Carving a Deeper Path

Around the lake where our group walks the road almost curled up from the last two weeks of ninety plus heat. The lake itself sits still and exhausted from evaporation, and the ducks are hunkered down in the shade because it is cooler there than in the water. I feel sorry for the high school football players who are withstanding several practices per day. There is almost no amount of the wet stuff you can pour down your throat to offset being encapsulated in full football gear. During practice back in the day, I fainted dead away on the forty-yard line and sat straight up like a cornstalk when they put the smelling salts under my nose. But this kind of humid weather is a time when we protect ourselves with funny hats as wide as a Humvee. Normally, we are more self-conscious, but not so when the sun beats the tacos out of you from all angles.

So, when our BBRR group took our walk today, we sniffed the cooler air like it carried the smell of a freshly baked cookie. Electrolytes were up, the breeze floated through our shirts, and except for the story of a hawk that is threatening to eat a neighbor’s poodle, conversation was light. And speaking of conversation…

One of my favorite parts of this walking club is the way we share dialogue. Normally in a group, it can be sticky when you make your passage between the chit and the chat, or between one subject and another. There is an art to small talk, an art that some people navigate socially better than others. If, for example you are listening to a long-winded person who is explaining the Decline and Fall of Western Civilization, it is difficult to interrupt them without the fear that they may start completely over when you return to the topic, starting with Chapter One: Homo Erectus Man and His Rise to Ambulation. However, in our group, we don’t have to worry about that. We shift lackadaisically around like a herd of grazing sheep, without any goals, itinerary, or past minutes to read back. We interrupt each other, complete each other’s sentences and then, half-hour later, we become Bon Qui Qui and say: “Is that what you had said?”

This is a wonderful retirement luxury I call driftiness. Nothing anyone is doing is anything they have to do. We are now doing things either because we love it or because we feel this is where our service would be best spent. In either case, the driftiness is the ultimate blessing, especially if you have observed the events of last week ranging from catastrophic Hurricane Ida to the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan. Thankfully, we are not held up in a shelter waiting for a ration of bottled water or looking over our shoulder at an oncoming tank. We are relatively safe, reaching out in our own way, be it caring for the elderly, volunteering at a local hospital, or on mission for a recovering alcoholic. Our conversations and our walks may drift, but our hearts are powerfully directed to someone who is worse off than we are.

I hear stories of buying travel campers, of learning a new skill like dancing, of buying a new boat, but for us, those things come and go. They are the embellishments, part of the drifting. The steadiness comes from the more serious talks, those that include the enriching experiences that are carving a deeper path into our days. Author Gordon McDonald calls this the life happening “below the waterline.” As most of us approach our seventies, our bodies don’t have the flashy accoutrements we used to have. We have some worn parts, we have things that need replacing, we have some squeaks, some rustles, some blips and blemishes. But below our waterline, real work is still being done, and we are walking the deeper talk.

BBRRC - August 2021

In Evansville, Indiana, sixty-five-degree weather in August is almost as unusual as finding Mr. Wonka’s Golden Ticket in your candy bar, so we renewed our walk this BBRR day with an extra punch in our step, and fewer visual humidex roadblocks to our line of sight. It was cool this morning, we had more energy and could see everything better. Yea, that is what I meant to say. Summer humidity here is an index people check as closely as their phone messages. We locals walk outside into an unbreathable soup, and even cool relief of a swimming pool can’t ward off the greenish tint of algae.

As you may know by now, we walk on the grounds of the State Hospital, or as a friend of mine used to call it, the State Horse Pistol. Oh, the Anguish Language. Shuffling along the paths, we have begun to include conversations about such topics as hammer toe, athlete’s foot, orthotics, and shin splints. I’ve decided to put all those issues under one heading called Footburps because Podiatry sounds too much like an excuse, sort of like starting out a sentence with “But I…”. Pretty soon you will talk yourself out of putting one foot in front of the other, and that certainly breaks every rule I know about walking.

