Farewell to Blogspot

On February 7, 2010, when I wrote the first Walker in the Suburbs post, I knew only that I wanted to share a few thoughts with the world. I had no idea if I could keep blogging until the end of the month. 

Now, almost 15 years later, it's time to move A Walker in the Suburbs to a new home. Truth to tell, it outgrew Blogspot long ago, but until now I've lacked the time and will to switch sites. 

Starting tomorrow, October 1, 2024, you can find A Walker in the Suburbs here. The content won't change, but the design is updated, and you'll be able to subscribe and comment.

Meanwhile, as I say goodbye to this platform, I think of all that's happened since it began, the writing I've done; the people who are gone and the ones who've just arrived; how our world has changed. 

How grateful I am to have this opportunity to connect with all of you, to share my love of walking and place. Thank you, as always, for reading. I hope you enjoy the new Walker in the Suburbs. 

Another Meta Post

Yesterday's post was meta, as I think about the blog itself in preparation for launching it on a new platform soon. This has been long in the works, and on my mind for years. 

When it comes right down to it, though, I'm finding it difficult to make the leap. Which reminds me of a central truth: change is difficult. This is as true for small decisions — turning right rather than left at the corner when I stroll the neighborhood — as it is for larger ones, like moving a blog of 14 years. 

But change is also essential. More and more so as the years move on, I've noticed. 

And so, this Blogspot home will soon be history. I'll keep you posted as I make the move — and I hope you'll make it with me. Don't worry. It will take a few days. These things always do. 

Every Verse

"Second verse, same as the first," goes a line from an old Herman's Hermits song. 

Two verses used to be the limit for the processional and recessional hymns at my church. But there's a new music director in town, an organist no less, and he plays all four verses of every entering and leaving song.

Is it my imagination, or is there a certain restlessness as we plunge into verse four of the entrance hymn, a narrowly avoided temptation to glance at the watch? 

As for the recessional, people are voting with their feet. This morning, about half the congregation left before the last notes of "The Church's One Foundation" sounded and the postlude began, organ chords thundering down from on high. 

This is how we're supposed to leave the sanctuary, I thought, as I made my way to the holy water font and out the door — caught up in a marvelous swell of sound. 

(This organ is from San Bartolome Church, Seville, Spain, not my church. I wish!)

Charting Time

It's only a baby habit, just getting started, but I've decided to keep a time chart, noting on my (paper) calendar what I'm doing and when. 

Time flows differently these days, it eddies and it stalls and sometimes it swirls by so quickly that I barely see the ripples it leaves behind. 

So rather than wondering each day, where does the time go, I will try to chart it as it flies. 

A noble experiment, yes? 

We'll see. 

The "R Word"

This week, I've begun to share the news with colleagues that, come May, I will start a new phase of life, one without the grind of daily work-for-pay. You might say I'm "retiring," though that's a loaded word in my vocabulary.

Writers seldom retire, but editorial directors for international development organizations do, so I'll use their nomenclature when necessary. 

The fact of the matter, though, is that I don't much care for the "R word." It sounds like Bermuda shorts and golf courses and happy gray-haired couples staring off into the sunset. 

Which won't look much like what I'll be doing, which is writing and peddling my work, not so much a new thing as an old one with a twist — a return to the freelance world I inhabited happily for decades but with less of the financial pressure. 

Still, it's an adjustment, one I've been mulling over privately for months — and one I can finally mull over publicly here. 

Farewell to the Spinet

When the moment finally came, it was nothing at all like what I thought it would be — as moments  seldom are. I worried that my dear, sweet Wurlitzer spinet, the piano Mom and Dad had bought on the rent-to-purchase plan when I was a kid, would have to leave here in the instrument equivalent of a body bag, bound for what I've heard described as "that great concert hall in the sky."

I'd been dithering over this for years — knowing that if I was to continue to play, the spinet would have to go, but being unable and unwilling to get rid of the instrument on which I plunked my first scales, practiced for hours a day in high school, and accompanied the girls when they were young musicians. 

