Loring, A Writing Life
5: My Walks
One feature of my married life that I consider to have been a great luxury was my daily walk.
In the years before moving out, my day had had a comfortable, indeed enviable, pattern. I saw my wife off to her job at the U, made coffee, and sat down at my desk, which was in a room looking out onto the garden and white picket fence I had created. “The Little Buddha Garden” a neighbor had called it. At noon I had something to eat and then jumped into the car and drove the two miles or so to one of the lakes and took a walk. Twice around my favorite gave me three miles of alone, thinking about whatever time. After that, I prepared my adult class lesson plans or graded papers or worked in my garden. Sometimes the pattern was broken by school visit weeks, often out of town.
It was during this long period that I published some stories and won some prizes and grants. I’d felt that I was, as they say, on my way. The going was slow, however, and I wasn’t getting any younger. Rejection, rejection, rejection, acceptance! Then more rejection on top of more rejection before another publication said yes. Those rare yeses were just enough to keep me in the game. Over time, though, I became more and more dissatisfied with my progress, more and more dissatisfied with my marriage, which is to say more and more dissatisfied with myself. I went off to India the first time to shake things up, to make a breakthrough. Indeed, I came back with renewed fire in my belly and wrote a story called “Babuji,” which won the Lawrence Prize. I went off to India a couple years later to begin writing the Buddhist pilgrimage book I still hadn’t started. These two solo trips to India culminated in my moving out. The marriage couldn’t contain my unhappiness.
Along with the things I kept—books, art work, favorite chairs, carpets, couch—I kept my walk.
I needed that doing nothing time and the physical exercise, too. As I finally got down to the work of transcribing my India notes onto my desktop computer, I somehow found a new pattern to my day. The Murphy bed hidden back into the wall, the walk down the street to the coffee house for a cup of dark roast complete, I sat sipping hot caffeine as I squinted at my terrible handwriting, editing as I typed the lived experience from notebook page to computer screen. This was not a task to be hurried. A lot had happened, and I needed to think about all of it, sentence by sentence. As I worked, I remembered and added detail, felt myself back there at good moments, deleted superfluous detail or incident. Struggled. I’d written every day of my trip, so there was plenty to transcribe, but three hours of that was my limit.
The limit reached, I went downstairs to the street and headed for Loring Park. Along with bicyclists and other strollers, I took the walkway along the edge of the pond, then climbed the stairs to the bridge over the highway and down into the Walker Art Center’s Sculpture Garden. This led to the gradual incline up Kenwood Parkway and then down a dirt trail onto the railroad right-of-way, in those days unpaved, and into the woods that would take me to the north end of Cedar Lake. On the way back, I’d detour into the Bryn Mawr Meadows playing fields. On Sundays, I could stop and watch South Asian ex-pats playing cricket, everybody in traditional whites, of course.
In good weather on weekdays, I often stopped under a tree at the far edge of the fields and meditated. Other times I took a few student papers along to read and mark up with my green pen under a gnarled old tree near Cedar Lake. Without stopping to meditate or grade papers, this circuit took about an hour and, on days when I had to teach an evening class, cleared my mind for preparing three hours of instruction time. These were the days when I didn’t have a cell phone, so I couldn’t be bothered by my refugee friends calling for favors. I was free until I returned to the studio and the answering machine.
And something surprising happened on these walks. Before this, my walks had always been free of conscious thoughts about what I was writing. Now, though, I couldn’t help thinking about my journal notes and the overall plan I had for my book. The trip I had taken was to the four major pilgrimage sites of Buddhism: Lumbini, where the Buddha was born; Bodh Gaya, where he attained enlightenment; Sarnath, where he taught the seminal lesson all Buddhist practice is based on; and Kushinagar, where he delivered his final message before dying. I’d settled into each of those places for long visits and written every day about the place and its significance in the Buddha’s life, but now, as I looked closely at my notes and considered what mattered most to me, I began to focus exclusively on my time in Bodh Gaya. It should not have surprised me that my true interest was what had happened inside of me on this journey, with the life of the Buddha acting as my foil.
The afternoon when this dawned on me, I hurried home and ignored the answering machine and the ringing phone, moving all the blocks of writing not about Bodh Gaya into another file and creating new text to begin giving context to why I had taken such a trip in the first place and how it fit into who I thought I might be becoming.
Understanding what I actually wanted my book to be changed everything. Mornings, I rolled out of bed, made myself coffee instead of taking that walk down the street, and sat down in my pajamas to my little book. The transcription was finished, so now my work was to go back over and back over again what I’d written, editing, shaping, discovering what the story wanted to tell me. This is the best, most exciting part of writing a story.
I found myself getting up earlier and writing until later, moving back my lunch and my walk. Years before this, shortly after moving to Minnesota, I’d won a fiction prize that changed my life. It had given me the bona fides to teach college courses and to get myself on the COMPAS roster to visit schools. I hoped that this book would lift me to the next level. Gradually, at least during the hours I worked at my desk or sailed out into the park for my walk, I couldn’t help feeling a new hopefulness.