Earth on foot 18
18 September 2025
A lithe squirrel, hesitant, makes his way over red bricks. An acorn fills his tiny mouth. I see him a moment later, far up the pine in the neighbor’s yard. I thought I was alone here, but there’s an awful lot going on around me, come to think of it. Not just in this John Cheever story I’m reading. Loud crickets. Jays. Gnats. Trucks and cars. Mosquitoes. Bicycles. Neighbors talking—on the phone, to each other, to their dogs.
“My Uncle Hamlet – a black mouth old wreck who had starred on the Newburyport Volunteer Fire Department ball team – called me to the side of his deathbed and shouted, ‘I’ve had the best 50 years of this country’s history. You can have the rest.’”
—John Cheever, The World of Apples. A book I snagged from a Little Free Library on a walk. I read one story a day from it. Some amazing lines in it.
Two teens on scooters ride down our street. One, with bright red hair blowing, sounds a constant tone that wobbles hilariously as he goes over the bumps and lumps of Baltimore’s asphalt. Next, I hear the rhythmic padding of a runner’s sneakers—puts me in mind of my run from earlier today—then the squealing brakes of a delivery truck. No quiet electric truck, this.
On today’s run up and back through the campuses of Loyola and Notre Dame (amid surprising heat and sun), a tree branch fell not one foot from me. A very near miss! On my return, I took the opposite side of the street.
As I made my way north, a white-haired, thin man who looked a lot like David Byrne smiled as we passed on the path; he smiled again when I returned later southward. I guess my run was as long as a college class.
