couple of days at Starved Rock State Park in north central Illinois. Nancy lived on the way. “Could I stop by?” I asked.
She said yes, and a couple of weeks later I knocked on her door, sixty-four-and-a-half years after we had last seen each other.
Since that day, we have continued emailing, sometimes texting, and occasionally talking on the phone.
An Introvert Goes Barn Dancing
I am an introvert, an extreme one, I think. I scored at the far end of the introvert scale on a short temperament sorter in the back of Please Understand Me II by David Keirsey. And I have all the eight marks of being an introvert listed online at “8 Signs You Might Be an Introvert” by Kendra Cherry.
Being around lots of people drains my energy, I like solitude, too much stimulation leaves me distracted, and I like jobs that involve independence—four of the eight signs.
How can introverts be married? Just fine to another introvert, which Linda was too.
What about being a college professor? That is the perfect occupation for an introvert. There is lots of solitude and independence. You can spend plenty of time alone in your office and in libraries. You have a great deal of independence in creating and teaching courses and in doing research.
Can introverts handle barn dancing? That’s iffy. Barn dancing involves a high level of stimulation around numerous people. That means that there are limits to the amount an introvert can do. And yet I love it.
I love the two or three hours of nearly nonstop physical activity. I love it when other dancers smile and make eye contact. I love the lively Irish and Scottish music, which is often live. I love being with strangers who are wonderfully welcoming. I love that after a while some are no longer strangers and that I know them by their first names.
The promotions for barn dances often say, “No partner needed.” That means that you don’t have to go with a partner. However, nearly all the dances at a barn dance require one. And that means you go up to a stranger and say something like, “Can I be your partner?” with a bright smile on your face. Or they come up to you with a bright smile.
You don’t do all of your moves with your partner. You do lots with your “neighbors” and others whom the dance sequences bring your way.
Partners can swing in three ways. They can circle around joined by the crooks of their elbows; they can circle around holding each others’ hands, facing each other; or they can circle around in a dance position, the position you would use for a waltz. Sometimes you don’t know ahead of time which the other person prefers. But it is quickly resolved.
People at a dance are no longer “Ladies” and “Gents,” but typically “Larks” and “Robins,” the Larks on the left and the Robins on the right. I am always a Lark—I don’t know whether I could do the Robin moves.
It is a tradition that at the end of a barn dance, a waltz is played, which was a nice surprise to me. I had never done a waltz. But I learned the rhythm—one, two, three, one, two three. Then I learned that you and your partner could be artistic by creating a variety of moves instead of simply moving around in a dance position.
So we introverts can like barn dancing just as much as extroverts. Maybe, even, we have a little extroversion in us.
The first barn dance I ever went to was at a dulcimer festival in Morris, Illinois, in June of 2023. I have been going to barn dances and English country dances ever since.
On Turning Eighty a Month and a Half Ago
Turning forty was traumatic because it hit me hard that I would die someday. Turning sixty-five was traumatic because I felt social pressure to stop working and simply wait to die, and I didn’t want to do either one. Turning eighty, however, was “more of the same.”
I want to keep on listening to people at coffee shops, during video calls, on the telephone, and everywhere else. I want to keep on loving all whom I encounter, gazing into their eyes with welcoming kindness. I want to keep on being grateful for all whom I have known, including Linda for nearly fifty-seven years of marriage until she died in August of 2022. I want to keep on walking fifty miles a month, at least, some of them through forests and past meadows. And I want to keep on going to barn dances.
It would be nice if I could hike to the very top rock of another Colorado mountain or to the bottom of the Grand Canyon again, but I wouldn’t be too disappointed if I didn’t. It would also be cool to go bubbling again at Clark Street and Belmont Avenue in Chicago with a group of like-minded bubblers.
In the end, the very end, I want to be able to let go of all these wonderful things, while continuing to savor having done them, and start on something new and marvelous.
Written January 21, 2024
Walking 800 Miles While 80 Years Old
I started walking in earnest after Linda died in August of 2022, because I had read that walking was good grief therapy. I discovered that it was.
Later, I started counting the miles I walked, and on June 30, 2024, learned that I had done an even four hundred since January 1 of that year. On July 7, 2024, seven months after I turned eighty on December 7, 2023, I learned that I was headed toward more than eight hundred miles for my birthday year. That’s when I decided to aim for eight hundred miles both for the 2024 calendar year and for my birthday year from December 7, 2023, to December, 2024.
In warm months when it was too hot to walk in the afternoon, I walked two or three miles first thing in the morning, before breakfast. Sometimes during those warm months, it was a bit cooler on weekends so that I could do longer hikes in nearby forest preserves—six, seven, or eight miles—or over to and around Lake Ellyn in nearby Glen Ellyn, a walk of 4.35 miles.
I don’t have a watch that measures miles, so I remember the route I have taken and measure its distance on Google Maps on my computer as soon as I get back home: left on Wakeman Avenue, south on Santa Rosa to Wheaton College’s campus, through the campus to the prairie path on the other side of the railroad tracks, over to Main Street, then north on Main Street, where I zig zag back to Wakeman Avenue, a distance of 3.03 miles.
Google Maps measures miles to the hundredth of a mile—52.8 feet—so I write down the distance to the hundredth of a mile on the kitchen calendar, then add up the running total of miles each Sunday. At the end of the month, I write the distance for the month on the calendar and draw a box around it.
I do not use my cell phone for internet access, nor do I take it with me when I walk. I suppose that means that if I were to trip on a misaligned sidewalk square and break a wrist when I fell, I would have to lie there until someone came along.
I do, however, take the phone with me when I walk in forest preserves so that I can call someone as I walk past a marsh or through a canopy of trees.
Sometimes people who have come to Wheaton from other states walk with me: Kate from Texas, Liz from Oregon, Kendall from Maryland, and Jonathan, who hitchhiked from California. (He had also hitchhiked throughout Europe for fourteen months.)
Kate from northern Illinois hiked the longest distance with me—8.9 miles at Poplar Creek Forest Preserve. Kendall is second with 7.1 miles along the Illinois Prairie Path, and Denny is third with 6.8 miles in Palos Forest Preserve.
Why walk so many miles? It is still grief therapy. It gets me out of an empty and lonely house. It is part of my regimen to live to ninety. (I won’t be too disappointed if I don’t make it, but will be wildly delighted if I do.) Plus, I identify with the Count on Sesame Street, who mailed himself letters so that he could count them.
P.S. I hit eight hundred miles during my birthday year on October 19, 2024, and for the calendar year on November 8, 2024.
© 2024 by Cliff Williams