Compliments to one of new members: Polly is going back into teaching after retiring for a couple of years. This a not a flighty decision but comes from a soulful desire to make a difference in someone else’s life, to be in the trenches again duking it out with kids. Teaching is not a job you do for the money, and if you are then, in my experience, you probably are not lighting those kids on fire in the classroom. Round of applause from the BBRR club, Polly. We are there for you, ready to pop in as guest speakers, demonstrators, or if needed, give the famous Bender One-Handed Applause (a sort of quiet standing ovation).

As if to celebrate her triumphant return to teaching, Polly took the outside lane as we turned off our usual route and walked a half-mile down Vann Avenue, which is to say we took our lives in our own hands. In Evansville, drivers seem to go out of their way to merge into the lane next to the sidewalk (where we were walking) just for the sheer fun of watching your eyes dilate and the part in your hair disappear. We did make it back to the hospital lake alive, but my PTSD blocked any memory of what was said before or after, and I had nightmares of Yellow Cabs falling out of the sky onto my head. Coincidentally, one of our walkers noticed a bottle of whiskey that had been thrown out of a passing vehicle, evidence of some poor soul’s desperate attempt to multitask while driving.

I prefer my minister’s method: He has a wonderful habit of picking up street trash on his thrice weekly wake-up run around his neighborhood. Recently, early one morning as he hit his stride, he ran past a discarded empty vodka bottle along the road and responding to the nudge of the Holy Spirit, scooped it up for disposal at the end of his jog. As he rounded the corner towards home, a neighbor out enjoying her morning coffee, spotted the bottle in his hand, and yelled: “Hittin’ the juice a little early today, aren’t you pastor?”

No one in our group drinks and walks, and no one picked up the booze bottle on our BBRR jaunt today either. I’m kind of glad. Footburp: I’ve been through that baptism, and it ain’t pretty. I’ll stick to putting one foot in front of the other and see where it takes me.

BBRRC - June 2021

If herding cats is still a thing, then that describes our group when we get together and walk. Well intentioned, we begin at the same point, but we do not herd well. In fact, it is a stretch to even call us a group. There are three different images that come to me, other than cats, when I think of how our BBRR walkers walk:

• ants scurrying back and forth, exchanging information through antennas
• attention-seeking traffic cones that get moved by inches here and there when bumped
• tater tots thrown on the same plate but secretly wanting to be dipped into ketchup

Of those three, I prefer the tater tots. I say that because those of us walking were all teachers at some point and can relate to tots, if not taters. Secondly, I think a bowl of them would be nice to munch on while we walk. I mean, who doesn’t like tater tots?

So, I want to make a little offer. Or you could call it a teaser. I will give anyone ten dollars in our group if they show up with at least three tater tots, and a package of ketchup. It could be a bottle of ketchup, but that may be overkill. We don’t want to overwhelm the three little taters. I know, I know I may be guilty of blog tampering here, as I am basically bribing readers to engage in my BBRR Club blog. And by the way I like my tater tots hot. Cold tater tots are basically little grease balls, and that begins to sound vaguely like they have slicked back hair and a cigarette barely hanging out of their mouths. I’m not eating any food with hair on it, so that subject is closed. And the last time I saw a cigarette and a tater tot hanging out together was in a greasy spoon truck stop in Iowa on I-80, and that subject is now closed also.

There are two other benefits to arriving with my (hot) tater tots at our next walk:

1. We can give them to the little gnomes that live outside an incredible hand-built elf house built right into a tree. True story. We found them on our walk at a house along the path our group took this month. The gnomes looked hungry and were begging for some dwarf food as we strolled by their garden. Kind of pitiful, but let’s face it, there are hungry gnomes everywhere, and it has been proven that they get really juiced when they eat taters.
2. Tater tots are the second favorite food of cicada-killer wasps. Cicadas, mistakenly called locusts, were an integral part of the conversation this June BBRR club walk. (There may be a shortage of cicadas this year, which means we will be able to hear each other’s conversations as we sit outside in our lawn chairs this July, sipping something long and cold). These killer wasps are large bumble bee-looking bombers that use the cicada carcasses as food fodder for the eggs they lay inside. Not dinner conversation mind you, but you can YouTube it and get the full story.

Or not. You could just show up next walk, July 1, with three hot tater tots and collect your ten spot. Offer good until blog supplies last. Some exceptions may apply. Side effects include headache, fever, nausea, blurred vision, constipation, toe jam, insomnia, and general malaise.

