Blogging from A to Z April 2024 Challenge: W

Aging: The Good, the Bad, and the Tolerable

W is for Walking

My mother didn’t drive. Her younger brother took her out one day to teach her. I envision it was in the 1920s. Maybe they had a Ford Model T. I suspect they were in a field near the family potato farm on Long Island. The way she told it, my Uncle Joey jumped out of the car because she was such an erratic driver. She never drove after that. And she didn’t need to. As a young adult, she lived and worked in Brooklyn, used the subway to get around. When she married my father, they relocated to Jersey City, NJ to be near Dad’s Italian family. Any woman married to an Italian man didn’t work. The expectation was that she would stay at home to care for the children, bake bread and cook pasta. We lived walking distance to the grocery store. The bus stopped at our corner heading downtown to the Italian shops and fish market.

When I left home, she finally got a job, which was a twenty minute walk from the house. After my father died, she routinely walked the six miles round trip to visit his grave at Holy Name Cemetery.

Mom lived with us in Oak Park, Illinois, in her 80s. She often took the El to go shopping in downtown Chicago. She said she always dreamed of living in Chicago. She was out and about every day.

Did I inherit her walking gene? Throughout my adult life, I always made time to take a walk, except for the few years in my 30s that I ran. Walking clears my mind and helps me think. If I don’t walk for a few days, I feel stiff and ill tempered.

Now that I’m in my 80s, walking remains a constant. Maybe not as fast or as far. My knees sometimes ache but walking relieves the pain. In the future, if I need a cane or a walker, I hope I won’t be too proud to use one. I just gotta keep walking.