Pinpricks

At one of the professional survival days in grad school, one of the presenters said that when she was feeling depressed about her writing, or the chances of being successful at it, she would visit a bookstore. She said that it made her feel better to see all those books on the walls. I had a moment like that today, when Cora and I went for a walk in the afternoon.

She and I have been suffering through the flu, and I've felt like my head might as well be made of cotton balls, and all the aches and pains have made me feel old and decrepit. So we haven't done much of anything this week, mainly just done circuits through the house playing with the same old stuff: I stack blocks, she knocks them down, we read Home for a Bunny seven times until the robin's singsong voice runs through my head saying "Here, here, here, here in this nest is our home," we dance, and then have a snack, and do it all over again. We took a three-hour nap together today, all cuddled up on our bed while she nursed. It was therapeutic to us both.

Anyway, we finally went for a walk. I bundled C in several layers of fleece (and she miraculously complied; I think she worried any protest might further delay her one tiny adventure for the week). We headed out in the cold, taking a different route than normal, and I pushed the stroller while watching C's arms sticking straight out in her body suit with built-in mittens. It felt so good to get a jolt of fresh air. I started noticing small changes in my neighborhood block: a neighbor's recently installed stairwell looking freshly painted and spiffy, a new art installation on one of my favorite yards, lights aglow on multiple houses. Luckily not too many giant Santas or blow-up reindeer. I used to kind of jeer at the whole holiday decoration thing. I think it's because my parents never got into that stuff, always looked at it as sort of lame and pedantic, like people didn't have anything better to do with themselves than hang lights and put Santa's entire crew on their rooftop. Now I realize that I was just a total scrooge. Even though I can't help thinking about all that energy that could be used for more responsible purposes, all the lights are actually very pretty, seem almost necessary beneath our oatmeal skies and 4 o'clock sunsets. It was fun to point them out to Cora.

I used to love going for walks and staring into people's windows. Not all up in their business or voyeuristic or anything, but just looking from the sidewalk and seeing snapshots of people's lives. We did that this evening, just C and I, and I tried to tell her what I saw, but often forgot. I need to be better about talking to her as we walk. We saw three old ladies playing cards at their dining room table. They all had poufy hair. They were sitting beside a glass cupboard with gold trim and display lights, so all the crystal trappings inside were lit up, sparkly even from the sidewalk. I remembered how my grammy used to play bridge once a week with the ladies. At the park, kids were climbing on the jungle gym, screaming and making a big fuss. One of the kids insisted on throwing gravel on the slide every time his sister tried to slide down, but she always managed to scramble back up. A nanny (I've met her before) pulled her little boy off the suspension bridge and carried him home. Several high-schoolers played soccer in the adjoining field. Down below, a single man threw the frisbee for his black lab. I passed a young girl wearing her iPod and carrying a backpack. She looked tired and depressed. I remembered when I used to work at Amazon and would take the express bus downtown, huddled next to someone I didn't want to talk to, so I'd whip out my iPod and look busy. I imagined this girl was coming home from her first real job, where perhaps she works as an entry-level assistant, spends the day feeling shy and lonely and underpaid, dreaming about the real thing.

As we rounded the final block home, and I started to talk to C about dinner preparations, I remembered that woman who presented at the conference, and her comment about bookstores. I had one of those totally commonplace observations where I was thinking that bookstores and neighborhoods are kind of the same, but it struck me nonetheless. Going to a bookstore is like opening the door to millions of minds, observations or advice or recipes or pieces of history, to scenes of people sitting at their kitchen table or playing in the park. We all want to connect somehow, but sometimes we just want to observe from a small distance, let our observations be selfishly focused on our own impressions, just to feel how stuff is relevant to us. When I used to feel overwhelmed by work or daily goings-on, my husband would remind me to zoom out high above the planet and just look down from that vantage point, see all the pinpricks of humanity like small lights creating energy, and recognize myself as just one of the many. I just had one of those afternoons today where I was energized by the commonplace, where trekking slowly with my kid and a cold was arguably as fulfilling as anything I've done.