BBRRC - May 2021

When cooler evenings and warmer days begin to fill in the barren patches where winter grass would not grow, our walking group lapped up the light that cast a lime-greenness over our morning trek/sojourn this month. It is Spring, and the radiance from all the vigorous crisp growth is like no other we see any other time of the year.

Mother Nature unpacks newness, or maybe the other way around. She is no longer boxed, bottled or wrapped in cellophane by Earth but is triggered upward towards us like birthday candles from a God who wants to shower us with fireworks. How do you say thank you for the Sun we have waited for all winter, or for three-foot weeds that make us sneeze five times in a row, and the last few with embarrassed laughter? This is also a time when tide of winter litter becomes fodder for birds’ nests and the last leaves of last Fall are mulched up by an army of zero-turn mowers. One of those oversized commercial mowers flew by us at record speed and easily passed a sleek black BMW on Lincoln Avenue. At that speed the operator could barely hold onto the wheel (#Evansville), but he plowed ahead anyway with reckless abandon.

Perhaps no other time of the year but Spring does our conversation become so peppered with remarks about nature. We might grumble about health, jobs, and family struggles other times, but in the Spring, we talk of the newness, freshness and the blessings the earth is now presenting. The most well-known annual flowers trickled out of our discussions as well, but things got more complicated when we reached a Master Gardener’s path laden with hybrids and exotics. Nothing in that space stays dwarf for very long, and even the low growing sedums, awaiting more heat, were singing an opera at fever pitch.

Our this-and-that prattle was interrupted by the sounds our brains love more (according to research): that of wind, water, and birds. That sensory trifecta spoke to us as if a conductor had raised his baton and signaled an orchestra to prepare to play, and we, the audience, to be still. This Spring orchestra announced:

"Excuse me. Ahem. Pardon me. I’m sorry to interrupt, but it’s me over here. It’s me, Spring. I’m here, ready to start. I have something for you I think you are going to love to see. Can you smell it? Do you hear me?"

We did hear you, Spring, on our walk today. We saw you when a stark white head appeared high overhead in a bald eagle catching a draft. We smelled the fragrance of your long draping arms in an eighty-foot weeping Hemlock. We heard you squawking about your territory when an over-aggressive gander stretched out its nearby neck. Mother Nature was on. She left her mask behind and breathed on us anyway, and she scratched our senses with no restrictions or health warnings. We tried to catch up on our oh-so-important life details, but Spring is the strong quiet type, and had the last word on our BBRR pilgrimage.

Off in the distance there was a field of soccer preschoolers running helter-skelter, all playing the same position with uniforms that were grossly oversized. Their strategy seemed more like that at a piñata party rather than an organized sport, but the soccer kids didn’t care. And neither did we. Spring is nature’s party with no winners and no losers, just participants, and us few walkers.

BBRRC - April 2021

With our route at the State Horse Pistol (hospital) temporarily off limits due to renovations, aka, a battalion of trucks the size of Utah, our small but determined band of roving walkers met down at Mickey’s playground. For a moment we pretended we were at the warmer version of Disney, but the snap of the Ohio River wind brought us back to reality. Evansville is not known for its consistent weather in the spring. Gray and cloudy is our consistency in the dead of winter, but this walk was going to bear up to a clear blue bone chilling April cold snap.

As you might recall, we are a newly formed walking club that meets on the first of every month. That seems like an easy date to remember, but alas, our club’s membership has already fallen by half, and it was only at five members to begin with. Let’s just blame it on the cold and gargantuan construction equipment. This time.

We were brave enough to walk along the levee path, checking out the curves of the river, and looking for a calmer path. Aren’t we all? For a brief moment I worried that I would become air born in my parka and have an aerial view of Evansville as I parasailed across the Midwest. Two of my companions actually had bunny ears on their head, hints of an upcoming Easter party, and like real bunny ears, they twitched in the wind, listening for clues of summertime, (or perhaps errant radio stations).

