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Celebration of interdependence

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A wonderful collection of poems about fatherhood from the talented Clint Smith, a book I discovered, appropriately enough, at Busboys and Poets in this fourth installment of my exploration of independent bookshops in the Washington region.

(NOTE: If you are reading this post via email, click on the title to see the online version, so you can read the entire poems included here.)

As part of my year-long exploration of independent bookshops, I knew Busboys and Poets would be high on the list. I’ve been in half of their eight locations in the DC area at some point in the past twenty years and I pass the Takoma store several times a week, occasionally stopping in for a meal (I am partial to their chili) and to browse the community-focused bookshop. For the fourth installment in this series, * I made two stops very convenient to the Metro Red Line—Takoma and Brookland—to take a deeper dive into the socially-conscious literature that is a hallmark of these small but well-stocked stores.

The name Busboys and Poets refers to American poet Langston Hughes who worked as a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel in the 1920s when he famously left his poems at the table of poet Vachel Lindsay, who then helped launch his career. It pays tribute to the idea that a “busboy” (working class) and “poet” (artist) can be the same person, reflecting the venue’s focus on connecting art, activism, and community.

Busboys and Poets (credit: Wikimedia)

Not only a restaurant, Busboys and Poets aims to be “a space in which intellectual, cultural, political, and social issues can come together for a discussion that benefits everyone.” They do this “through access to socially-conscious literature, programs, healing conversations and a respectful exchange of ideas.”

The first store, founded by artist Andy Shallal, was on 14th & V streets NW in Washington. 14th & V is located in the U Street Corridor neighborhood, known as “Black Broadway” in the 1920s, and is a major center of DC’s cultural, artistic and progressive activist scene. The Takoma store continues that theme of location in vibrant, progressive communities, and it was there that I found a wonderful book of poems by a gifted Black author and poet so appropriate to the shop’s name and themes.

Above Ground: Poems (2023) by Clint Smith explores the emotional terrain of fatherhood in works that are touching, light-hearted, gripping, loving, insightful, disturbing, and delightful. In other words, they are just like being a parent. Smith is a gifted writer who looks deeply at lineage and the history surrounding being black in America. He is also discovering the world anew through the eyes of a child, with the curiosity and joy that often comes when one encounters life for the first time. As the publisher notes, Above Ground “wrestles with how we hold wonder and despair in the same hands, how we carry intimate moments of joy and a collective sense of mourning in the same body.” I had a range of emotions reading the collection: delight, laughter, and recognition of life with children, certainly. But also sadness at the world our children—and especially children of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, and children of immigrants—inhabit today. Smith has captured the joys and sorrows of life through vibrant poems that look at the everyday occurrences of parenting.

In “Waiting on a Heartbeat” Smith captures the anxiety that begins even before childbirth. He imagines his son telling him from the womb that “there is joy in being a father to a mystery.” There is the reading of Dr. Seuss each night while his son is still in the womb, and Smith comes up with choice lines such as

“I read a sentence | and watch you kick, and I tell your mother | that you are laughing and she tells me you | are trying to let me know that my turtle | voice is subpar.”

Smith also shares the fear of all expectant parents of having a doctor who tells the mother that the problem is all in her head only to discover—when returning to the hospital and demanding a different physician who will run some tests—something that occurs in one out of one thousand pregnancies that could have been fatal to mother and child. Into this period he drops a poem “When People Say ‘We Have Made It Through Worse Before'” that reminds us—as well as the poet—that “We are not all left | standing after the war has ended. Some of us have | become ghosts by the time the dust has settled.”

New birth is a mixture of science and mystery, as Smith reminds us as he writes “What is the difference between science | and a miracle other than discovering new | language for something we don’t understand.”

Something else we don’t understand is how absolutely tiring it can be to raise a child. Smith finds this truth in the delightful “Ode to the Electric Baby Swing.”

Throughout this lovely collection, Smith reminds his children, himself, and his readers of where we come from.

ROOTS

Your great-grandfather was born in 1930 Mississippi

You were born five months ago in Washington, D.C.

Your life is only possible because of his ability

to have walked through this country on fire

without turning into ash.

You come from his deep voice,

you come from his thick bones,

you come from the curl of his Ls

when he says hello.

The first time I handed you to him, I watched

as you settled on his lap. I saw the way your brows

furrowed just like his, how your eyes carry the same

pools of wonder, how when both of you smile it begins

on the left side of the mouth and then blooms

into chrysanthemums at each edge.

I first came to know Smith’s nonfiction work when I read How the Word is Passed. Smith’s masterful book is told with a poet’s ear for the story. Which is as it should be. In that 2021 book he takes the reader to landmarks and monuments all across America, places where guides, local citizens, and activists tell stories to those who visit. Some of the stories are true. Some are willfully false. Others work with less than complete information to try and point towards truth.

As a historian and preservationist, I was exhilarated and challenged by How the Word is Passed. Exhilarated that a writer of Smith’s talent and background would take on public history in such a thoughtful and respectful way, while recognizing the importance in saving the places where history happened. Challenged by the realization yet again of how far we have to go just to a true examination of the past.

As a father, I had similar reactions in reading Above Ground. Smith’s poetry makes the ritual of Sunday morning French toast a marvel. His eye for the absurd leads him to wonder why, on Halloween night, he has chosen to “bundle you into a costume of cured meat.” He doesn’t know, but the scene is creates with the hot dog costume is priceless.

“But your mother | is dressed as a pickle and I am dressed as a bottle | of ketchup and together we make a family of ballpark | delicacies.”

Because “who are we to deny anyone the joy of an infant wrapped in processed meat.”

But Smith can also write about the tragedy of another school shooting and say that “I don’t know how I am ever | supposed to let you | out of my sight.”

Joy and grief. Laughter and sorrow. It is all there in fatherhood. In Above Ground. In life.

More to come . . .

DJB

*To see the most recent installment in my year of visiting the DMV’s independent bookshops, click here. Four down, twenty-one to go!

Photo by Atharva Whaval on Unsplash

The narrative of America

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A new book by Walter Isaacson considers one of the most famous sentences in American history.

The American narrative is not simple, straightforward, and linear. Narratives seldom are.

They often begin with great promise. Or great danger. Sometimes both. They meander and, if the author or authors aren’t careful, the reader becomes lost or disillusioned. At inopportune times—perhaps when the characters are at their weakest—some outside force comes along to throw the whole tale off track. Events hidden at the time they occur can resurface much later and cast the entire enterprise into doubt. Too often the story line is so hard to follow, or becomes so unbelievable, that the reader gives up in frustration.

But when a narrative needs to be told, a core truth or ideal may resurface at key moments to remind us of the value, the necessity even, of this particular story.

