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.

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.

Fellas, I’m drowning in things to do, but I can’t stop thinking about this article in the Atlantic by Richard Florida , called America Needs to Get Over Its House Passion, which I guess is a quote from Edmund Phelps or something. The more I think, the less sense it makes. It has been passed around and m’hm-ed all over the place with a lot of agreement, but something’s wrong. I wish I had time to take it apart slowly to see if it makes sense, but off the top off my head, I find myself wanting to defend the idea of home ownership. Florida points out that the rate of return on residential real estate is negligible after inflation. Sounds true enough; especially for home ownership as opposed to real estate investment. But that refers to resale value. I imagine that many or most Americans see home ownership as a different kind of investment; a lifestyle or a degree of security to aspire to, rather than a speculation. Assuming you manage to pay off a thirty year mortgage, you have a home at the end of it. Real estate. Shelter. Granted, it still costs money to own, but it’s very hard for anyone to take it away from you at that point.

In those cities, like Austin, in which rent is still a good bit cheaper than a mortgage, I suppose the assumption is that people ought to be investing the difference. The catch is where? The country is full of people who saved for retirement in nice, safe mutual funds and now have nothing to show for it. I also think some of the correlations go the opposite direction than those implied in the article. The same people who buy houses in blue collar towns are unlikely to bound out of their seats to go work in technology at the drop of a hat. I bet the reason home ownership is more common in places with lower incomes, wages, and economic output, is because life is more precarious, so the home as shelter is more important. People who are less educated are more vulnerable to changes in the larger economy. A person without a college education or professional experience can’t just run out and “innovate” if she gets fired. That kind of entitlement to be critical of the world around you and to imagine your ideas are worth something is all tied up with class.

And come on, home ownership is lower in areas with higher concentrations of the tech industry because higher concentrations of the tech industry cluster around educational institutions. The universities alone would make those areas more economically resilient. Also, transience in the tech industry is as age-related as is it is in students. Most of us burnt out on that life sometime in our thirties, and would sacrifice a lot to stay in one place and have a garden.

I’d also like to see that survey of homeowner vs renter happiness in an age bracket in which the homeowners are likely to have paid off their mortgages. (Or does that happen? Do people more often take out a second mortgage to put a kid through school or something?) There’s a lot of interesting data here, but I’m still not sure where the argument against home ownership comes from. What’s the alternative?

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Kelly Dobson, lots of interesting stuff on the connections between people and machines.

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Not much posting here because of all the aforementioned Things To Do, about which I will hopefully be able to post in six or eight weeks. Let me say though, that Mother’s Day commenced with flowers and maple candy, continued with Aure eating far more than his share of the candy, lying on the floor, bicycling his feet and shouting, Lemme go! Lemme go up to the ceiling! Next, a walk and a brunch determined by Aure, consisting of tacos of all the best parts (I can barely restrain myself from adding TM to the end of that, after following @wise_kaplan on Twitter for so long.) nopal, and orange juice. Finally, fewer hours of work than I have done in about ten days. A very fine day. Thanks Large and Small.