The Couch: Signs of Change

The Walk: Accidental death march around the neighborhood

Distance: 22 Blocks (3.3 miles)

Duration: Lost track of time toward the end...over an hour? 70 minutes?


Thoughts: I worked on this essay I was asked to write for school:

“The train stamps and stamps onward. I stand at the window and hold on to the frame. These names mark the boundaries of my youth.”
--Erich Maria Remarque

“Even though I’m only fourteen, I know what I want, I know who’s right and who’s wrong, I have my own opinions, ideas, principles, and though it may sound odd coming from a teenager, I feel I’m more of a person than a child—I feel I’m completely independent of others.”
--Anne Frank

Twice in the last week, in two different classes, I’ve found myself asking my students “how do you know when you have grown up?” They answered: “You don’t. You can’t.”

My students are brilliant.

Objectively, how can you know that you are, now, officially an adult and an experienced veteran of war instead of a frightened recruit (in the case of Remarque’s character, Paul Bäumer), or an independent, self-sufficient young woman instead of a little girl (in the case of Anne Frank). When do you realize that you are a pillar of salt instead of a woman (Lot’s wife from the Bible), a cockroach instead of a human being (Franz Kafka’s Gregor Samsa in “The Metamorphosis”), or a flower bending over its own reflection in a pond instead of a young man (in the case of Narcissus in Greek mythology).

Are you aware of the moment of change? Can you see it in yourself without external validation (Honey! What happened? You’re a pillar of salt!) Does it dawn gradually as you lay in bed and wiggle your multiple legs, flex your antennae, aware of some subtle difference, until finally you raise your head and see, unbelieving, the horrible change that has occurred? Or, like Narcissus, are you so absorbed in your own beautiful condition that you remain blissfully unaware that you are now a flower?

I still remember the moment when I finally felt like a full-fledged adult. It was not the first time I voted. It was not the day I could walk into the bar and legally order a Flaming Dr. Pepper. It did not even occur on a birthday. Instead, it was the day that I bought my first couch. Until that moment, it had been futons for us. Futons are cheap and practical. In a small apartment they can serve as both couch for TV watching and guest bed for those occasions when your friends drink too many Flaming Dr. Peppers and Brain Hemorrhages and need a place to crash.

Futons are also dreadfully uncomfortable as both couch and bed. As a couch, the mattress is always slipping down. As a bed, the mattress has an uncomfortable lump in the middle, from always being folded up. After a while, our friends wised up, stopped drinking mixed shots with silly names, and no longer needed a place to crash. So one day we decided to buy a couch.

It was a real couch, and it wasn’t even from IKEA. It was hand-crafted: velvety brown micro-suede stretched over a wooden frame and springs. Sitting down, one sank into soft, plump cushions. It took up most of the living room in our small apartment. As the delivery men wedged it into place, we stood back to take in the effect. Suddenly, we realized that this was no longer the home of two college graduates making do as we struggled in transitional jobs and graduate programs. This was the house of two adults. We were adults.


Now, long before this particular moment occurred we had begun to change. Our friends, our lives, our methods of entertaining ourselves. Had we noticed these changes? Perhaps, but the total effect was not understood until we found ourselves in the presence of that very grown-up piece of furniture: the couch. Will it be the same for you? Probably not. You may score your first couch from a street corner, or as a hand-me-down from a parent. At some point, however, you will have a moment. It may be your first apartment, your first payment on a brand-new car, or the first time you hear a helpless infant screaming for you in the next room. You will turn to someone next to you and ask, “Are we really that old?” And then you will tuck in your shirt over a spreading paunch, push the hairs back over the thinning spot on the back of your head, or tug nervously at the Spanx riding up your butt, and awkwardly shamble back to your state of unawareness. Trust me, it will happen.

Meeting Folks, Murals, Walking-Pains

FRIDAY
The Walk: Around the neighborhood

Length: 12 blocks (about 2 miles)

Duration: 40 minutes

Thoughts: Walking along 1300 East I ran into an acquaintance...slightly more than an acquaintance, because I went to her wedding, but less than a friend and not quite a family member. She was pushing a stroller and walking two dogs...neither the dogs nor the baby were hers, though; she was babysitting. She told me she and her husband were moving to Texas, and I thought about how some relationships work like this: they move along by big events. Last time we saw her was likely at some event (perhaps another wedding) not long after we'd seen her at her wedding (a dreadfully boring one, by the way), and now they are moving along to another place, another time in their life. We are happy enough to see each other on the street and catch up on the big news, and we won't see each other again until the next wedding in the group. As I walked away (or, was dragged away by my two dogs) I thought about how she doesn't really exist in my mind until I see her. She exists only as an occasional update to the software, otherwise she's one of the programs that sit at the back of my hard drive and don't ever emerge on the surface of my screen.

