Late August 2020
The Frau stumbled upon an old photo of our abode shortly after it was built:
The Frau and
I started working from home in mid-March. I felt very lucky as
neither of us had lost our jobs nor lost any hours as this was my immediate concern. My job doesn't actually
require me to be in the office very often. When I am there, I sit at a desk and
log into other computers remotely to do a lot of my work so remoting in from
home isn't all that different from being in the office. My boss is very
anti-telecommuting but I am hoping that, when the pandemic ends (or ends
enough) I will be able to work from home 3-4 days per week.
Since I was going to be working from home, my daily ritual of walking to the bus stop and spending 8+ hours on the other side of town needed to be replaced. I simply had to make sure I spent some time away from the old homestead. It was part of a larger stratagem on my part, really. There wasn't a formal plan and what scheme there was wasn't particularly grand. And, truth be told, it was something of an extension of an attitude I've had for a while - indulging in some telos.
I found a good example of what I mean in a recent read. The author, who is English, was at an august museum or library in Paris or Copenhagen or some such place and he noted how you can always tell which tourists are American because they will look at an exhibit only briefly before moving onto the next one. We Yanks apparently have a short attention span and little patience for reflection and contemplation.
Perhaps a good way to say it is that I tried to live a little more deliberately. With those basic levels of Maslowian needs seemingly secure, I was free to work on the upper levels. I strove to be more thoughtful in choosing the paths to take - in the Thoreauian sense of direction in life but also in a more mundane way.
Werner Herzog once opined "The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot." I used to walk a lot in college. For a while, work was a little more than a mile from home while most of my classes were a bit farther. At some point I stopped walking. Then several years ago I began once again to go out on leisurely walks of moderate distances. And then a couple years ago I started taking lengthy treks on foot. Not like a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, but a few miles.
Last spring as the weather was getting warmer, I started walking more frequently. On the vernal equinox I took a walk to the Starkweather Conservation Park which is just a few blocks from home.
I'd walked through the western half of the park before and it is mostly wooded. But I had never taken the bicycle/walking path that goes along the park's eastern perimeter up to its northern border.
There were
some mallards because mallards are everywhere here. Our baseball team is named after them. And I spied a few Canada geese as well because they're ubiquitous just like mallards. Shorelines can be overrun with them and their poop in the
summer. A Sandhill crane pair were hanging out by a nearby office building.
(The International Crane Foundation is about 40 miles north of Madison up in Baraboo.)
Also to be
found were the obligatory red-winged blackbirds.
Someone
somewhere somewhen posted a map of the Starkweather Creek area online as it was
in 1892. My neighborhood was largely marsh before becoming farmland and the
park seems to be the last remnant of that.
A couple of years
ago there was an article in our local alt-weekly about Trachte buildings which
are a piece of vernacular Madison architecture. They are known for their steel
walls and barrel roofs. I've noticed them around town since I moved here but
never knew their history until reading the article.
Walking home
on this trek I noticed a couple Trachte sheds and have been taking their
pictures whenever I see them ever since.
It was
really fun to take these walks through most of the spring. Doing so every day,
I was able to see the incremental changes in the flora and in the creek.
Schools of minnows appeared in the concrete stream by the bike path that
carries runoff water and they'd abruptly change course when they saw me
hovering over them.
I think
these walks helped me ease into the abrupt change in my morning schedule that
the pandemic brought.
Just as I
had developed a routine outdoors, routines were also developing indoors…
********
Bonus photo!
I found a picture of the Buffalo ice cream parlor that I went to as a young boy
in Chicago along with an old model Big Green Limousine. Note the "Key
Punch Computer Program School" sign in the window.
2 comments:
Are you following the Trolley Dodger weblog as well?
I may have rode on CTA 9570. Not on route #53 Pulaski, but maybe on routes #74 Fullerton, #54 Cicero, or #77 Belmont, before they were discarded in March 1973.
No, I haven't seen that blog before. Thanks for bringing it to my attention..
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