The Greatest Sentence Ever Written (2025) by Walter Isaacson examines the narrative of America through the lens of the second sentence in the Declaration of Independence. In 67 short pages, Isaacson begins by making it clear that while we think of Thomas Jefferson as the author of one of the world’s most famous documents, he really just wrote the first draft which was then edited and changed multiple times. The drafting committee, including Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, made substantial alterations, including to the first phrase, which Jefferson penned as “We hold these truths to be sacred . . . .” It was Franklin who crossed out “sacred” and inserted “self-evident.” From there, Isaacson takes us through what the men (and they were all men) were thinking, and the cultural and intellectual influences that swirled around them when they drafted, reworked, and ultimately signed their names to the document that rings with these words:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

This is a book that can be read in one setting, yet one to be savored and referenced again and again. Isaacson is a gifted writer with a deep love for history and biography. He notes that the phrase “self-evident” has a very specific meaning in analytic philosophy, “more than just a fancy way to say ‘obvious.'” The concept was developed by Franklin’s close friend David Hume. By labeling as self-evident the truths in their sentence, “Franklin and the drafting committee implied that they were true by definition, ‘discoverable by the mere operation of thought,’ not contingent on observations.”

“But let’s be honest,” Isaacson writes. “Labeling their assertions of ‘these truths’ as ‘self-evident’ was not entirely correct. They were, in fact, quite controversial, even revolutionary.”

In a similar fashion Isaacson takes us through the background and decision-making around the use of the well known phrases “all men,” “created equal,” “endowed by their creator.”

These truths became the “creed that bound a diverse group of pilgrims and immigrants into one nation.” The Declaration of Independence, as written in 1776 and then reinforced “four score and seven years” later at Gettysburg by Abraham Lincoln, defined both our common ground and our aspirations.

And it is in the exploration of what constitutes that common ground and how we continue to hold on to it in perilous times where Isaacson makes his case. We must seek those truths once again if we are to survive as a democracy. We need to refocus on the idea of the commons, where people treat each other with equal dignity. Americans—at their best—have shown how to be fiercely independent individuals who are equally fiercely devoted to their community and its commons.

Both Jefferson and Franklin, writes Isaacson, studied Isaac Newton “whose mechanics explained how contending forces could be brought into equilibrium. Their goal on contentious issues was not to triumph but to find the right balance.”

“Compromisers may not make great heroes, Franklin like to say, but they do make great democracies.”

But in today’s world the commons is shrinking. Isaacson quotes the philosopher Michael Sandel’s concept of the “skyboxification” of America, whereby places and practices that used to be in commons are now roped off. We used to sit in the same stands, come in through the same entrances, and share a common experience. But now there are VIP entrances and skyboxes. Gated neighborhoods. Separate lines at airports. Different types of schools. And this fracturing of our community is also seen in technology. What once promised to connect us “found a better business model in dividing us.”

America’s core principle, that this is a land of opportunity for all, is under attack. In the end Isaacson asks the reader to return to Franklin’s question about the purpose of an economy. Sure it exists to create wealth and growth. But the deeper purpose, Isaacson and Franklin would argue, is to create a good society. “A good, stable society where individuals can be free and flourish and live together in harmony.”

Our narratives and myths are always changing, and are often fractured. How can we move forward? Isaacson urges us to “be more like Franklin. He not only helped craft the sentence that defines our common ground. He lived it.

Franklin organized police, fire, and street-sweeping corps; a public library, hospital, and school; pension funds for widowers; and mutual insurance cooperatives. He ran a newspaper and publishing house that followed no party line. He gave money to a wide range of causes. Franklin set up a revolving fund for young entrepreneurs. When he died he was the largest individual donor to the Congregation Mikveh Israel, the first synagogue in Philadelphia. 20,000 mourners watched his funeral procession, “which was led by all the clergymen of every faith, including the local rabbi, walking arm-in-arm.”

In a recent newsletter, the historian and activist Rebecca Solnit wrote about the way that the wealthy and elites have destroyed the commons in our time to enrich their own wallets.

“In the 1990s I watched San Francisco-based Craigslist undermine newspaper want ads—what we called the classified section—as it expanded. There’s an argument to be made that Craigslist was a more convenient service, but the want ads in newspapers subsidized journalism. The revenue from Craigslist just subsidized Craig Newmark, who became a billionaire. It’s ironic that what was once Columbia Graduate School of Journalism is now the Craig Newmark School of Journalism; it’s a bit like a fox endowing an orphanage for motherless eggs. (He could have at least given the money directly to news reporting.)”

Isaacson maintains that Franklin’s example is the ideal of living in support of common ground and the American Dream. When I think of billionaires today hoarding their money made off the backs of workers and taxpayers, destroying our newspapers and social media, openly suggesting that democracy no longer works, I believe we need to do all we can to rein them in and rebuild the commons. And the American Dream.

More to come . . .

DJB

John Trumbull’s famous painting of the committee sharing its draft of the Declaration of Independence with the Second Continental Congress in the Public Domain from Wikimedia.

From the bookshelf: February 2026

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Five books. Every month. A variety of topics from different genres. Here is the list from February 2026.

Water, Water: Poems (2024) by Billy Collins is a collection of 60 new poems that looks at life with his typical informality and attention to the commonplace and all that’s around us. The topics Collins considers are serious—being counted, getting older, connecting with others—but he addresses them in a lighthearted way that asks us see the humor and occasional absurdity in life. There is beauty in the everyday, even in getting older, and Collins helps us see and appreciate it. And he’ll write about the everyday parts of life we encounter as we stroll down the street, sit down to a bowl of cereal, watch a cat drink from a swimming pool, turn our attention to the nurse in a doctor’s waiting room. There is a reason Collins is one of America’s favorite poets.

Ways of Walking (2022) edited by Ann de Forest is a collection of 26 wide-ranging essays whose writers reflect on where they have walked and what they have discovered. Exuberant, troubled, surprised, and reflective—often as part of the same journey—these authors are always thoughtful and observant. They grapple with a multitude of questions, the most basic one being, “Why did you start to walk?” Once one makes the decision to reach out and grab life, walking at a human pace is a decision to encounter it intimately. In their walking these writers are sometimes crossing forbidden lines and breaking boundaries. Some are walking for social justice and peace. Others are pushing themselves to deeply explore their immediate environment in order to understand the challenges to our lives on this planet. Throughout there are discoveries, both small and large. The collection has been described as “a moving, endlessly stimulating invitation to walk, to think, and to rethink walking.”

Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment (2024) by Allen Guelzo is written for those “who have despaired of the future or whose lives have been ruined by the failures of the present.” Lincoln came along in his time to rescue our democracy on its last gasp. His was an intervention “so unlooked for as to defy hope.” Guelzo, who is a lover of democracy “as only the descendant of immigrants can love it,” focuses on Lincoln’s principles with both the skill and passion of someone who yearns that “this last, best hope of earth may yet have a new birth of freedom.” This is a story that, as one reviewer notes, is for those short on hope and—just as important and just as troubling—perspective. Guelzo reminds us, as all good historians do, that while we live in difficult, uncertain times and have worries about our future, so it has nearly always been.