It finally dawned on me that I was going about this the wrong way. To get rid of the spinet, I would need to fall in love with its replacement. So last Saturday I ventured out to a piano showroom in a mall not far from here, intending only to look and see what was there. 

What was there was a used Schimmel studio with a top you can prop up like a baby grand and a tone and touch that sent shivers down my spine. It was more than I was planning to spend but they were willing to take the spinet on trade! That clinched the deal, and the day before yesterday, the spinet left the house in a piano truck safely belted and blanketed, perhaps on its way to another young pianist.

Meanwhile, I can't stop playing the new piano, which fills the house with its sonorous sound. I would say I don't know what took me so long — but, of course, I do. 

Baby Step

Tonight I take a baby step toward my next life: a webinar for a course of graduate study I have in mind. I have no idea if this will work out, if it will be what I think it can be, or even if I want to apply. But I won't begin unless I know more, so hearing them out seems a good way to begin.

As I watch our grandson become more alert, as I marvel at his first smiles, I realize, all over again, how much change is a part of life. Babies change weekly — no, daily! — and older children almost as quickly. But as we get older change becomes the enemy. The body fights it and the mind does, too.

So the question becomes, how to build change and challenge into life? Work provides this for me, but it won't always. Study seems like a perfect substitute: pushing the mind to new frontiers. Or at least that's the plan. As with so much these days, all I can say is ... we'll see ...

Catching Up

Saturdays are usually for catching up, for buying groceries and running errands, for cleaning the house and doing the laundry. 

Today I'm posting this blog using a new browser, which is a different kind of catching up, the technological kind, one I'm less familiar with and not very good at. The switch is not altogether by choice. It's been progressively more difficult to write posts using the previous interface, and an older browser wasn't helping. 

So now there's a new browser and a new back end for the posting process and ... it's anybody's guess what this will look like once I press publish. 

Middle-Aged Woman Project

A few weeks ago I heard an interview with writer John McPhee on the radio. He was explaining a series of pieces he's writing for the New Yorker, which he calls his "old man project."

The idea is that he doesn't have the time to explore in depth a drive through Spain he made decades ago or a dairy farm in Indiana with 25,000 cows or any number of other ideas he's been saving up to explore, so he is dipping his toe in them, then moving on.

McPhee is basing his project on a long-ago encounter with a 66-year-old Thornton Wilder, who had decided to catalog all 431 plays of the playwright Lope de Vega. The younger McPhee didn't understand why Wilder was doing this. The older McPhee does: it's a project without an end, a way to keep yourself going.

This got me thinking about what I do, am doing, to keep myself going, specifically my writing self. And the answer, right now, is simple: Every day, I write a blog post. And I've written one most every day for close to ten years. A Walker in the Suburbs is my Middle-Aged Woman Project.

Suddenly Cool

It was 37 last night here. I'm tempted to research highs and lows to learn just how long ago it was since we had such a temperature. Back to April, I imagine.

In honor of the brisk air, I'm back in black running tights and sweatshirt — and am wishing for socks that came up farther than my ankles.  Seasonal change may finally be upon us.

I'm no fan of cold weather, but once it's here, I remember why we need it: to kick the fall foliage into high gear, to energize us — and, more than anything else, to provide variety.

It feels good to pull on tights — not just because they are warm, but because they are different.

Life Preserver

If all birthdays should hold within them some memento mori, some reflections on our own mortality, then my recent one was complete even in that way, with the funeral of an acquaintance, a woman my age (too young to die!) held Saturday in a local cemetery.

Attending this funeral brought many thoughts to mind: Sadness for the family, especially the two twenty-something children who now must make their way without their mom; gratitude for my own health and family, for everything I have; and relief that I've escaped a trap that suburban living makes women especially prone to.

It isn't always easy to schlep to the office, but the suburbs have a way of sucking women in and making everything about the kids. While I made sure I was home with the girls as much as possible when they were young, and I look back on those years as some of the most precious and happiest of my life, I tried always to have a separate self, a career (writing) self — an Anne that is not also Mom.

