#11

Eleven is my favorite number. Seven is my second favorite. Then, combinations of the two. It's very rewarding. You see these numbers a lot. My favorite letter is L. When was the last time I watched Sesame Street? I learned about Jim Henson's death from organ dysfunction the age of seven, seven years after the fact. Eleven years later, I turned eighteen, which I remember feeling extremely irrevocable. When the numbers are attached to fictional characters it feels very special, like in Halo and Stranger Things.

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Here's a little stuff about things.

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I.

Walking is something of a point with me. As a child I had some problems with my heart and lungs. One of the only competent doctors I have ever met thought they would be ameliorated and probably eliminated by getting me out of the hammocks, beds, and chairs I favored in my pursuit of quiet, eyes-and-brain-based activities and spend a few afternoons or mornings a week walking up mountains. 

I kind of resented this because I was very into spending all, every second, each available component and section of my free time reading. It's already amazing how much stuff takes time away from reading, so traipsing up and down a mountain didn't seem like a good investment to me. I only ever felt lukewarm about it. But my cardiopulmonary system worked itself out, right as rain.

When I got to middle school--leaving the age of eleven behind--my feelings underwent a transformation deeply colored by a full immersion into the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien. In advance of the Jackson films, which to me and to my best friend looked like the consummation of all human wishes in one glorious triad, I reread The Hobbit and gnawed my way through the rest of his works, cracking every bone I could grab to lick gratefully at the precious marrow. I repeat this process every year, happier than an earthworm in biodynamic compost. To me this is a sublime condition and the truest form of earthly joy.

I got into the habit of taking advantage of excuses to shoulder my backpack meaningfully and start walking the three miles from the school to my house. Only after school to head for home, and only on, say, half-days, or under exceptional weather conditions, at first, as I felt safer riding the bus, which was also faster. I always carried as many books as my backpack would hold, and tried my best to maintain good posture with it always--as dwarves make light of burdens. 

Habit forms itself, sometimes. Almost against my will I would seize opportunities to walk the long way, to refuse rides and instead find out how long it would take to walk home from the movie theater, or the other high school, or the downtown haunts, or the Chinese place where I got my first real taxable job. Before that I was a paperboy, a job which allowed for a good deal of walking, but I lost this gig to a forty-year old dad when the Great Recession started to really pinch.

Walking home from parties, from the arcade, from the park, from the library, from wherever I had walked to or been driven to. During snowstorms, on days when the streets were mottled, inch-thick ice and the icicles hung hung four feet long all along the power lines and snapped great branches from strong trees. Three-inch crust over the three feet of wet packing snow where the blowers don't churn and spit. On days when old folks don't leave their house and the parents only let their kids out for a half hour before they have to come in from a break 'cause the heat's so pure and fierce a dog might go insane and leap at a dumpster so hard it leaves big smears of tacky blood on it. At two forty-five in the morning, full of beer and singing aloud. From a little after sunup to a couple hours after sunset, and barely able to walk at all the next day, using my hands as much as my feet on the stairs. 

I remember this guy I went to school with rolling up in his mom's minivan one evening when I was walking home after wrestling practice. The snow and sleet were falling so thick you had to wipe a crust off your forehead and eyebrows and soaking, crusted eyelids and frozen eyelashes and the feet slid in long runnels of gray puddly slush and gave back ground on slick patches of stubborn freeze under the liquefaction. He rolled up and offered me shelter in his warm dry van and I told him, through a face gone numb and clumsy with chilled blood, no, I'm good, you're good, I'm almost home. I remember the look on his face as he nodded a little, his mouth a little open, a tiny little frown. He didn't look away from me as he pulled off, his eyes not hurt, not confused exactly, but uncomprehending, not processing. And over time I have found that people do not actually believe me, and think that I am lying, when I say how much I prefer to walk, when I describe how much I walk, under what conditions.

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Tomorrow, more on this subject, which shall settle it for a long time coming.


--JL