10,000 Steps
My husband of almost forty years has become a step-counter, a serious step-counter, with 10,000 his daily minimum. As I write this, he’s making his way up the Mike Uhtoff trail in the mountainous woods behind our house, logging his first 5,000. The app in his back pocket, when he carries it, keeps track.
Often, I’m a partner. When we visited Yosemite National Park two weeks ago, we spent one drizzly afternoon walking the valley floor, 20,000 virtuous steps in all.
Counting, though, is not the point. It’s the “wellness” motivator that lures us to views of the Rogue Valley on a winter day, to uncurl from the computer and feel sun on our face, to explore a new town without GPS, to hear the wind in the treetops in place of the evening news.
The real walker in our family, though, is our Brooklyn grandson Lucas—an inheritance from his Ethiopian mother, Kidist, for whom walking was a way of life in Addis Ababa. (After nine years working with coffee farmers in East Africa, our son Carl became a walker, too.)
“Do you know that you have extra special superpowers?” I asked Lucas this March as we walked in the rain in Central Park on one of Tony and my frequent cross-country visits.
“I can breathe fire and slay dragons!” he exclaimed.
“No, that’s not what I was thinking of,” I said.
He tried again: “I can rescue people from bad wizards!”
“No, but good try,” I said.
“Here it is: you are a super walker!”
“Really?” he said.
It is true. As soon as Lucas could walk—he was a late walker, I should add—Kidist put his stroller aside in favor of strengthening his legs and his senses.
“He needs to feel the world,” she said.
Back when we lived in Brooklyn, I often picked Lucas up from daycare and accompanied, not “took,” him home. Even if his mother had delivered him by stroller in the morning, he’d have nothing to do with wheels when I appeared. He walked us home.
At first the distance was short, when Lucas attended a small daycare eight blocks away. Intoxicated by upright-ness, Lucas drank in every inch of the home-word journey. He kissed the fire hydrants, talked to the ants, climbed the front stoops, smelled the tulips, gagged at the dog poop, tested how far he could run after breaking from my hand, watched the clouds, sang to passersby. When we arrived home 45 minutes later, I don’t know about his heart, but mine was full.
By the time Lucas was three years old, daycare was two miles away. But his calculus hadn’t changed: an hour’s amble of discovery and conversation trumped a twenty-minute subway ride most days.
Now, however, questions punctuated his steps. “How do the squirrels know how many acorns they’ll need for winter?” “Why do people wear wigs?” “Why do flowering trees grow their flowers first before their leaves?” “Why are some people homeless?”
On Halloween, Lucas insisted on walking home in his Superman/Pirate combo costume. When people saw him, some smiled. “I like making people happy,” he said. When Lucas spied a gentleman wearing traditional Hassidic garb, including a furry hat and side curls, he said: “He’s just like me. He’s wearing a costume.”
In the darkest months of the year, the moon accompanied us much of the way home. One night, Lucas kept track of the positions of the moon relative to our position: first overhead, then to the right, then to the left. “How many moons are there?” he finally asked. When I told him it was the same moon, he didn’t believe me.
When Kidist’s mother died suddenly in November 2016, Kidist took her grief to the sidewalks of Brooklyn, Lucas often in hand. As a child in Addis Ababa and her mother’s favorite, she treasured the Sundays when she and her mother walked across the city and up the hill to a small church, where they bought a snack from a stand outside the church and sat under the branches of a large tree.
Every two weeks, she remembers, her mother took her to the city’s sprawling open-air market, the largest in Africa, and shepherded her through the pungent underground cheese kitchens, the narrow alleys lined with spices, and the stacks of new mattresses and huge cooking pots, all piled high on someone’s head.
In the hospital in Addis, as her heart failed, Kidist’s mom took her hand and said, “I miss walking with you.”
That winter, back in Brooklyn, Kidist sometimes walked for hours, rain or shine, to “feel my mom and the memories.” Lucas joined her. “When you’re sad, you walk” he told me.
Walking has no season, Kidist would say. “I want Lucas to have the same bond with me that I had with my mom.”
As Tony and I walk (or hike) our 10,000 steps, it is the conversations—alternating with silence— that carry us, not the steps. Often, we find ourselves talking about what has shaped us.
For Tony, it might be his arriving by boat from Naples when he was thirteen and never quite shedding the immigrant baggage that made him feel inadequate, or the freedom he felt when he first piloted a small plane over the George Washington Bridge. For me, it might be the day when I was twelve that I learned my parents were divorcing and I would move to California with my mother and her new husband, or the rush I felt dancing to “Twist and Shout” at a beach party in Santa Monica.
Sometimes, it’s humor that lightens our steps. On our first hiking venture in Southern Oregon, we set out on the three-mile trail up Grizzly Peak but the winter snow still covered the path and, though we had boots and poles, we turned back. A young woman dressed in sneakers and a bikini racing outfit ran (uphill) past us. “The beach is that way!” Tony said.
Invariably, we discuss our boys and what about them makes us proud: their intelligence, their thoughtfulness, their determination to make their own path.
And, like Lucas, we fill the air with questions. Where does the stream that flanks the trail near us start? Where do the bears sleep at night? Which is worse: climate change or income inequality? Where does faith live? Will we still be counting our steps ten years from now?