Coffee (2020) by Dinah Lenney is part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons—a series of short books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. And what could be more ordinary, perhaps even ubiquitous, than a cup of coffee? We turn to coffee to get us through our waking hour, the morning, the meeting, the day. We have coffee breaks and coffee shops and some of us, with our grinders and slow-drip brewers in our home kitchens, have coffee rituals. Coffee can be used to slow ourselves down or speed ourselves up. There is so much that could be said about coffee’s place in our lives and in our culture. And if you aren’t careful, one can try and explore all those possible avenues and come off appearing if you wrote this extended essay while being overcaffeinated. Lenney, unfortunately, falls in that category. She needed to skip a cup (or pot) each day and decide what this book wants to be when it grows up.

The Late Monsieur Gallet (1931) by Georges Simenon, an early work in the Inspector Maigret series, is a tale of misdirection, betrayal, and misfortune. Called to the crime scene in a small hotel outside Paris, Maigret is immediately struck by the fact that so much about the case seems fake. The grieving relatives don’t exactly grieve. The dead man used an alias and had not worked at his stated place of business for 18 years. He traveled extensively throughout the country although his health was poor. Monsieur Gallet had been shot in the head, but it was a knife stabbed in the heart, administered almost immediately after the gun wound, that killed him. And was the dead man right or left-handed? Maigret delves into the contradictions that are all around him, trying desperately to sort out the facts from fiction.

WHAT’S ON THE NIGHTSTAND FOR MARCH (Subject to change at the whims of the reader)

Keep reading!

More to come . . .

DJB

NOTE: Click to see the books I read in January of 2026 and to see the books I read in 2025. 

Photo of library from Pixabay.

A fine way to celebrate a special day

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Brief thoughts . . . and a poem . . . for a birthday.

(NOTE: If you are reading this post via email, click on the title to see the online version, so you can read the entire poems included here.)

Turning 71 is somewhat anti-climatic. When you reach a nice round birthday like 70, people send cards from all around the globe. Heck, you are even allowed to tell the world how wise you are. You’ve reached a milestone.

But birthdays that don’t end in 0 or 5 are often treated as lesser events. We should simply nod at the passage of time and move on. I get the sentiment. We can only gear up for big ones every so often, I tell myself. If every day is a big celebration . . . well, I’m not going down that philosophical road. Not on my birthday.

But I’ve always liked birthday celebrations. This year I’m using mine to explore parts of this wonderful world we live in. Let’s celebrate with a poem for the occasion by Billy Collins.

Once in a Dog’s Age

Just because a dog or a cat or even a hen

doesn’t know how old it is

doesn’t mean it’s not that old.

Every creature moves along

the treadmill of time at its own pace,

most insects hurrying along,

while the tortoise lumbers under its armor.

Many do not look their age

but sometimes you can tell—

take that ancient sparrow

barely moving along as if on crutches.

But what about this crow

on a fence post by the roadside?

No telling how old he is.

Today could be his birthday

for all we know, and who’s to say

that perching on a fence post

is not a fine way to celebrate a special day?

My next one’s still months away

but when it finally rolls up to the door,

I will remember that crow

of a certain age and join him

on another fence post down the road,

showing off my blue-black feathers,

my shiny head always swiveling

over a field of flowering potatoes

and under an immense silvery sky,

as one car comes and goes,

then another from the other direction.

More to come . . .

DJB

Once in a Dog’s Age from the book Water, Water: Poems.

Photo of an American Crow by Henry Burton in All About Birds. Photo of Giant Tortoise on Seychelles by Dan Maisey on Unsplash. I have been visiting Seychelles this past week and have marveled at these ancient giants in the wild.

Illuminating the past in light of the present

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Eric Foner’s new book of essays from the last 30 years helps us understand that “the past is the key of the present and the mirror of the future.”

Historians and history are very much a part of today’s news. There is a war on history that has about as much to do with history as the “occupation” of Washington or Minneapolis has to do with crime. A new book of essays written by one of our country’s most distinguished historians arrives into this moment like a bracing breath of fresh air.

Our Fragile Freedoms: Essays (2025) by Eric Foner makes it clear that while there is no single “correct” way to study history, we must engage seriously with that past if we are to unlock and confront some of the most difficult challenges we face today. In a little under 60 essays, Foner looks at history through the lens of his own groundbreaking work around the Civil War and Reconstruction as well as from the perspective of a wide range of professional historians working in the field. The latter comes primarily from book reviews that provide the reader with context and new insights. Foner views the horrors of slavery and the violent return to white rule that came at the end of Reconstruction with his eyes wide open. Many of the essays and reviews seek to move us past the “consensus” of the Jim Crow era that the “Negro Rule” of Reconstruction was corrupt and ineffective while praising the white “redeemers” who used violence to stop Blacks from voting, holding office and owning property. It is a consensus that has been repudiated by professional historians but that is still a widely-held belief by large portions of the American public. And while Foner’s work builds on his own time in academia as well as dozens of other historians from the academy, his clear and cogent writing is easily accessible to a much wider mass audience. He is writing now to help us address the question of whether America can ever escape the legacy of slavery without a much more honest examination of the past.

In a theme-setting introduction, Foner reminds his readers to avoid reading history as a linear narrative of progress. And just to prove the point, he begins with two powerful essays—both book reviews—about how little we still know and understand the slave trade and slavery in this country. A review of Robin Blackburn’s The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights tells us that among the book’s many virtues is the fact that it moves slavery from the periphery to the center of any account of western ascendancy. “Between 1500 and 1820, African slaves constituted about 80 percent of those who crossed the Atlantic from east to west.” Slave plantations, more than any other institution, “underpinned the extraordinary expansion of western power and the region’s prosperity in relation to the rest of the world.” Even after emancipation, Americans refused to grapple with the impact of slavery on the nation, a refusal that continues to this day.

Foner’s review of Marcus Rediker’s book The Slave Ship: A Human History reminds readers about history’s greatest forced migration. Over the course of four hundred years “eleven million Africans were transported involuntarily to the New World. About three million more perished onboard the ships or in the process of capture and enslavement in Africa.” To forget that scale of human trafficking—and the complicity it required—thwarts our ability to address the long tail of the aftermath.

When he turns to the section on Civil War and Reconstruction, Foner begins with a review of historian Drew Gilpin Faust’s book This Republic of Suffering, an insightful work that looks at how death on a massive scale changed the life of the nation. Foner writes that Faust’s task is to strip from war any lingering romanticism, nobility, or social purpose. In another essay, published in 2011 in The Nation, Foner reminds readers that the Civil War changed the nature of warfare, created an empowered nation-state, vindicated the idea of free labor, and destroyed the modern world’s greatest slave society. Each of these outcomes, as from all great historical events, carried with them ambiguous, even contradictory, consequences. We are grappling with those today.

In that same essay, Foner identifies the gap that exists between historical scholarship and popular understanding of history.

“In April 1961, when Charleston, South Carolina, marked the anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter, the city was bedecked with Confederate flags and the commemorations made no mention of slavery. Fifty years later, in April 2011, the city fathers and National Park Service sponsored a gathering that included reflections on slavery’s role in the war and on post-slavery race relations. As in 1961, a band played ‘Dixie,’ but now it was accompanied by ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic,’ recognition that a majority of South Carolina’s population (the slaves) sided with the Union, not the Confederacy. But the event attracted far smaller crowds than the first time around.”

