A few weeks ago I posed a question to AskORblogs regarding pedometers. I received some good answers. One fellow weblogger — Michael at Following Edge (a weblog worth reading) — went further; he mailed me a pedometer to test. I've been using it for a couple of weeks and it confirms what I already knew: I am sedentary.

My interest in pedometers was sparked by the film Super Size Me. As a part of the protagonist's thirty-day McDonald's-only diet, he reduces his physical activity to that of the average American. He wears a pedometer to track his movements. Before the diet he walks more than 5000 paces per day. "That's too much," advises one of his three doctors. "The average sedentary person takes fewer than 2500 steps each day." And so our hero forces himself to walk less.

"How much do I walk?" I wondered. "I'll bet I don't walk much at all."

After using the pedometer for two days, I thought maybe my worries had been for naught. In what I considered narmal activity, I made 4000 thousand paces each day. On the third day I dropped to 2500 paces, but it didn't bother me. I'd already seen that I could do 4000 steps without much effort.

But then reality hit. My daily totals were 1500 and 1800 and 1650 and 1500 again. In fact, it seemed that on most days I took about 1500 steps.

It seems that I'm one of the most sedentary of the sedentary.

I've decided to remedy this situation. There are a number of walk-to-fitness programs, but they all stress one key thing: get out and walk! For the past three days, I've been trying to do just that.

I know from past experience that I take about 2000 paces to a mile. One common theme in these walking programs is a goal of 10,000 paces per day. I've not yet reached 10,000 steps in a day, but I did reach 9500 paces on Saturday, 8600 paces on Sunday, and 9300 paces yesterday.

It's a start.

But today is my first day at work since I started this regimen, and the numbers are scary. It's nearly noon and I've only taken 190 steps all day. Criminy! It looks as if I'll have to take a long walk later this evening.

I took a long walk yesterday afternoon. The fog had burned off and the sun was shining glorious all around. I decided to walk to the library to pick up my holds.

For the first time since we moved in, I wandered through the neighborhood on foot. I listened to the birds, and to the trickle of the water in gullies and gutters. The kids were just getting out from school. One boy leaned forward, climbing a hill, towing his two buddies in rollerskates behind him. Cats and dogs sprawled on sidewalks and lawns, basking in the warmth. Where they were not allowed outside, they basked in living room windows, on the backs of sofas and chairs.

It was easy to sense that we are on the cusp of spring.

When I made it to the library, I was less pleased than angry with myself. It's closed on Mondays! I know that, but it had slipped my mind in my eagerness to walk. Ah well. I decided that in order to make the trip worthwhile, I'd make my return trip on side streets I'd never seen.

It was on one of these streets that I walked past an old man. He was shuffling along, hands in his pickets. He reminded me of Pappy (Popeye's father): he wore a cap, a grizzled white beard, and he had hardly any teeth. How do I know he had hardly any teeth? I had just walked past him when he said, "I wish I had that kind of mobility."

Had I been in a bad mood, I might have walked on without reply, but I was in a good mood, and experience has shown that these sorts of encounters are fun, so I stopped to talk. Or to listen. And what the man said didn't make a lot of sense.

First I explained that my mobility had decreased since my knee surgery. "I'm getting old," I said, which is what I always say in situations like this. (It always gets a laugh from those who are even older than I am.) The old man looked at me with suspicion.

"You ain't so old," he said. He began to count on his fingers. "One, two, three — I'm three months of eighty-one. Yessir, you get to be my age and you can say what you please, you've earned the right to be a pain in the ass. Especially to your kids.

"Kids these days," he said. "When I was in school, it was for the Navy, and we didn't ask questions. My boy, for instance, if you can call him that."

"What do you mean?" I asked. I walked beside him as he shuffled down the sidewalk.

"Can you really call him my son?" he said. "I gave him three cars in less than a year. The first car, he wrecked it in the first week. The second car, he wrecked it four months later. The third car he wrecked again. And in a year! Can you believe it? He wanted another one, but I said 'hell no'. A boy like that.

"In the school, I was in the subs, and I tell you, you had discipline then. You had to. And then they tried to tell me I didn't know what to do, but it was three wars, you know. Three wars! And then nothing in return.

"Hell I remember when I got back, I lived up there in Washington, but it wasn't no place to live. They called it a small town, but nobody said hello, nobody knew each other. 'Twas like the big city but without the big city and what's the good of that?"

I was lost by now; the non-sequiturs hurt my head. I tried to steer the conversation back to familiar ground. "Have you lived here long?" The man looked at me as if I were stupid. He sucked the air in and out through his gums: a wheezing laugh.

"And didn't I just say so? First here and then Washington and now here again. But not the same place. It doesn't matter none though. I don't walk every day, but I keep active. I keep active. You gotta keep active or your done. You wanna live 'til your eighty so you can be a pain in the ass.

"I walk up here and sometimes I walk up there to that rummage place" — the Goodwill thrift store — "and look around. You can find some stuff there if you look hard enough. You gotta look, though. You gotta look. I bought this hat there.

"But you gotta watch out, too, because the school's ain't what they was. But even then, they didn't believe me."

And so on.

Eventually I left the old man. I traipsed downhill to the end of Arista, and then to Risley Park. In the park, I found some flyers about the proposed linear park. The Friends of the Trolley Trail are converting six miles of the old inter-urban rail line to a multi-use path. Sounds like a keen project.

Time and again I've learned that it only takes getting out into the neighborhood to meet people and to have experiences from which I may draw the stuff of stories.

It's strange. It's as if the people I meet want to talk to me, want to tell me their stories. Does this happen to other people, too?

On this day at foldedspace.org

2004 — Denied   Maybe it's because I finally got around to watching Bowling for Columbine last night; maybe it's because I'm becoming more disgusted with the United States government (Republican or Democrat) and its policies as I get older; maybe it's because I'm a rational human being. Whatever the case, this piece of news pisses me off...

2003 — No Rain   Our photography assignment last week was to photograph rain, or to make photographs that evoked a feeling of rain. Unfortunately, rain was in short supply.

2002 — TAG Science   I was a squirrely kid. Looking back I'm not sure how my teachers coped with me. Not all of them did.