We blathered nonstop, according to the rules of the club, as we picked up two little ones in a stroller, mom in tow. Twisting our way through the restoration area, we marveled at homeowners ambitious enough to scrap and paint their way along tall porticos, cornices and wonderfully carved entablatures. I don’t know what any of those words really mean, but if you get the idea that we were surrounded by century old river houses, you’d be correct. I felt like I had stepped out from Mr. Peabody’s Way Back Machine, and for a moment I longed to be an 1850’s steamboat boat captain coming home to my wife, waving to her one hundred feet up in her widow’s perch.

While we meandered aimlessly, narrowly missing piles of gravel and concrete, upturned hazard cones, and delivery trucks in the wrong lane, and I envied the two toddlers warmly buckled into their stroller with only their sniffy red noses showing. Being from Kenosha, Wisconsin, they took in the cold like bosses, and I know in their stocking capped heads they were giggling at all of us for being such wimps. Made me want to put on my big-guy-pants, find a bubbler at the nearest stop and go light, er no? (apologies to Wisconsin vernacular).

I did learn a couple of interesting facts about Kenosha on our BBRR journey. People there are working together, very hard I might add, to heal tensions after a very rough year. All along our walk, as we talked about our life’s challenges, I thought it telling that no one made any hint of April Fool’s Day. There were more important things to cover, among them the gratefulness that we were all healthy, and that we were looking into the sun and seeing some light at the end of Covid.

That is no joke. The Bunny bunnies keep marching towards better, and so does our nation, and our next generation, the kids from Kenosha.

Bunny Bunny Rabbit Rabbit Club

When you are thinking of a name for a new club, it is probably not such a good idea to use bunny and club in the same title, let alone in the same sentence. It tends to bring out the naysayers and activists. My four-year-old grandson likes to call these groups “binger-bongers” and the rest of the family has yet to understand exactly what that means.

I like joining activities, organizations, and coupon applications that have a bare minimum of requirements, so I was happy to recently join a group of people who loosely call themselves a club. We are keeping our club simple, and it’ll have very few stipulations.

When I was a kid and joined a club, I received a sticker and a hat in the mail and sometimes a jingle that made me feel like I was an animal of some kind, or perhaps an alien. To get even those few things, I had to fill out a long questionnaire that asked questions like “Do you eat Captain Terrific Cereal every day?” or “Have you learned all the words to The Ballad of Davy Crockett?” In all honesty, I was often afraid of the overwhelming responsibilities I would be obligated to uphold by joining such a club and would seek my older brother’s counsel which included a short retreat to the backyard to play two hours of basketball or to poke sticks down ant holes for that same amount of time. This was my way of talking myself off the ledge of commitment.

In addition to the application, joining a club also meant I had to sign a special pledge of loyalty that read something like this:

“I, ____, promise to have good manners and uphold the rules and regulations of the Buzzing ‘Round Jupiter with George Club. I will, to the best of my ability, promise to be active in taking care of Mother Earth, and to only use my Jupiter Jetpac in emergency situations.”

There were several difficult parts about learning this new pledge. Part of the difficulty rested in the accompanying secret handshake, which was impossible unless you were a contortionist. One problem was that after I memorized the new pledge and repeated it into a taped recorded 800 number when I was ready to join, I mistakenly said the same pledge at school in place of the Pledge of Allegiance at school every day. Heard and seen as slightly rebellious, my club pledge, mixed with the national pledge, did not fare very well with my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Heart, who embodied kindness and magnanimity with her every living breath.

The other problem with memorizing my new club pledge was that I had both pledges fighting for space in my brain, which caused me to randomly substitute words here and there as I stood there looking loyal to our American Flag. As other kids heard me, they in turn began to stumble over their words, particularly the difficult ones like “indivisible” and “republic.” After a few days of this, a whole row of kids, hand on heart, were fearlessly taking an oath to Jupiter instead of the United States of America.

My new club, the Bunny Bunny Rabbit Rabbit Club has, at least so far, nothing to do with bunnies or rabbits. In fact, as near as I can tell it does not have any parameters, boundaries, or obligations of any kind. However, it does have a couple of rules, which are very loose, and have already been broken without any penalty or even a mild scolding. What I like even more, is that our Bunny Bunny Rabbit Rabbit Club cannot be found on the back of a cereal or cookie box, and I’m not going to get anything in the mail that tries to sell me something. Ever.

