MGPARK

I don't read very much anymore. I turned 34 two months ago. I moved into a bigger apartment. I still walk the dog three times a day. We circle the neighborhood. We take a square-shaped route via the arterial roads - Riverside to Whitsett to Magnolia to Laurel. Cars pass and make such tremendous noise - the earth shakes, my ears pulse. I hate it so much. But where else is there to walk? There are no interior sidewalks here, no patches of grass for the dog to sniff. This is the rub, I think. This is what you get for moving to the valley for more space and quieter nights.

There is nothing for me to do while the dog walks and pees and sniffs. It is not the move, listening to music or a podcast. She is still reactive. We are still wary, the both of us - of strange dogs, of cars going over the curb, of stepping on broken bottles. We remain alert. Instead I pass the time staring at everything. I stare into the windows of passing cars. I turn my eyes to the sky and watch a red-tailed hawk cross from one telephone pole to the other. I count the different shades of green on one tree. I stare into the lighted windows of their single-family ranch-style homes. I peer into gardens, into puddles. I look at all of this and then I wonder about my life. What am I going to do? What's going to happen to me? All the old questions I still ask, even now.

There is no continuous narrative. I think about the girl who lived in the second-floor bedroom of Leslie's boardinghouse. This was in Boston, where the summer rain smelled different. I don't know her at all. My life in Los Angeles, my life of the last three, four years, feels so immediate to me and I could not even tell you why. I sever ties, I run from routine, I scrub the past.

That brief summer when I lived on the UES I used to run in the pre-dawn from York Ave all the way to the park. The shape of the city would change as I ran - the globes of light hanging above the prewar buildings, the cut of the doormen's uniforms. In the early dark I watched the flower delivery guy carry in fresh flower arrangements, carry out the old. I watched a woman slump against the security desk, letting her eyes close. It felt like a gift. It felt like everything, all of it, belonged to me. It was mine, all mine.

The dog and I go for a walk at five in the morning because it is a dead hour. No dogs. Few cars, fewer people. There is always a slight stutter of surprise when those of us awake at such a heinous hour of the day run into one another. But these are lonely hours for a reason. They are private hours. At the church my family used to attend, the caretaker would unlock the doors at three in the morning for those parishioners who would come to kneel in the pews and pray. Desperate prayers for desperate times. The thinking was this - if you prayed with enough fervor, if what you put forth carried inside of it a hope so unspeakably impossible, this was the hour in which He listened. Like all rites and rituals across cultures and creeds, it all means nothing - or everything - to you.

The hour the dog and I go for a walk is a prayer in motion. I am walking the dog at five in the morning because she was an abandoned shelter dog. Whatever happened to her in the preceding four years has turned her reactive to all other dogs. I am walking the dog at five in the morning because I wouldn't be able to sleep in anyway. The mind starts to stir by four, begins reeling by five. I am walking the dog at five in the morning because everything else is slipping through my fingers. I can't grip onto anything for long enough. It all sifts away - my sense of control, reason, my conviction in the things I once believed.

I cannot remember a year so hard as this one. But then the long tail of my memory grows shorter and shorter every year. It all goes. What remains?

Here is one. A memory from the other week. I am walking the dog in the middle of the afternoon. A dangerous hour. Everyone comes home at lunch to walk their dogs. She and I are laying siege to our nerves this way. But it must be done. A woman is coming towards us, pushing a shopping cart. Inside, her belongings. Three cloth bags. One suitcase. I step aside to let her pass. But she stops first, waves me through. "The wheels, I know sometimes it makes them nervous."

I learned how to write by writing out her sentences. She has no equal. 

The rain started in the evening and it was still raining when I woke in the morning and I think now of the scrap of poetry she kept near her desk, the one by Karl Shapiro -- 

It is raining in California, a straight rain Cleaning the heavy oranges on the bough, Filling the gardens till the gardens flow, Shining the olives, tiling the gleaming tile, Waxing the dark camellia leaves more green, Flooding the daylong valleys like the Nile.

Age is nothing but a number I promise I was 19 once. You follow your mind from one story to the next - and you swear you know everything and nothing all at once. At 29, my mind doesn’t open up in the same way. I second-guess everything. If time is supposed to bring wisdom, confidence, I’m still waiting. I cry every other day and I don’t know what I want more - to run into traffic or sit in a dark cave until my life recedes into a single dot. 

E.B. WHITE, CHARLOTTE’S WEB