In other insightful essays and reviews, Foner moves through Jim Crow America, the Gilded Age, and our struggles in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century to move past the legacy of slavery that has always been, as President U.S. Grant told German Emperor Bismarck, “a stain on our Union.” I was fascinated by the final section on historians and myth, where Foner reviews the work of such pathbreakers as W.E.B. Du Bois, C. Vann Woodward, and Richard Hofstadter. A final, bracing essay looks at historians and the role of myth in American life. In pushing back against the view that Americans need new myths, Foner argues that the role of the historian today “is not so much to devise new myths as to piece together a candid appraisal, no matter how alarming, of the fraught moment in which we live.”

Foner has won the Bancroft Prize, the Lincoln Prize, and the Pulitzer. His most famous book is Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 published in 1988. It set the standard for modern histories of Reconstruction. One of his most important, from my point of view, is The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution which brought together a lifetime of scholarship around this most contentious era in our nation’s history. And in spite of its look at a period some 150 years in the past, it is work with great resonance for this day, this political climate, and the major questions of how we will advance as a nation.

Foner makes the point that “the past is the key of the present and the mirror of the future” as he opens Our Fragile Freedoms.

“The pieces reproduced here also remind us of the current crisis of American democracy, reflected in intense political polarization, the weaponizing of base prejudice, and refusal to accept the outcomes of elections. This situation is not unprecedented. American democracy has always been a terrain of conflict. Our politics have always included those who believe that too many people, or people of the ‘wrong’ kind, are voting and taking part in public debate. Various forms of violence—war, assassination, mob actions, political repression, the brutality intrinsic to slavery—have played more of a role in our history than is often recognized. I vividly recall watching televised images of the Capitol riot as it unfolded on January 6, 2021, and hearing a commentator declare that ‘nothing like this’ has happened before in the United States. ‘That’s wrong,’ I remarked to no one in particular. ‘What about the Battle of Liberty Place or the Colfax Massacre—violent uprisings a century and a half ago that sought to oust democratically elected state and local governments in Reconstruction Louisiana—or the 1898 coup d’etat in Wilmington, North Carolina, that marked the end of biracial government in that state?”

History, Foner writes, was visible at that riot. It remains visible today. We forget it, ignore it, or sanitize it at our peril.

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo by Roma Kaiukua on Unsplash

Observations from . . . February 2026

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A summary of the February posts from the MORE TO COME newsletter.

This February has earned its reputation as the longest month of the year. In the Washington region we were hit by more than six inches of snow topped by ice followed by a couple of weeks of sub-freezing temperatures. Our local governments don’t always have the tools and resources to respond to winter weather so we hunker down. For some, the feeling of being trapped has taken on an existential dread, with something or someone we cannot escape living inside our head.

Thankfully a group of nineteen Buddhist monks on a Walk for Peace of more than 2,300 miles showed an alternative to simply living as if we’re trapped and powerless. They stepped out. Their trek from Texas to Washington was designed to raise “awareness of peace, loving-kindness and compassion across America and the world.” It also raised awareness about the power of the simple act of lifting a foot, swinging a hip, bending a knee to plant that foot on solid ground, and then repeating those actions over and over again.

“Why do we start to walk?” is a question that can be answered on many levels in a variety of circumstances. But once one makes the decision to reach out and grab life, walking at a human pace is a decision to encounter it intimately. And even in the darkness, cold, and snow of February, taking that first step can help us recognize that we each have power. We can do hard things.

Let’s step off into this month’s posts on MORE TO COME to see where my perambulations took me in February.

READER FAVORITES

As the monks were arriving in the nation’s capital I was completing a recent book of essays from writers who amble, zip, stride, stumble, and march. Who walk slant and walk slow. In an age that prizes speed and efficiency, these writers—like the Buddhist monks—are moving at a human pace in ways that foster encounters, discovery, and surprise. I was delighted when Ann de Forest, the editor of Ways of Walking, agreed to chat with me about the collection in Walking as a subversive act, the newest installment of my Author Q&A series. Ann’s thoughtful and wide-ranging comments topped the list of reader views this month, and I think you’ll find her insights worth your time.

Spring 2026—featuring the winter/spring concert schedule of our son, the tenor Andrew Bearden Brown—was the other top reader post in February. Andrew is traveling coast to coast singing roles that range from the Evangelist in the St. John Passion to Gerontius in The Dream of Gerontius, a work featured in the recent film The Choral. Check out his schedule. As my brother Steve and sister-in-law Anna discovered earlier this month, he may be coming to a city near you!

Andrew with Steve and Anna
Ensemble Altera in Bradenton, FL

I also recycled a personal favorite, Citizenship (Revisited), in February because in the midst of the cold I felt others might join me in needing the reminder to love the neighbor you like and the neighbor you don’t like.

FROM BRIGID OF KILDARE . . . TO ABRAHAM OF SPRINGFIELD . . . TO VALENTINE OF TERNI . . . TO ROSE OF FILOLI

“Rose Wonders” by Thomas Dambo. One of the many delights from a day at Filoli.

February may have yucky weather (that’s a meteorological term), but it also has some wonderful things to celebrate. I touched on several this month.

  • Trains, tremors, trolls, and turkeys covered several memory-making days in Alameda, California with our daughter Claire. On our visit to the National Trust Historic Site of Filoli on Saturday we saw—among the redwoods—the fanciful 27-foot-high sculpture of Rose Wonders, capturing the imagination of children and adults alike. February 1st was the feast day of St. Brigid of Kildare and Christ Church in Alameda had a visitation by the saint that was near and dear to our heart. St. Brigid’s feast day traditionally falls in the middle of the winter solstice and the spring equinox, signaling that the period of wintering is passing and the new life of spring is on the way.
Candice visits with St. Brigid of Kildare

February is, of course, the month we celebrate St. Valentine’s Day. We attended a delightful party that evening at the home of our friends Sara and John, but earlier on Valentine’s Day we had been in Staunton for a celebration of the life of Helena “Tidge” Roller. Emmanuel Episcopal Church was filled with family and friends who gathered to remember Tidge’s capacious and improbable life: she was an Anglican missionary in rural northern Canada; a graduate student at Catholic University; she taught English to President Johnson’s daughters and traded stories with the Secret Service agents in the teachers’ lounge. She spoke several languages and read every single thing she could get her hands on . . . just go read the obituary. It is priceless.

“In Tidge’s memory, do something to make things better: volunteer your time or money to a good cause, pick up trash on your morning walk, foster a child or teenager, read a great book, or find someone who could use a hand and go out of your way to help.”

A day that celebrates love was the perfect day to celebrate the life of Tidge Roller. The world is a brighter, more interesting, and more gracious place because she was in it.

MISPLACED AFFECTIONS

  • In a month that celebrates love, The love of money—about the murder of the Washington Post committed in plain sight—reminds us that our affections can be very much misplaced.

