WOW! Six years with this dude? Why not?
Did you know that an amazing man is walking across the WORLD? Boy, I’ve heard of lost kitties finding their families across miles and miles of territory, but it’s hard for me to imagine a kitty walking across the globe!
Mama was struck by this amazing story, because she says she has a piece of what Paul Solopek, the World Walker, calls “Car Brain”—a dependence on automobiles that deadens ones responses to so many sensual, visual and mental experiences to be had by being on foot. (I have those all the time because I don’t drive, thank heaven!)
Mama knows all about that—or did, for a little while, she says, when she and papa revisited our little fishing village in France. For their first few off-and-on years there, mama walked like a madwoman through changing seasons of the lovely local vineyards, watching them turn from brilliant green in summer to mottled red and yellow (Catalan colors!) in autumn, leafless, lonely brown skeletons in winter when the leaves had dropped off, and then to a pale, sweet lime color as the spring started up their growth.
She walked through nearby forests with sometimes disturbing sounds of unseen animals rooting in leaves—wild boar, maybe, or only little birds, pecking for food—and she found remnants of what could have been pieces of Roman pottery or crumbling walls when Caesar controlled the world. At least she made up stories that were fun to contemplate while striding through history! (I make up things all the time when I’m dozing—I just look asleep, but actually, I’m writing scenarios of all sorts of things in my little private pea brain.)
(Scaling new heights on papa’s leg)
Mama says her fan-feet were made to stay firmly on the ground, but I catch her flying in her mind, so often that she seems she might just take off and soar over the eternal city in search of more walks, unknown paths, tiny streets off the tourist tracks, and so I understand her wish to “walk across the world”, if only metaphorically (I have to know THAT word because mama speaks so often in those meta-things!).
I’m going to finish that guy’s article right now. There’s a picture of a very funny animal walking along with him, and I just have to find out what THAT is! It’s something that can go a long time without water, which means it goes a long time without peeing, right? Boy, would that solve a lot of problems for all of us!
And after I finish the story, I’m gonna walk from the front door to my bed.
Whew! That’s gonna be tough…but one day—World, here I come!
Maybe I’ll start out tomorrow…
