Last week Shawn Micallef, who usually talks about walking in Toronto, was posting bits of a trip home to Windsor. Although I have never lived there as an adult, I was filled with a powerful homesickness as I read about walking there. Particularly because I’ve never driven much there, the geography of the city is still intimate and distorted according to my childhood memory, its places better connected in my mind by long walks than streets and blocks. The childhood beginnings and endings of journeys in the back of a station wagon were so disconnected, they might as well have been by airplane.

My father’s father was a walker. He lived on McEwan Avenue in a large gray house. I can see it on Google Maps now, too small and the wrong color, a burgundy minivan in the driveway, the tall trees gone. Although he worked at the Chrysler plant and owned a sparkling blue Chrysler with tail fins, he always preferred walking to driving. He was famous for stopping in the remote corners of parking lots and taking the long way round. He took me for long strolls, holding my hand and feeding me treats, bits of halvah or Peerless ice cream. I was four or five. I remember low things—uneven sidewalks, school yards, chain links fences, busy crossings, and the menacing thrill of boxcars and railroad tracks.

I recently binged on a bunch of fascinating but milk-of-human-kindness-curdling literature. It was a Fantastic Mr. Foxish consumption of a heap of papers and articles analyzing the scramble for status in tech culture and communication, and combined with bad-ish TV and undigested chunks of Veblen, it left me queasy and discreetly burping bubbles of doubt. Everybody suddenly looks like a bunch of sneaky apes jockeying for unripe bananas, but not in a serene, at-one-with-nature kind of way. I’m sourly aware of the numbers surrounding every small electronic contact. The numbers that Twitter displays on one’s home page make an offhand response to a stranger feel suddenly leaden and manipulative. At the same time, a clutch of quotidian anxieties and real world things-gone-just-wrong-enough are conspiring to make me feel, if not exactly oppressed, at least sat on.

I know the current onslaught of migraine and insomnia could likely explain this pinched perspective (an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato), but I feel like I’ve stumbled into a maze of dead ends. The corridor that led me here is no longer connected to the world outside and I am trying the same hallways and cul-de-sacs again and again in the feeble certainty that they are changing constantly with a restless energy. I am treading the same space in my mind again and again as I wait for it to inevitably change form enough to recognize. And meanwhile, I am actually walking.

Walking is the pace of thought.

I’m not sure how else to recapture the tenuous connection between my body and my surroundings, other than walking and watching for some familiar and recognizable story in the things right here.

Even I begin to feel transparent and ghostly after working alone for too many days. Throw in a migraine and a 3am conviction I should have gone to art school (nope) and I start to feel lost. The comparatively small internet of ten years ago was of immediate comfort in those moments, a place for introverts to connect in our own weird ways. The New Big Internet is more complicated. While I like the anonymity and enjoy many of the technologies for contact with other humans, the rigid architecture of the social structures can be grueling. I watch with admiration the way some people effortlessly navigate the relentless online social architecture. I think to myself, self, I could never do that (sober), and that these new worlds increasingly reflect the external worlds of parties and conferences and networking events and book tours in which the same people are, and always have been, equally adept. They are able to collect and cherish connections, to leave agreeable traces of themselves everywhere. They are charming and lovable. I usually admire without envy. I wish I knew the secret language of those public unions, but I don’t and if I did, I’d to be someone else.

When we set about naming our impending baby though, we wondered why it felt so important to choose a name not shared with many others and, like every other parent we know, couldn’t really come up with an answer. But I am starting to think it has something to do with an ill-articulated awareness of the growth of culture around a certain kind of person, an evolution of The Lonely Crowd‘s “other directed” human. (Also it has do with me being a Heather from the seventies.) A new kind of person whose existence, even consciousness, depends on their situation within and ability to influence their social setting. I think we are foggily aware there is a new exigency in recognition and the ability to build an unambiguously unique history. Naming your kid something genuinely nuts might be visionary.⁰¹