BOOK + INDEPENDENT BOOKSHOP REVIEWS

Bridge Street Books
  • Between the two of us we have one memory is a look at how aging impacts us all, but it can have a celebratory side, especially as we focus on the everyday wonder of life as seen through the recent Billy Collins book Water, Water: Poems.
  • In the third installment of my year of visiting the DMV’s Independent Bookshops, Waiting for peace, I took the reader on a short tour of Georgetown’s Bridge Street Books and also reviewed the third of George Simenon’s Inspector Maigret series, The Late Monsieur Gallet.
  • It’s the grounding, not the grind reviews a book by Dinah Lenney in Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series—short works about the hidden lives of ordinary things—about that very ordinary, perhaps even ubiquitous, cup of coffee. Plus I used the opportunity to throw in some great coffee-themed songs.

COMMENTS I LOVED

Brilliant Reader Bob sent along this little snippet of a poem written “For Alex Jeffrey Pretti” by one of our country’s best-known young poets in response to the summary of January’s MTC posts:

“If we cannot find words, may we find the will; If we ever lose hope, may we never lose our humanity.”

Amanda Gorman, 2026

DON’T POSTPONE JOY

Thanks, as always, for reading. Your friendship, support and feedback mean more than I can ever express.

As you travel life’s highways be open to love; thirst for wonder; undertake some mindful, transformative walking every day. Recognize the incredible privilege that most of us have and think about how to put that privilege to use for good. Women, people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, immigrants, public servants, and others can feel especially vulnerable . . . because they are. Work hard for justice and democracy as the fight never ends.

But also keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable. Take time to dawdle and dream. Let yourself be bewildered!

Leave enough empty space to feel and experience life. Those gaps are where the magic begins. When times get rough, let your memories wander back to some wonderful place with remembrances of family and friends. But don’t be too hard on yourself if a few of the facts slip. Just get the poetry right.

Be comfortable in the mystery. Seek the uplifting spirit that leads to a life of grace and wonder.

Grace to help us remember that we can do hard things. “Grace to never sell yourself short; Grace to risk something big for something good; and Grace to remember the world is now too dangerous for anything but the truth and too small for anything but love . . .”

Wonder to help us remember that “we are here to keep watch, not to keep.” Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. And bash into some joy along the way.

Life is finite . . . love is not.

Try to be nice. Always be kind.

More to come . . .

DJB

For the January 2026 summary, click here.

You can subscribe to MORE TO COME by going to the small “Follow” box that is on the right-hand column of the site (on the desktop version) or at the bottom right on your mobile device. It is great to hear from readers, and if you like them feel free to share these posts on your own social media platforms.

Abstract Valentines by Susan Wilkinson on Unsplash

Citizenship (Revisited)

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Here is an old piece that I have recycled because I need it today. It is a reminder to “Love the neighbor you like and the neighbor you don’t like.”

Participation and community are at the heart of citizenship. In a democracy, citizens are participatory members of a political community that grants us certain rights and privileges. In return, we have duties that extend beyond the individual.

Engagement with our fellow citizens—“We the people”—is one of the benchmarks of a healthy democracy.

Of course, engagement comes in a variety of fashions. We each make thousands of daily choices about the particular terms of that engagement. We may be cranky or pleasant, resentful or empathetic, hateful or loving. Most of us go through these daily interactions blissfully unaware of our own contradictions and hypocrisies. Are our choices a factor of our environment or outside stimuli? The result of values and beliefs? Does our past impact the way we engage with the present?

I suspect these and more all come into play, but I want to focus on the past—our “raising” as we say in the South.

Personal histories

Sorting out personal histories is hard work. I have spent years trying to recognize and acknowledge the complicated family history that is part and parcel of who I am today. Understanding how Scots-Irish immigrants who settled primarily in the American South prior to the Civil War influenced my perceptions, opportunity, fortune, and worldview is important as I navigate life in the 21st century. How did these Presbyterians, Baptists, Episcopalians, and Restorationists ingrain their religious tenants in my beliefs? Where do the influences I inherited from my Depression/New Deal/World War II-era parents show up today in everything from lifestyle choices to voting patterns? How much white male privilege have I called upon in things large and small in my now seven decades of life?

Caution: History is under construction

What we know about the past is changing as we uncover new information, recognize previously hidden bias, and engage with broader communities. History is always under construction. Part of my personal construction project is trying to recognize the limiting and destructive patterns of living and thinking I’ve unconsciously adopted through the years. Patterns which, no doubt, affect my ability to be a good citizen.

Everybody has a role

Krista Tippett, in introducing 2023’s exceptional On Being interview with author Isabel Wilkerson, talks of how we fall into these patterns. She gives as an example our ranking of human value—who matters the most and who matters less—and identifies it as “communal infrastructure” (there’s that community piece again) that “becomes internalized and perpetuated at every level along the hierarchies that result.”

Wilkerson suggests we have the power and expertise to change history. Instead of thinking “I wish we could do something about the Supreme Court” as if it is someone else’s problem, she calls on us to recognize that we each have power, influence, and expertise—as bankers, doctors, teachers, union members, and more—that we can bring to our role as citizens.

Recognizing that everyone has a role to play is key to being a good and conscientious citizen.

Lifting all Americans

How we respond to others is important in building the type of country we want America to be. Just don’t expect the outrage agenda of today’s traditional and social media to help. As Teri Kanefield noted, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find news sources not enthralled to misinformation and conspiracy theories. Most thinking people understand that Fox is a propaganda network that keeps people enraged for profit. But like Kanefield, I’ve noticed an uptick in the outrage agenda from progressive voices as well. It has led me to stop watching cable news shows and to unsubscribe from several newsletters.

Leslie Moonves, a former CBS executive, famously said of Trump’s presidency: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” Joking or not, this is simply bad corporate citizenship. * Rather than focusing on drama or the binary choice of who is up/who is down, socially responsible media—good corporate citizens—inquire about where candidates want to lead the country and how they envision leading “all” Americans, not just the ones who agree with them. **

Helping lift all Americans reflects the optimism of the New Deal, which is part of my personal history.

“The foundational belief of the New Deal was the conviction that democracy in the United States—limited and flawed though it remained—was better kept than abandoned, in the hope of strengthening and extending it.” The New Deal mattered then, at the cusp of spring in 1933, because “it gave Americans permission to believe in a common purpose that was not war.” 

Belief in a fundamentally uplifting common purpose leads naturally to how we think about others. The former presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Michael Curry, has encouraged us to “Love the neighbor you like and the neighbor you don’t like.”

Banner from All Souls Episcopal Church, DC

In my religious worldview none of us is perfect. We are all—to use Biblical language—sinners. Richard Rohr reminds us that Jesus is shockingly not upset with sinners.

This is a shock so total that most Christians still refuse to see it. He is only upset with people who do not think they are sinners: These denying, fearful, and illusory ones are the blockage. They are much more likely to hate and feel no compunction.

Our job, and the mission of religion, is not to expel sin and evil. There is no place to expel it to because “we have met the enemy, and the enemy is us.”

We can choose to perpetuate injustice against “the other” or—in our own flawed but unique way—take on the job of choosing to fight it. In FDR’s words, we can “apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.”