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SATURDAY
The Walk: To a friend's house

Distance: 4 blocks (.6 miles)

Duration: 10 minutes

Thoughts: I want a mural painted on the back of my house. Why? The back of my house is ugly. A big boring slab of gray-green paint, with two glass windows, and three boarded in windows. It is not open, or alive like the back of my parents' house. It does not have any interesting architectural features, like the back of Molly's parents' house. It is drab and boring, and the cheapest way to liven it up, to my mind, is to cover it with bright colors and figures. I think it would make me happy. I think.

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SUNDAY
The Walk: From our house to May and My's house

Distance: 18 blocks (3 miles)

Duration: 1 hour

Thoughts: The heat. The heat. I think it has gotten to my brain already, because during this walk all I did was obsess about the pedometer and getting to 10,000 steps. Such thoughts are too boring to discuss in detail here. Just one thing I'm mulling over...I wish I didn't tire of walking the same route so quickly. I've walked to their house maybe 3 times? I usually walk along 800 East, because it isn't as busy as 7th and 9th, and 10th doesn't go all the way through. Yesterday, I felt bored with 8th, so I cut up to 9th. I guess there's no real problem with that, it's just that if I get sick of things so quickly, I'm going to run out of new routes to walk in my neighborhood. I remember when we moved here last July, the first walks I took were so fun because it was all new terrain (I had grown so sick of every walk in the old neighborhood). Now I'm starting to see the enjoyment tarnish a bit, and I haven't even been walking here a year yet. It just annoys me, is all.

Rocking Chair Reds

The Walk: From the furniture store to home

Distance: 1.6 miles

Duration: 30 minutes

Thoughts: We bought two new red rocking chairs for the front porch. Birthday presents. They look great, and they have a nice, smooth rock. As we set them up on the porch, flakes of snow began drifting from the gray skies, a lazy drift. None of them seemed to land on the greening grass, or on the yellow daffodils. It was a cold wind, however, that escorted me home on my walk, along with a steady, but light, drizzle of rain, then soft hail, and then the snow.

People at school were bitching up and down the halls, but I like a spring storm, and a gray sky. I've been thinking a lot about T.S. Eliot poems lately--the early stuff. I never think about his later work, I have no taste for it. But as we are reading All Quiet on the Western Front, the word "anesthetized" from Prufrock keeps popping into my head. I know. "April is the cruelest month" would be more appropriate.

The Charm of Arrival

Walk: From the Dutch Deli to home

Distance: 16 blocks (2.5 miles)

Duration: 50 minutes

Thoughts: Why do I enjoy walking in one direction only more than doing a round trip? Perhaps the key is I like having a destination. Walking in a circle has never appealed to me. Going around and around the park, circling the blocks, it can suffice, but the best walk for me is a long one that ends someplace different than where it began. There is just an innate pleasure in getting somewhere.

I have long fantasized about walking an extremely long distance, with stops along the way, a walk that takes most of a day, but not in the mountains. I'd like to do this walk somewhere urban. When I lived in L.A. I imagined myself walking from downtown L.A. to Santa Monica beach (according to Google Maps, 16 miles). Now, in Salt Lake, I can't think of a good, similar, option. Once I walked from our house on Capital Hill to Malon and Myron's in the Avenues, and then to Rocky and Erin's house in Harvard-Yale, and then to my parents' house on Wasatch drive (isn't that just the perfect list of snobby liberal neighborhoods in Salt Lake?). That was about a 7 mile walk (again, according to Google Maps), and I remember at the end of it, feeling that I could hardly keep walking. Thoughts of death marches drifted through my thoughts as I trudged up the hill to to Wasatch. Perhaps the LA walk was always a pipe dream...

Folk Art Landscaping

Walk: to Bright Yellow house on 700 East and back

Distance: 14 blocks

Duration: 50 minutes

Thoughts: It was weird how, as I approached the house, I carefully composed my face into an "I LOVE what you're doing with plastic and gold spray paint" and tried to banish all expression of "You are fascinatingly creepy and weird for decorating your porch with Barbie's dream car and plastic flowers." Both emotions completely true, but I know that one is offensive, so I banish it to the recesses of my brain because I wish to avoid conflict. This house, with its classic white-plastic garden chairs spray painted gold, it's display of Minnie Mouse stuffed animals in the upper windows, its God Bless America sign and garden statuary is a fabulous piece of art. What are the rules of putting stuff in your yard? The gaudy over-spillage and decay of one house can be completely appealing, while the drab over-spillage and decay of another (right behind my own house), tends to get me pissed off in a self-righteous white middle-class kind of way. What's that about?

On the way to the Yellow House, we passed the drinking fountain at Liberty Park and Shed danced and caught water droplets from the air as I jetted the fountain with my thumb. Ida watched glumly because I would not let her keep Shed in line by biting his ankles.