At the risk of losing potential members, here are the two rules you need to follow to join our club. First, this club meets the first of every month, which by definition, is the very essence of Bunny Bunny Rabbit Rabbit. (As a sidebar here, let me state for the record that I am already tired of typing the title of our club, as it seems intuitively and grammatically incorrect to repeat a word just typed. However, it drives spell check crazy, so I guess, being that I don’t having a loving relationship with computers anyway, makes that complaint a wash).

For some people, myself included, meeting the first of every month in a club becomes immediately fraught with problems. First, I generally have little clue what day of the week it is, and even less information about the day of the month. I have found it nerve wracking to expect myself to be a human calendar, and equally annoying to try to understand the Chinese directions that allow me to set the date on my $19 watch, so I just stumble along through the week hoping my wife tells me where I am supposed to be at any given moment. Time can be a fickle thing, always changing, and given that I am retired now, and don’t like to be reminded that three fourths of my life is in the past, I let time do its thing, and I do mine. This does not mean I do not have goals, or a bucket list. I do believe in having a bucket list but belonging to the Bucket Bucket List List Club doesn’t even sound right.

Still, if you want to be in our club, you have to be there.

If this bothers some of you, you may find some solace in an experience I had several years ago regarding the issue of being on time. I actually circumvented any responsibility for my schedule several years ago when I was teaching, being blessed with a student genius in one of my classes who had a beautiful gift associated with his autistic spectrum. And I sincerely do mean I was blessed to have him in my class. If you’ll excuse me going down this rabbit hole, my student, Richard I will call him, could tell you the license plate numbers of every faculty car in the parking lot. He could also give all of the students their passwords in his class, which took an enormous amount of pressure off all of us. With hormones circulating in their middle school bloodstream at a furious rate, secret passwords to log on to a computer should be outlawed if not taken off kid’s plates completely.

I cannot fully express the gratitude I have for my former student Richard. While he did not tacitly carry any of my teaching duties per se, he was an enormous help in my personal life. Because of his incredible ability to remember numbers of any kind, all I had to do is give him my weekly appointment and meeting schedule and he would come into class and remind me that day where I was supposed to be and when. He would in a few words also say things like, “Bring your iPad,” or “They are going to rotate your tires,” which was just enough to make me look prepared when I arrived at said appointment. Needless to say, the beauty of Richard was that for two years, I never missed a dentist appointment, a haircut, a doubles match, or a date night with my wife. That last one had some big pay offs, and things around our house were never better than when Richard was in charge of my time. (full disclosure to naysayers and activists: I had many a conference with Richard’s parents who were glad to see his skills being utilized).

So, knowing that our Bunny Bunny Rabbit Rabbit Club was meeting on the first of every month did pose some challenges for me. Particularly without Richard. I began to think I would do some searching on the internet before I would commit to being somewhere every first of every month. I did not want to build up any undesirable resentments at having joined a club that might have some sinister or clandestine background or start receiving any teleprompts at dinnertime telling me I needed to call back or my IRA would be confiscated.

As it turned out, I found some really good news. Most of the references to repeating the word “rabbit” on Wikipedia turn out to be positive, and in general lead to some kind of luck if you say the word this way or that at the beginning of the month. It’s like a blessing, only without the religion, or any twelve-step program. I’m not generally in favor of relying on luck, so I began to wonder whether joining the club might cause me to pick up habits like throwing salt (or rabbits) over my shoulder or rubbing a Buddha statue’s tummy. I’ve tried both of those things for luck and got thrown out of restaurant for the first one, and out of a temple for the other.

What I learned was “NO” to luck, “YES” to blessings.

However, there are a couple of specific negative references to rabbits than concerned me on the Internet, as I continued my research. One has to do with an archaic 19th superstition fisherman had about saying it when they went out to sea. That one did not concern me, as lately I am spending little or no time fishing at sea. Even if I was, I’m sure my conversation would be centered around fish and not rabbits.

