Walking

The younger you are, the more the surrounding landscape influences you.

When I was grown but still young, I lived in Pocatello, where I invented the "four park challenge." I tried to make this a well-known observance among humanity, but only a handful ever knew of it, only a few ever did it, and only I really appreciated its great value. I am being and will be overdramatic about it now, and I was back then, at once self-aware and bemused but dead serious about it. To fulfill the four-park challenge, you must start after dusk at your own doorstep and walk to four different parks before walking home. Simple, but sublime in a quiet town like Pocatello when you're 23 years old and full of romance and loneliness and bemused self-consciousness and studying broadly everything in the world as an undergraduate.

When you get to the second or third park, it is best to lay on your back on the cool grass and feel the breeze and listen to a dog barking or a screen door opening and shutting somewhere. You don't think about the reason; you think about yourself. You imagine yourself as the subject of a coming-of-age novel or an interesting movie. You listen to the trains downtown and the trucks on the interstate on the eastern hill. You watch out for cops a little bit because the sign says you are beyond park hours. You daydream about what would happen if a cop did come to find you laying in the grass under a Juniper tree.

If you are with a girl, you try to make her happy by talking about interesting things. (If I would have ever had the right girl with me, I would have tried to memorize a certain Emerson quote or a Whitman poem. That's the kind of romantic, self-absorbed undergrad I was.) You stretch your arms and legs out, like the valley and the town that you are traveling tonight stretches around you.

I do not now have the luxury of regularly observing the four-park challenge, although Boise would be a fine place for it. When my daughter is old enough to enjoy walking several miles and hours beyond her bedtime, I will teach it to her.

Smiling because

I am occasionally caught smiling while all alone. I guess I'm not the type of person who just walks around smiling all the time. Or if I do, then the smile I'm talking about is a different kind of smile. What are you smiling about? someone asks. I just thought of a joke I should've said a few days ago. A funny one.

The film goes off the reel

I like watching and listening to the film pull off the reel at the end of the movie. It’s the best part of many movies. The entire very end of any movie in a theater is great. Of course it’s great when all the other people leave, and it’s great reading who was responsible for catering and key grip and hairstyling of the lead actor and who was Toronto legal counsel. It’s great reading who wrote some of the songs you recognized. But all of the other pleasures of waiting through the credits are not as pleasurable as the bizarre music and fireworks created when the film spins off the reel.

Sometimes the teenagers running the theater will close the curtain or shut off the projector before the wonderful stripes, numbers, blotches, tears, and scratching sound (cousin of the record needle clearing its throat). I don’t get too upset about this deprivation because I convince myself it adds to thrill—not so different from waiting until the clock runs out to see if your team can score the winning point. As I exit I have this lofty, upholstered room all to myself.