Back in the day, my dad’s legs took him places—up and down hills a mile to school, across fields behind plow horses, and along fence rows and creeks on his family’s farm checking traps in his first entrepreneurial effort to sell pelts to Sears Roebuck.
And less than a decade ago, my dad was small-town famous for walking.
“I just figured out who you are,” a man once said to my dad in the waiting room of a neighboring city hospital. “You’re that old guy who walks all over London.”
That’s where my dad lives, in the small town of London, Ohio, where he once had six walking routes, one for each day of the week minus Sunday.
He was known not only for how much he walked, but for the way he moved. I’d drive home from a day of teaching, and far down the street I could spot him—erect, purposeful, and sure, with a steady fall of each step and arms swinging forward at the same speed and same angle of the opposite leg. His head high, he looked toward where he was going.
He walked the way he lived.
At the time, I thought he was old. Now I know he wasn’t.
The other day, I watched him cross the dining room. It was like he set out to mime Emily Dickinson’s poem.
I stepped from Plank to Plank
A slow and cautious way
The Stars about my Head I felt
About my Feet the Sea.
I knew not but the next
Would be my final inch –
This gave me that precarious Gait
Some call Experience.
But the poem is about more than my Dad’s altered gait. As always, Dickinson uses concrete images to show abstract concepts. Here, she writes about my dad’s increasing wisdom, how he now thinks—with a lack of speed and with great concentration, considering first this angle and then another, how he tries to take perspective of the generations before him when he writes history, and how he considers the views of the three generations that follow him in his family.
He’s seen what missteps can do. And he wants to tread his final inches with care.
Apple to Apple 