Now I tell my girls to do this, to keep themselves alive. The childrearing years only seem like they'll last forever. In truth, they're over in a flash.  When they are, you want a self to go back to.

Digital Trail

I'm not a big Facebook user. I remember posting vacation photos on the social media site once years ago — and realizing how much control I lost when I did that. I've been skittish about the site ever since.

But I give away data all the time, in ways great and small. The books I order, the words I write, the tweets I tweet — all leave a digital trail.  All I can do is make it a faint one.

Privacy has been on my mind these days, what with revelations that Facebook sold user data to Cambridge Analytica. I was amused to learn that an enterprising AP photographer was able to snap a picture of the talking points that Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg had in front of him at yesterday's congressional hearings.

The New York Times reports this tidbit: "Resign? Founded Facebook. My decisions. I made mistakes. Big challenge, but we've faced problems before, going to solve this one. Already taking action." And, if he had been asked if Facebook should be broken up, Zuckerberg was prepared to say: "U.S. tech companies key asset for America. Breakup strengthens Chinese companies."

 It's a fitting irony that Zuckerberg was outed not by social media but by old-fashioned media. Long live the camera ... and the pen!

(Savvy Facebook users might learn that this was my high school.)

Empty Room

Suzanne and Appolinaire moved out over the weekend. They left a stuffed-full center-hall colonial for a small blue house on a steep hill in Arlington. Walk up their sidewalk a few yards, crane your neck, whip out your binoculars — and you can see the Washington Monument. It's that close to the city.

Meanwhile, in the outer 'burbs, there's an empty room. It's been empty before, of course, while Suzanne lived in Africa for three-and-a-half years. But now she's married, and — unless they're between houses, as they were these last three months — they won't be moving back.

It's all as it's supposed to be, and I'm delighted they're settling into their new place.

It's just that there's this empty room — its exposed ticking mattress cover; the blank spots on the wall where the Les Mis poster used to be; the gaps in the book shelf. Even the cello is gone.

I'll have to get used to it, that's all.

Our Films, Our Selves

Today "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" opens in theaters, the first half of the seventh and final Potter book to hit the silver screen. When the first Potter film came out the girls were in first, fifth and seventh grades. Now two are in college and the youngest is in high school. You need only look at Daniel Radcliffe's jawline, no trace of boyishness left, to know 10 years have passed. But through the magic of cinema his 11-year-old face will always be with us and will remind me, at least, of those relatively (and in retrospect!) serene elementary school years.

Actors are pegged not only to the ages of their debut (think Shirley Temple) but also to their strongest performances. I learned the other day that Jill Clayburgh passed away in early November. For me she will always be the devastated wife and mother of "An Unmarried Woman." I must have seen that film half a dozen times in its heyday and was always inspired by the New York setting and by Clayburgh's journey to selfhood (which sounds very transactional and 1970s but, hey, that's when the movie came out).

The last scene is a classic, as Clayburgh attempts to carry a huge painting that her lover (Alan Bates playing an artist) has given her. Bates is dreamy and Clayburgh loves him, but he's leaving town and she has worked too hard at independence to follow him. So he hands her the large canvas as if to say, here, you want to be a self-sufficient woman, try this on for size. Or at least that's the message I took from it at the time. I was much younger then.

In Design

The scene: a class on Adobe In Design. The characters: Seven people who know what they're doing and one who does not. The latter, an editor, works in words not in images, cannot find all the tiny buttons and tabs with which one works in this program, cannot even remember to use the mouse instead of the keypad. But she -- heck, I'll just come clean and say I -- press on, determined to get as much out of the class as possible.

I don't plan to become a designer; I just want to demystify the process. I repeat that to myself all day, a silent mantra, but there comes a time in mid-afternoon when I'm hopelessly confused. I don't know how to manipulate the image, I don't even know what layer I'm on. The class is moving fast and by the time I ask a question I'm six steps behind the others.

The secret to staying young, I've heard, is to keep learning. But learning is risky. It requires a willingness to appear foolish in front of others. I felt foolish today. Based on that, I should have lopped a week off my age. At least.