The next time I prepare to respond with outrage, I’ll try instead to love the neighbor I don’t like. The reality is that we’re all in this together.

More to come . . .

DJB

*Corporate citizenship is a recognition that a business has “social, cultural and environmental responsibilities to the community in which it seeks a license to operate, as well as economic and financial ones to its shareholders or immediate stakeholders.”

**I recognize this may sound naive here in 2026, but I still believe that we’ll only restore a healthy democracy by retraining these habits of citizenship and rebuilding key institutions.

Photo by Matt Collamer on Unsplash

It’s the grounding, not the grind

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A short book on coffee where it feels the author may have had a cup too many. But hey, it does give us a chance to hear some great coffee-themed songs.

Would you be surprised if someone who has worked in the coffee industry for almost two decades—who trains baristas, has served as a “coffee and espresso consultant” and is certified to grade quality coffees—told you that when you ask people who drink coffee every day, sometimes multiple cups a day, about coffee absolutely nobody ever talks about the taste?

Unbelievable, huh?

Yet Teresa von Fuchs swears that’s true. And a recent book on the subject backs her up. When asked about the best cup of coffee they ever had, people talk about a place—the city or town where memory takes them—or they talk about an activity. Or the maker or the mugs. Perhaps it will be the view they remember or the color of the sky. Time of day is a big part of the answer we give when asked this question. But von Fuchs and the author of a short, new work on coffee, say we never talk about the taste.

Coffee (2020) by Dinah Lenney is part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons—a series of short books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. And what could be more ordinary, perhaps even ubiquitous, than a cup of coffee? We turn to coffee to get us through our waking hour, the morning, the meeting, the day. We have coffee breaks and coffee shops and some of us, with our grinders and slow-drip brewers in our home kitchens, have coffee rituals. Coffee can be used to slow ourselves down or speed ourselves up. There is so much that could be said about coffee’s place in our lives and in our culture. And if you aren’t careful, one can try and explore all those possible avenues and come off appearing if you wrote this extended essay while being overcaffeinated. Lenney, unfortunately, falls in that category. She needed to skip a cup (or pot) each day and decide what this book wants to be when it grows up.

For a while Lenney’s approach comes across as charming. There are so many things to say about coffee. It can be “the excuse to pause; the reason to meet; the charge we who drink it allow ourselves in lieu of something stronger or scarier.” There are personal memories about good coffee (see von Fuchs’ assertion above), but one can also talk about lifestyle. Whole books have been written about coffee’s history and its impacts on workers and countries that are part of that past and that are still reflected in life today. One could divert and talk about the proper way to brew it. Whether cold coffee is great or an abomination. Black, or with milk or sugar.

Lenney actually goes into all those things.

One reviewer said that the author is writing as if she can’t find her keys. “Haven’t we all felt skittish after our fifth cup of coffee?”

Well yes, but we usually don’t sit down and write at that point.

There are things to like in this book. I agree with Lenney that what I crave first thing in the morning “is the heat, the jolt.” It is “the grounding, not the grind.” I appreciated being reminded of the places where coffee has been present and played a role in bigger memories. Places like Sant’ Eustacio il Caffè during a six week sabbatical in Rome.

Sant' Estachio
A busy day at Sant’ Estachio il Caffe in Rome

And yet, I kept waiting for Lenney to calm down and get organized. For her to do something of value with the coffee questionnaire she sent to friends. To at least take her personal anecdotes and spin a better story.

If you are wild about coffee, its rich history, and all the connections with culture both here and abroad, you could very well find this a book worth reading.

But for me this book was like a pot of day-old coffee. There was once promise in the pot and as I drink it there is still some effect on me, but truth be told it really isn’t very good.

Something that is good is Lenney’s Spotify list for the book. Let’s enjoy a few of her suggestions (and you might also want to check out some coffee-themed songs I posted a couple of years ago.)

Think I’ll have a cup.

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo of coffee by Mike Kenneally on Unsplash

Between the two of us we have one memory

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There is beauty and joy in the everyday, even in getting older. Billy Collins helps us see and appreciate it.

(NOTE: If you are reading this post via email, click on the title to see the online version, so you can read the entire poems included here.)

My wife and I were visiting friends in the Shenandoah Valley last fall. In the course of a conversation I was struggling to remember something that was just on the tip of my tongue . . . except that it wasn’t.

In the moment I reverted to one of my new favorite fallback lines when my personal research librarian is struggling to pull up the right file:

“Candice and I like to say that between the two of us we have one memory.”

Our wise friend Oakley immediately walked me over to the refrigerator to read this poem which had a prominent place on that ubiquitous family photo wall:

It was Forgetfulness, one of the most famous poems by the former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins. That first line is especially memorable: “The name of the author is the first to go . . . “

We all have our aversions to aging. It is almost a religious belief in this country that aging and its effects will happen far in the future. Social scientist Arthur Brooks recounts that when asked what “being old” means,

“. . . the most popular response among Americans was ‘turning eighty-five.’ In other words, the average American (who lives to seventy-nine) dies six years before entering old age.”

I have a friend who swears he will rage against old age all the way to the grave. For some that is what keeps them going. Being influenced by my mother’s love for peace and harmony—familial and otherwise—I’ve never been very good at rage. At the times in my professional life when I succumbed to raising my voice or, heaven forbid, pounding on the table, I regretted it almost immediately. So raging against the fates doesn’t work especially well for me.

One thing I haven’t regretted as I age is selecting books on a whim based on a recommendation or something as simple as seeing a poem on the front of a refrigerator.

Which is how I came to read a recent collection of poems by Billy Collins, picked up while in Books, Inc. in Alameda, California.

Water, Water: Poems (2024) by Billy Collins is a collection of 60 new poems that looks at life with his typical informality and attention to the commonplace and all that’s around us. The topics Collins considers are serious—being counted, getting older, connecting with others—but he addresses them in a lighthearted way that asks us see the humor and occasional absurdity in life. There is beauty in the everyday, even in getting older, and Collins helps us see and appreciate it. And he’ll write about the everyday parts of life we encounter as we stroll down the street, sit down to a bowl of cereal, watch a cat drink from a swimming pool, turn our attention to the nurse in a doctor’s waiting room. There is a reason Collins is one of America’s favorite poets.

And yes, some of the poems in this recent collection actually do deal with water, such as this delightful one that puts a different take on the old creation story.

Adam Names the Fish

Genesis 2:20

Exhausted,

after coming up with giraffe,

buffalo, and butterfly,

then ocelot and kangaroo

he begs the sky for a breather.

But there is nothing

but the silence

of the low clouds,

then a trace of wind,

the tweet of a wren,

the moo of a cow,

two of the many

he is most proud of

for their simplicity

and the hint of onomatopoeia.

Cow. Wren.

He likes snake and canary too.

But the silence says

he has more work to do.

So, with nary an Eve to impress,

he takes the deepest breath

known to man,

and, holding it, dives in.

