Walkn' Down The Avenue

One of the pleasures of my life has always been walking.  I grew up in a small mid western town where few people who could walk waited for the infrequent buses, and where a large percentage of the people did not own cars; it was the middle of the great depression and car ownership was not all that common.  In my early twenties I moved to Cambridge Massachusetts where pedestrians were a commonplace and there was good  public transportation, but eventually I had to have a car, a brand new Volkswagen Beetle, a novelty back then, to drive to my first teaching job, an hour south of Cambridge.  For the next decade I had a car to commute to work from outside New Haven and then from the edges of Palo Alto, plus we had four small children who needed to be ferried about.  Then I lived in Brookline Massachusetts and although we owned a Volkswagen Microbus for the children and dogs and grocery shopping, I walked to work at Boston University a couple of miles away, in fact even turned down a much better job at Brandeis because it would entail driving out to Waltham, and  I wanted to walk to work. At intervals I lived in Rome, and walked from my apartment on the east side of Rome outside the old gates across and down across the Tiber, up the Gianiculo to the American Academy Library, a glorious walk that took me forty five minutes to an hour in the glorious dawn of another Roman day. Somewhere along the line in my forties I gave my car to my older son and commuted all over Boston by bicycle, not the hazard it would be nowadays when the traffic has grown so, my one considerable concern was coming home slightly squiffy on my bike from a fun cocktail party. Then I moved to New York City and was a true pedestrian.  Never once did I not prefer walking to anything else.  In fact even in Palo Alto when I came back from an extended trip to Greece and got the rhythm of walking in Greek villages, I left my car at home and walked down the many miles of Embarcadero Road to the Stanford campus, smiling and nodding and declining the offers of rides as I went from persons who could not comprehend a grown man with a brief case walking.  When we moved to Sarasota we were delighted to find a condo in an area that promised easy walking to shops, to the gym,  and what is more access to a network sketchy though it may be of public buses.  But now six or seven years later I cannot walk, my balance is shot, and although I work at this problem with two different trainers, I am making very little progress.  I saw an orthopedic surgeon when I fell and broke my wrist; he said "give it up and use a cane, you're eighty six."  The trainers roll their eyes and intone as a mantra: "Cane today, walker tomorrow, wheelchair the next day."  When I was a child I fell off a balcony.  One of the trainers says I have got to resolve a fear of falling resulting from that episode lodged deep in my unconscious.  Well, I am an anxiety ridden person who used to love to walk and I don't think that is the answer.  I am going to go with a cane.  My older brother fell down the stairs at ninety and died.  My older sister's femur shattered one day when she was walking across her kitchen and she spent the last six years of her life in a wheel chair in a nursing home. Another sister at ninety uses a walker and somehow manages to work in her garden and enjoy a daily swim in her pond. One other sister at ninety two walks to meet her daughter five or six streets from her condo; she uses a cane.  Way to go, sis.