Brother, Do You Have Five Dollars?
I like, at least once a month and, when possible, more often, to get up early on a Saturday, load my camino pack with some clothes and a few books, and take a walk around the city. I’ve done this, off and on, for half a decade now; it started as a substitute for being denied a pilgrimage to Santiago, Spain, on account of Covid. I have found it interesting in itself.
Sometimes you walk between places you’ve walked to before, on different occasions. If there were a map with all my walks on it, this would connect familiar dots in an unfamiliar way. Recently I came around the corner of a semi-abandoned strip mall and found I was at one end of a pedestrian bridge. I’d seen the bridge a hundred times as a driver; I think I remember it being constructed. Now, for the first time, I was at it on foot.
I picked up the trail at the end of the bridge and, after it crossed a creek, found it went down to the dirt on a trail that I last walked maybe three years ago. (People complain about the difficulty of maintaining memories as they age. The silver lining is that life is full of interesting puzzles. When was I here last? Where did I come from?) I remembered coming up from the lake on a trail through lovely grassland surrounded by trees, an often rather swampy area not developed as a public park. One could hear the noise of traffic nearby, but traffic, roads, electric wires, buildings—all the signs of human civilization apart from the trail itself—they were out of sight. Then the trail would turn, and suddenly in view was an elevated ribbon of concrete for the light rail. The suddenness of the view suggested a science fiction image of walking on a strange planet: first nature, then advanced engineering laid on top of it.
That was the trail behind, the trail that, on this recent walk, I had not taken. But now I was at a branch off it that traced the edge of the creek. I had walked this before. The creek was down in its bed, but above it on both sides was a lot of detritus, particularly plastic bags stuck on bushes and branches. Recently we had a lot of rain, and we had it fast: suspended trash was evidence left behind.
I continued on. I was alone, as far as I could tell; no runners or bicyclists passed me; no walkers were coming from the other direction. Then I turned a bend and saw a group of men, sitting beside the trail. This would a good place to sleep rough, and they looked like they might. Momentarily a rare thought came to mind: this might not be a safe place to walk alone.
They all looked up at me. I had my trained New-York-subway-stare-into-the-distance, when I turned my head to say howdy. One of them asked, “Brother, do you have five dollars?” I shook my head, and he told me to have a good time.
I thought, I am having a good time walking. And I thought, If I had to sleep rough, it would be good to have some other guys with me.
All the paths of the city are amazingly intertwined.
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Out & About: I am to preach at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas on Sunday, February 16, at the 9 and 11:15 a.m. Eucharists.
The next Good Books & Good Talk seminar is on Sunday, February 23, at 5 p.m. also at St. Matthew’s. We’ll be discussing Bessie Head’s novel, When Rain Clouds Gather—I hope you read it and, if possible, come to join the discussion. Bessie Head wrote from, and of, Botswana, following her exile from apartheid-era South Africa. It is a deeply human, beautifully complex novel.
Readers Write: Once upon a time it was cold here in Dallas and I wrote about the odd ways this city copes with cold. After reading it, a reader told me about being in Dallas for a conference some years ago: “While we were there, an ice storm hit the city and TV was full of video of trucks sliding sideways down overpasses. The airport was closed for so long that the Red Cross had to come in with sandwiches for the stranded travelers. At the meetings, no one talked about anything except whether we were going to be able to escape. In the end, things eased up before the end of the meetings. My flight did take off, although not on time. They lost my luggage.”
It is an odd place to live. But hey, we only have about ten days of winter altogether!