Collins can write about being happy that he still has 400 pages left to read in Lonesome Dove and yet choosing not to take the book with him should his house burst into flames. Perhaps it was just where he was meant to stop reading. He marvels at being introduced for a talk by an astronaut, who is orbiting the earth at that very moment and who takes the time to read a poem from space by Emily Dickenson. He recognizes, as he grows old, that his plumber won’t really care that he once heard Percy Sledge live.

Collins finds the joy in everday life.

Ode to Joy

Friedrich Schiller called Joy the spark of divinity,

but she visits me on a regular basis,

and it doesn’t take much for her to appear—

the salt next to the pepper by the stove,

the garbage man ascending his station

on the back of the moving garbage truck,

or I’m just eating a banana

in the car and listening to Buddy Guy.

In other words, she seems down to earth,

like a girl getting off a bus with a suitcase

and no one’s there to meet her.

It’s a little after 4 in the afternoon,

one of the first warm days of spring.

She sits on her suitcase to wait

and slides on her sunglasses.

How do I know she’s listening to the birds?

He also encounters a little absurdity.

First Typewriter

The old Royal Aristocrat

I got for Christmas long ago

came with its own plastic cover,

so every night at bedtime

I would place the typewriter-shaped

cover over the typewriter

and another cover over the parrot.

Only then, could the three

of us get to sleep.

Then came the night

when I placed the typewriter-

shaped cover over the parrot

and was kept awake for hours

by the sound of her typing

what would turn out to be

the opening lines of Our Town

instead of the more customary Hamlet

by the more traditional roomful of blind monkeys.

Collins, who published this new collection at age 84, seems to have found a way to age gracefully. That ability to still be productive and useful in both known and as-yet-unknown ways has certainly become part of my journey. And, frankly, it is tough in these troubled times. The writer Anne Lamott had a recent piece that spoke to the “mixed grill” of life. Things would be much easier, she writes,

“. . . if I could implement life as a silverware drawer—the myriads things for which I am grateful would go in the knife drawer, the horrible scary things in the space for big forks, and so on.

But it doesn’t work this way. Things are all swirled together. . . . I have a grandson living here who is about to start applying to colleges. The FBI has seized the 2020 election ballots in Fulton County, Georgia. Paper whites are beginning to bloom here.”

Even as we age, perhaps especially as we age when we don’t handle multi-tasking with the same dexterity that we did in our 20s and 30s, the mixed up nature of life can lead to rage and despair. But there is also joy in things big and small. And perhaps, like Collins, we can find that joy even when facing death.

A Change of Heart

I once expressed the wish for a tomb

topped by a white marble angel,

her head buried in her folded wing,

but now, I’d rather you

just copy out that little poem by Ryota,

fold it into quarters,

then slip it into my shirt pocket

before I am incinerated in a chamber.

It’s the one where he used to think

that death came only to others,

but now in his ultimate hour,

he realizes that this happiness is also his.

Being patient with ourselves, and with each other, may be the hardest work we do. Finding joy in the everyday helps.

More to come . . .

DJB

NOTE: The poet referenced in the last Collins poem is Ōshima Ryōta (1718-1787), a prominent Japanese haiku poet of the Edo period. Illustration of brain from Getty Images via Unsplash.

Walking as a subversive act

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Essays to celebrate movement at a human pace. Movement that fosters encounters, discovery, and surprise. In the latest installment of the Author Q&A series, editor Ann de Forest chats with me about her book on the ways of walking.

Last week nineteen monks from the Huong Dao Vipassana Bhavana Center in Fort Worth arrived in Washington. Gathering at the Washington National Cathedral for a “sacred stop” with faith leaders from a variety of traditions, they were nearing the conclusion of a 108-day, 2,300-mile journey on foot from Texas to the nation’s capital. The Walk for Peace was designed to raise “awareness of peace, loving-kindness and compassion across America and the world.” It also raised awareness about the power of the simple act of lifting a foot, swinging a hip, bending a knee to plant that foot on solid ground, and then repeating those actions over and over again.

As the monks were arriving in the nation’s capital I was completing a recent book of essays from writers who amble, zip, stride, stumble, and march. Who walk slant and walk slow. In an age that prizes speed and efficiency, these writers—like the Buddhist monks—are moving at a human pace in ways that foster encounters, discovery, and surprise. These essays invite you to read them at a leisurely pace, taking the time to ponder life’s questions.

Ways of Walking (2022) edited by Ann de Forest is a collection of 26 wide-ranging essays whose writers reflect on where they have walked and what they have discovered. Exuberant, troubled, surprised, and reflective—often as part of the same journey—these authors are always thoughtful and observant. They grapple with a multitude of questions, the most basic one being, “Why did you start to walk?” Once one makes the decision to reach out and grab life, walking at a human pace is a decision to encounter it intimately. Edward Abbey famously said, “Life is already too short to waste on speed…. Walking makes the world much bigger and therefore more interesting.  You have time to observe the details.” It is a sentiment shared by many of the authors of these essays. And in their walking, these writers are sometimes crossing forbidden lines and breaking boundaries. Some are walking—like the monks—for social justice and peace. Others are pushing themselves to deeply explore their immediate environment in order to understand the challenges to our lives on this planet. Throughout there are discoveries, both small and large.

Matthew Beaumont described Ways of Walking as “a moving, endlessly stimulating invitation to walk, to think, and to rethink walking.” I was delighted when the book’s editor, Ann de Forest, agreed to chat with me in this newest installment of my Author Q&A series.

DJB: Ann, why is walking often seen as a subversive act?

AdF: For so many reasons. Walking counters much of what we’re told to prize in contemporary society. In an age of speed and efficiency, walking is slow. Walking favors process over product, and fosters attention in a culture that feeds on constant distraction. Walking tears us away from our screens and thrusts us into the material, physical world, which we encounter with our actual, physical bodies. Which then makes us realize our own bodies’ power to move independently—no need for special equipment or training or education. Walking is also a great leveler. Nearly every other human being on this planet also walks. Walking is our human heritage, linking us with those who’ve come before us and those who will come after us. And in our current divisive climate, that sense of connection that walking fosters can be seen as subversive as well.

Visionary peacemakers like Gandhi and Martin Luther King understood walking as an empowering form of civil disobedience, a counter against violence and hatred, a means of fostering unity instead of division. Like many, I’ve been moved by the Buddhist monks who just completed a 2,300 mile walk for peace across America, demonstrating by their steady, deliberate witness that there is an antidote to our country’s current frenetic, destructive pace.

Buddhist Monks being greeted at the Washington National Cathedral by Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, Dean Randy Hollerith, other faith leaders, and more than 100 other Buddhist Monks (credit: Walk for Peace Facebook Page)

You write about growing up in Los Angeles where the common perception is that nobody walks. Yet you did, even walking the length of Ventura Boulevard with a high school friend. What did you learn about yourself, Los Angeles, and the act of walking from these perambulations around the city?

