My Bad

Damn! Forgot to post again yesterday morning.  Up at the crack of dawn, worried about the reaction of the student to whom I sent an angry email about his talking and phoning in class, about the pages I handed out without page numbers which I and the students collectively mixed up in as many different variations as six pages can get.  Anxious about getting ready for our cleaning lady, the former Marine, tall and blonde and clearly no nonsense.  Anxious about an expedition upon which I planned to embark as soon as the CL arrived: a walking expedition to visit a new acquaintance.  We met him at a brunch, he is a widower, his husband of thirty seven years died a few years ago.  Lo and behold, he lives nearby.  Mapquest said one mile of walking would put me at his front door.  I penned a note, he replied with an invitation to stop by.  I was a nervous wreck.  What if I got half way there and was not able to make it any farther?  What if I fell?  At nine sharp I set off.  I budgeted three quarters of an hour.  I remember walking from our apartment in Rome near the Villa Torlonia down the Via Venti Settembre across the Tiber through Trastevere and up the Janiculo Jill to the American Academy or from our house near the Bayshore Highway in Palo Alto into the heart of the Stanford campus.  Each of those must have been four miles at least.  A little tiny mile?  Nothing.  Well, it took me thirty two minutes, the visit was a pleasure, I stayed thirty minutes, I declined his offer of a ride home and set off in my sturdy shoes.  Two weird things. One was the sidewalks along the way, perfectly made, devoid of cracks, but set into the radically sloping sides of the roadbed, clearly never ever meant for anyone to walk on, so Sarasota, where the idea of a person on foot is as quaint as using a bow and arrow.  The other weird thing, which indeed I remembered from my other moment in the burbs, id est, life in Palo Alto CA, was the perfectly manicured lawns, the one storey houses, the perfect plantings, the quiet, the absence of cars, children, adults--it was a holiday and no one seemed to exist.  Except for the women out walking their dogs.  At the sight of me they froze.  Hey, ladies, I am not black, I am not young and husky, I am a retired professor with a big pension, relax!  A few more years and they will all be packing heat and walking could be fatal.  But, come to think of it, I will probably be dead by then.  Thank God, my husband and I chose to live in the squalor of the proximity to the mall, the traffic, the people, the noise.  To be in city noise is very heaven, isn't that what Wordsworth wrote?