Three Long Walks (HOL 34)

House of Laughter 34

It was a little spooky when I took Isaac to daycare Thursday. Another little boy in his class has started wearing a helmet, too. I walked in with Isaac in his carrier, and there in the foam pit was another small blond baby wearing overalls and a helmet. I know this sounds incredibly stupid, but I actually looked down into the carrier to make sure Isaac was still in it. Just in case we drove past David Copperfield on the way to Little Mouse.

We have been on a walking kick at our house. I decided to start walking more because my buddy “Little Matt” is hiking the Appalachian Trail this month. I also thought about the time I visited Don in New York and Alex in D.C., and how in both cities I walked all over the place and was amazed by all the details I would have missed from the passenger seat of a car.

Nancy, Isaac, and I walk quite a bit at Country Park and Battleground Park, and we always enjoy it, but I wanted to actually be going somewhere, not just walking in a large loop.

For a while, I’ve wanted to follow a set of abandoned railroad tracks near my house. They go behind several businesses including my favorite book store, “Edward McKay” On Tuesday after work, I loaded Isaac into my backpack and we started walking. We stopped and visited a friend who was working on her house. We saw some Mexican guys hanging out and talking after their shift at Loomcraft textiles. I saw two homeless people sleeping under a bridge not a mile from our house. We saw a familiar stretch of Battleground Avenue from a new perspective.

After we checked out Ed McKay’s new store, we went and bought a couple of slices of pizza and a pitcher of beer at Elizabeth’s Pizza. Isaac is now old enough that he can eat almost anything you put in front of him as long as you chew it first and spit it into his mouth. He enjoyed eating cheerios from our stash, and the occasional black olive from my pizza.

It was a really great night.

My second long walk wasn’t voluntary. On my way out the door to work this morning, I noticed something was missing. Isaac’s car seat. Nancy had left it in her car the night before. I called her cell phone at work. She was proctoring a test, and couldn’t talk, but when I asked her where the car seat was, she panicked. At this point, I realized I had three options. 1) Be a complete ass and make Nancy come home from work and bring me the seat. 2) Put Isaac on the floor of the truck and drive to school hoping I didn’t get in a wreck, didn’t get a ticket, wasn’t seen by any of the staff or other parents at the day care who would automatically brand me as the worst parent since Brittany Spears. 3) Bite the bullet, call work tell them I would be late, and walk the little nipper to daycare.

The third choice is what Jesus would have done, so that is what I went with.

20 minutes later, I dropped the boy off at school, and had a brilliant idea: “I’ll ask one of the other parents for a ride home!”. This works in theory, but in reality, how many of you would give a ride to a sweaty, out of breath, fat guy, with some rambling incoherent story about his wife taking the car seat? I ended up walking back home.

My third long walk was this evening. Nancy, Isaac and I joined a swimming pool for the summer, and we wanted to see if we could walk to it. We made the trek, found the pool, and on the way back, an S.U.V. stops near us and a guy I’ve never met before yells out the window at me “Blogger! Hey you blog don’t you?”.

Nancy and I were completely taken aback. Isaac was cool. The fellow was named “Rock”, and he runs the Greensboro 101 website. He had seen my blog and recognized the little monkey with the blue helmet on my back. His girlfriend was riding with him and we talked for a while. They were very cool people.

As the three of us walked home, I felt pretty damn cool. Isaac on the other hand, well he is used to being famous.

Strength and Honor

Big Matt