I wouldn’t have been able to articulate this as a kid, but there’s an absurdity about L.A. that, I think, exposes the inherent absurdity of every city, and maybe every built environment. I say that with the greatest affection for my hometown. Growing up there I accepted as normal the jumble of contradictory architectural styles, the dizzying shifts in scale, the blurry co-existence of suburban, urban, rural, and industrial spaces, and somehow understood how tentative and temporary the whole assembly seemed. Walking in the city, especially as a teenager, felt like a small rebellion, but at the same time an eccentricity in tune with this already eccentric place. Walking along a car-centric corridor like Ventura Boulevard taught me to notice the city’s seams, to consider more closely the parts that contributed to the motley assembly, which led to a deeper appreciation for the history of the place. Ventura Boulevard, for instance, revealed itself as a linear quilt of small-town Main Streets stitched together into a major thoroughfare. I had yet to hear the term “urban fabric,” but one of the things I learned about myself is that I liked exploring and discovering hidden histories of place, and the decisions that went into forming places. And when I became a writer, the resonance of place became my central theme.

Walking in L.A., because it was eccentric, made my friends and me feel like we were privy to secrets nobody else knew about. Wherever I walk today, I still have a habit of poking around corners and back alleys, always on the lookout for small surprises that drivers would never see. Tom Zoellner’s essay about walking out of LAX captures that spirit so well. On a whim, he decided to walk the seven miles from the airport to his home in Venice Beach and along the way stumbles upon hidden pockets of community life and greenery tucked in between the concrete and asphalt infrastructure that in a car would have been his path home. 

Lena Popkin’s essay “Travel Lightly” describes the different perspectives that a man and a woman bring to the same walk, even at the same time. Women, especially single women walking alone, can experience a fear that someone like me―walking out of a space of straight, white, male privilege―may never experience. She writes that walking has taught her both real danger and real peace. How did some of the other writers in this collection respond to her call for us to hold multiple truths in one space?

Lena Popkin’s realization is so wise. It takes most of us years to trust our capacity to hold two, or more, contradictory thoughts or emotions at once—and she was my youngest contributor. Several of the writers deal with similar contradictions, and your question makes me reflect on whether the act of walking helps us expand our capacity for holding—and possibly reconciling—multiple truths. I think of Hannah Judd walking aimlessly along the Chicago lakefront in the dark mourning her father after his sudden, unexpected death, while holding a joyous and consoling memory of the time they walked together across the Brooklyn Bridge, a walk she had surprised him with as a birthday present. I think of Ruth Knafo Sutton’s father holding two different, beloved places in his mind at once, a bend in a river in Allentown, Pennsylvania reminding him, every time he encounters it, of his boyhood home in Morocco. Nostalgia for a place he’s lost co-exists with the joy of meeting its mirror in his present life, walking with his daughter in his old age.

When we walk, we often experience what could be called a cognitive dissonance—between our freewheeling minds and our physically taxed bodies, or between the sheer pleasure of moving and the harshness of our surroundings. But somehow walking makes these contradictions feel more harmonious than dissonant. Adrienne Mackey, in her essay “(while walking),” conveys the mental and emotional drifts, the exhilaration and physical pain that occur on a 5 ½ day, 103-mile trek around the entire perimeter of Philadelphia (a project which I was involved in as well, and that indirectly inspired this book). “It is raining and I am soaked and I am walking on a high bridge that brings out a small fear of heights,” she writes. When a companion says, “’This is fun,’” she looks out over the oil refinery wasteland below and tries to see it as beautiful. “This is fun,” she decides. “Anything can be fun if you simply shift your perspective.”

Walking doesn’t always involve putting one foot in front of the other. Victoria Reynolds Farmer writes about traversing the City of London in a rented wheelchair. What perspectives and truths came out of her experience that were especially meaningful to you, as the collection’s editor?

Victoria’s deeply resonant essay offers yet another example of someone capable of holding multiple truths at once. As soon as I started assembling this collection, I knew it was essential to include perspectives from those for whom walking presents challenges and risks. Victoria, who was born with cerebral palsy, writes about a trip to London, a place she’s long dreamed of, where she imagines herself walking in the footsteps of one of her literary idols and inspirations, Virginia Woolf. She immediately encounters obstacles. As a city bus passes her by because it only has space for one passenger in a wheelchair, she realizes she can never move through London like Virginia Woolf, absorbing its boisterous energy. And if she had dwelled on that moment of dashed dreams, hers would have been a fine essay, rousing readers’ indignation over the injustices of an infrastructure designed solely for the able bodied.

But Victoria’s dashed dreams lead her—and her readers—to a more profound place. There are sentences that break my heart like this:  “… in the middle of a city I had loved for so long, a city that didn’t seem built for my existence in the world, I began to think deeply and intently about my life inside my body.” Hers is a spiritual journey. Every time I read her essay, I feel the poignancy of her disappointment as my own, and not just because she is a gifted writer who helps her readers share her experience through both her mind and body. It’s because she taps into a feeling most of us can relate to—the disappointment when a desired ideal doesn’t match the reality. She articulates a quintessentially human paradox: we exist as bodies, flawed, vulnerable, often weak, and certainly mortal, and yet also exist as spirit, on a loftier, limitless plane. The truth that resonates for me is that it’s in the gap between our exalted ideals and our physical brokenness where we are the most human.

Finally, Ann, more than one writer references the stories that go together to make the places we walk. However, multiple writers also discuss the fact that people and places are disremembered as cities, towns, and landscapes grow, shrink, and change. Do you see answers in these essays about how we can walk and see what has deliberately and sometimes violently been unseen?

This goes back to your first question about why walking can be considered a subversive act. Walking can be a profound act of both witnessing and reckoning. This summer I heard a presentation by artist Kamau Ware, who runs immersive Black history tours in Lower Manhattan. He said several times that the goal of his project was to make people “remember,” and it struck me as he was talking that one opposite of “remember” could be “dismember.”  In other words, we need to re-member all the broken, fragmented, and buried lives and stories in order to make ourselves, the spaces we live in and move through, and our society truly whole. Of course, one has to first know what histories have been erased or suppressed in order to acknowledge them. Jee Yeun Lee, who walked 100 miles along arterial roads radiating from downtown Chicago, did extensive research before she set out; her narration functions as a palimpsest where stories of broken treaties, forced displacement, environmental degradation, and genocide emerge beneath the contemporary surfaces of upscale shopping districts, shipyards, strip malls, apartment buildings, and suburban neighborhoods. She describes her work as an attempt to “decolonize” the American landscape.

Walking with intention, as a kind of ritual or performance, is another way of not just reconciling with the painful past, but acknowledging our own complicity. I love the way Nathaniel Popkin describes his movements on a penitential walk to follow the trail of the infamous Walking Purchase, one of the most shameful land swindles in American history. He wanted to to “unzip” and “zip” and “unzip” again. For me, the answer to your question is in those words. The unzipping is a means to open and expose, while the zipping carries healing and reconciliation. We can’t heal wounds without first acknowledging that they exist. We can’t remember without being aware of the acts of dismemberment. Remembering, like walking, is an ongoing act. There’s always more unzipping to do. Especially right now, when our government is on a mission of suppression and erasure!

Thank you, Ann.

It’s been a pleasure.

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo of Walk for Peace from Wikimedia