Walks with Books

If I fall off a curb, it’s my boss’s fault.

A new time-keeping system recently introduced at my workplace requires those of us who punch in for a living to punch out for lunch.

After several years of merrily sidestepping breaks to pack more accomplishment into my day, I initially grumped about being ousted from the office for an hour.

It’s growing on me, though.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been taking to the streets, book in hand, for an almost-daily midday stroll.

Peripheral vision has saved me from several collisions with passing pedestrians as I reclaimed a favorite pastime of my youth and wandered downtown Alpena neighborhoods, directionless, with my nose buried in a book.

For a delightful 45 minutes at a shot, I stroll along sidewalks, delighting in the acidic wit of Jane Austin or fighting epic battles alongside the old man and the sea.

My current read, John Green’s achingly beautiful “The Anthropocene Reviewed”, almost got me run over the other day when I stopped in my tracks in the middle of an intersection to laugh and weep at the same time.

Other books await their turn for a walkabout: a heartbreaking Jonathan Safran Foer young adult novel I need to read again, a Neil Simon play, Bill Bryson to make me giggle, a biography of my favorite Russian writer.

Some books, I’ve decided, simply don’t lend themselves to a walk-and-read, usually because their unwieldy size would prove awkward for a girl on the move.

Take, for example, my dad’s Bible.

I keep it tucked unobtrusively next to my desk at work, wrapped in its black, zippered cover. The book’s thin pages would flop in my hands as I walked, I think.

Then again, it survived a lifetime walk in the hands of my read-more, learn-more, history-buff father.

At the dinner table, Dad would regale my brother and me with the rollicking stories he made come alive from the Old Testament’s pages: Absalom and his deadly headful of hair, fat King Eglon done in by a lefty, determined Jael and her well-placed tent peg, the golden hemorrhoids (look it up!).

I’ve never known someone to take such delight in a book, or to know it so well. Dad taught me the joy in the Bible’s deep humanity, the way it delves into the minutiae and ridiculousness of human life and shows us that we matter, unfathomably, to a Great, Big God.

Another such book sits on my living room side table, occasionally serving as a resting spot for a cat.

Enfolded in a green cover decorated with elegant embroidery, my mom’s Bible bears witness to the many walks she took among its pages.

Her open, teacher-ish handwriting fills the margins, some scribbles in pencil, others in blue pen.                                                          

Underlines and stars and exclamation points and arrows emphasize the words she believed quietly but firmly, the truths she lived along her walk as she gave and forgave and fought for the underdog and loved the downtrodden with her hands as well as her heart, the way her Book told her she was loved and forgiven and fought for.

On my lunchtime meanders and as I delve into a day, the books of my parents walk alongside me and in me and make me who I am.

I don’t spend as much time among their pages as I ought. I reach for Dostoyevsky or Hemingway instead of Moses or Paul, and those precious zippered covers sometimes gather more dust than I’d like to admit.

Though I neglect the books, they never neglect me. 

They whisper in my ear as I walk from day to day, telling me to love and be loved, speaking to my heart of humility and hope and purpose in the darkness.

Clocking out has its advantages. 

A little encouragement to take a break for a deep breath and a dose of fresh perspective is, perhaps, not such a bad thing.

Especially if you have a Good Book along for the walk.

First published in The Alpena News on Nov. 14, 2021.