Don’t giggle. I think this might be more urgent than it sounds. There’s plenty to indicate that our literal worth might one day depend on our ability to scramble for social status by obsequious do-gooding in the direction of the right people (the depressing economic rendition of ingenious, lovable charm). Wealth already depends, in a more tangled way, on making oneself appealing to influential people and learning how to guess who might one day be influential in order to make small favors go farther,⁰² but there’s a lot of well-intentioned effort to make sure that the connection is even more direct and quantifiable. As horrifying as projects like The Whuffie Bank are to me,⁰³ I am a nice middle class parent whose ideals turn out to be not so stiff in the face of the oncoming inevitable as I thought they were. A lot of them are already lying flat in the street, covered with tread marks. Like most parents, I want my child to succeed where I didn’t. Projects like that confirm my suspicion that something in me is being selected against. If this is what the future looks like, perhaps Aureliano was giving up too easily. Maybe I should have considered Astrolabe a bit more seriously.

~

I just cannot stop thinking about Elif Batuman’s essay in the London Review of Books.

I got off the train in Soho and walked down West Broadway past Canal Street with a crowd of others, all of us clutching our cell phones. In my memory I hit redial a hundred times before I got through to Victor, who was in a client’s conference room uptown, watching television. He told me about the flights to Washington. At some arbitrary point, the movement of the crowd slowed and we stood still in the street. The man beside me moved closer and said, It’s Osama bin Ladin. Massoud is dead. The black painted metal sidewalk where we were standing deflected slightly as someone shifted their weight. We all stood looking up into the air, south, down West Broadway. The top of the first tower tilted suddenly at an angle I never saw afterward in any photograph, and I said into the phone, It’s going to fall. I heard Victor say, She says it’s falling and someone else say No, that’s impossible, it will be okay. And then it fell and I think he heard the screams and said, We can’t see it yet, it’s still okay on TV.

I don’t remember anything else until I was much further north, at Houston. Crowds of us, streaming north, weeping, turned to watch the other tower fall, too far away now to see anything human in it. A heavily pregnant woman trudged past me and I felt more sorry for her than anyone else. She is going to bring a child into this hell, I thought. She will have to live with herself for that terrible act, and I thought of the stories of slave women killing their children.

Later, so many emails and phone calls from far away friends, desperate to situate the events within a broken or evil US foreign policy, greedy for the symmetry and symbolism; while when I closed my eyes, I could still see the far away specks of real, not symbolic, human bodies falling. And every perfect September in New York, the sick panic would catch me by surprise; surprisingly sudden, surprisingly the same.

Until one day it didn’t. For three years now, the yellow September light and the hard blue dome of sky awaken a sharp recollection of impending labour, the wild high and pure happiness of late pregnancy. I’d started my maternity leave, but there was no baby yet. The city was mine for those last weeks. I walked and walked and all of New York was as excited as I was. Elderly ladies stopped to wish me luck, younger women to ask how I was feeling. Everyone wanted to congratulate me and everyone wanted to tell me I was carrying a boy—a big boy, look at that belly, all out front! Look at that, they said, A boy for sure. A three hour last hurrah of a lunch at Eleven Madison, eavesdropping on rich kids, their table littered with half filled wine bottles. The baby, still a stranger, pressing his improbably large feet outward, stretching the thin skin around my bellybutton, visible through my shirt, wholly protected. Afterward, eating ice cream and walking up Lexington to Kalustyan’s to buy spices and pickled lemons.

And I so want to remember that perfect anticipation and limpid happiness forever. But already, I can’t summon a clear recollection of the end of pregnancy, though this weather and the smell of Central Park in September send me flashes of it. I picture myself running away now to arrest the last of those memories before they are lost to me through the insistent present. The longer I walk through the Conservatory in pursuit of them, the deeper they are buried beneath the touch of Aure’s wet sleeve and cold hand, the crunch of crabapples under my shoes, a kernel of visceral maternal anxiety, and the misweighted heft of a stroller full of crackers and water bottles.