On Walking the Same Streets

Some men collect cities. I have walked four neighborhoods in my life often enough to call them mine, and I have done it on purpose. There is a particular street near my flat I have walked at least twice a week for eleven years; I could draw you the cracks in the pavement from memory; I could tell you which trees have lost which branches in which storms. The cherry on the corner died two summers ago. The bench across from it was replaced last spring with a metal one that nobody sits on.

I am writing this because people sometimes ask me — politely, the way you ask a man you do not yet understand — whether I get bored, or restless, or whether I have considered seeing more of the world. I have considered it; I have done some of it. I have stood at the edges of cities I will never know well, and I have noticed that the part of me that does the looking does not change much by being moved.

The streets I know are not interesting because they are interesting. They are interesting because I have allowed them to be — and that is a slower, less flattering kind of fact than the one travel sells. A new street demands attention; an old street rewards it. The cherry being gone is only legible if you remember the cherry. The metal bench is only sad if you remember the wood. There is an arithmetic of familiarity that I trust more than I trust novelty: the deeper the page is read, the more the page has to say.

It has also become, over the years, a kind of thinking. I cannot work at a desk for long; I get up, I put on a coat, I walk the long block around the park, and I come back having thought something I could not have thought sitting down. Walking the same streets is the closest I have come to disciplining my mind into producing without being told to — the body moves, the loop is the loop, and the thinking does what it does because nothing in the route is asking anything of it.

There is a man on my route who has been sitting on the same bench since I started walking it. I assume different versions of him have rotated through — surely the bench is not a sinecure — but I have never caught the changeover. He has the same posture, the same paper, the same cigarette in the same hand. He nodded at me, eventually, after maybe three years. He nodded yesterday too. We have not spoken in a decade.

A walk, in my experience, is the size of itself, no more and no less, and I have stopped accepting the framings other people try to lay on it. The streets I have walked are the streets I have walked. Tomorrow I will probably walk them again, and I will probably notice something on the cherry's old corner that I did not notice yesterday, and the metal bench will still be empty, and the man with the paper will be on his bench, and the light at the end of the route will do the thing the light does. Nothing in particular will have happened.

That is the point.