The other reference has to do with actually seeing a white rabbit near a dying person. I’m not even going to go there given the kind of year we have all had. Finally, there was one reference that suggested yelling the word “Rabbit!” up a chimney would alter your day in a good way. I opened the flume on our chimney and tried it once or twice for good luck, got an eyeful of soot and scared a roosting bat out of its wits, and almost into our living room. I decided then and there that I won’t be incorporating that in my repertoire of “Have a nice day!” routines.

Well, so much for over thinking things through research. I may make further references to the history of the title of our club, but I will try to keep it short. Most people only can stand so much folklore and historical minutia, given their time constraints, personal “lucky” habits, and relationships with bunnies.

So, back to the rules and regulations, our first club rule is that you must show up to the meeting on the first of the month. The second rule is that you must be willing to walk. Show up and walk. That is the club, the Bunny Bunny Rabbit Rabbit Club. It’s a walking club, and just to be clear, you do not have to hop because that would be just plain exhausting. I have seen Olympic athletes astound and thrill audiences all over the world with their feats of strength, agility, cunning and finesse, but there are few of them who take more than a few hops anywhere in any of these events, which should tell you how difficult it is. Even bunnies that do it only hop for a few hops, (known in the bunny biz as “hop-a-doodles”), before they tire of it, stop to stare you down while they gnaw on your newly sprouted, unspoiled daffodils. Some of you may take argument with the Olympic event, the hop/skip/jump, but again it is only one hop and then competitors immediately revert to something no bunny has ever been seen doing, and no one in our club better be seen doing, either. At our age, skipping sounds and looks a lot like its cousin, tripping, which would immediately get you tossed out of the group for obvious reasons.

There is a third requisite to the Bunny Bunny Rabbit Rabbit Club, but it is not mandatory. Members may need to talk as well as walk. Walk and talk. But talking is only voluntary. Since all of the members so far are retired teachers, we have no problems talking. In fact, at our first meeting, there was continuous chatter from the moment we arrived, with no one really listening to anyone else. Thankfully, listening is not one of the rules. No one said anything about listening. If talking isn’t required, then listening certainly isn’t necessary, and I suspect they’ll be darn little of it if our first meeting is any indication.

During our first meeting, since I provided most of the leadership in the not-listening department, I can tell you very little about specific things that were said as we walked continuously and interrupted each other on a regular basis. Teachers will be the first to tell you that they are great at interrupting. Just sit in on any faculty meeting and watch an administrator or principal try to get a word in edgewise. Even when a principal gets the conversations down to a dull roar, the teachers aren’t really listening. Upon close inspection, most of them are deftly texting each other without even looking down at their phones hidden under the table, while continuing to smile and nod at policies being reviewed for the thousandth time ad nauseum ad infinitum.

A few more key bullet points stood out to me in the cacophony of chatter as we walked, not hopped, over hill and dale. I might add here that none of these topics inspired me to be a better person in any way, and most of them were not informative, true or helpful or even necessary. However, all of it was kind and respectful, which is a quality in short supply in this world, and sorely needed in surplus quantities. While the subjects of insurance rates, taking care of elderly parents, raising grandkids, and orthotics did pop up, the “kindness” thread that was woven in our bunny squared rabbit squared (Rats! Spell check still after me!) group was a reminder that in spite of the disrespect we were sometimes subjected to while we were teaching, there were many shining moments that deserved a higher space than we had to time to give them during our teaching careers, or on one walk.

(Hmmmmmm…Next month we walk on April Fool’s day, and we’ll have both luck and the foolishness in the mix. Luck and Fools. Sounds like an old-fashioned baking soda).

So, while we may be just a walking club now, we teachers did not always just walk. In fact, we never walked at school. We hit the ground at a dead run before most people get out of bed, ready if not eager to see if the plan we made the night before, or in the middle of the night, or over the summer, or while on vacation, was going to work with our students at school. We used to say that the days were long, but the years were short. Many of the days were very, very long… and complicated. And DIFFICULT. Full of more than just a few hurdles and a couple of really big hops. It was more like a leap of faith that got us through, Bunny Bunny Rabbit Rabbit, and if we are lucky it’ll keep us new clubbers talking and walking.

(Next entry for the Bunny Bunny Rabbit Rabbit Club will be April something-or-other, 2021).