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Blogs by Richard French
Walking 5/18/2016 7:24:02 PM
Though I've never been much of an athlete, I've always enjoyed walking. I've taken walks everywhere school or work has led me and in places I've stayed for a few days or weeks.
When I first began walking as a teenager, I hoped that ideas for stories would come to me, but not so. Once in a while, a new idea would appear and I would jot it down, but mostly my surroundings have distracted me and my everlasting inner murmurings have gone on apace.
Only once has a spell of walking yielded ideas for pieces of writing. After my first winter in Toronto, I began to take evening strolls in High Park, the city's largest and a short subway ride from where I live, a place of woodland, lakes, gardens, and hiking trails, also a zoo and tennis courts, very well-kept for a much-used urban setting. The park also has sculpture garden and a stage where a local company puts on one of Shakespeare's plays every summer.
The spring weather and the delightful surprise that came with renewing a friendship with a woman I used to walk back and forth to high school with put me in mind of romance and I began to imagine characters and scenes of people in various stages of love -- from the uncertainty and effervescence of early meetings to an old man grieving the death of the woman he'd been married to for 50 years. I made notes for a new sketch each time I walked through the park, stopping often to jot down a passage of dialogue or a few words to describe something I saw. In two and a half months, I filled two pocket notebooks with ideas. At one point, I had enough material for 24 sketches, which I, reduced to 21. My first thought was that I'd turn my jottings into verse. As I moved along, though, I decided that the results would not repay the effort I'd have to make, so after a loty of revising, I now have a collection of prose miniatures called, at least for the moment, "Love Builds a Nest in High Park." Here's the ending of one I call "The Biggest Love?"
They strolled between walls of darkening green, which will be bare in the fall and still with frost in January but now gleamed in the silent radiance of chlorophyll and the force of nature.
“You!” Chip exclaimed. “Our lives expand when we love someone. We’ll both come out ahead.”
A wind-blast swept through the park and moved on. A moment of fluttery calm and another gust rushed in. They were back at the old fir, which looked more crippled since it had lost a branch.
“You’ve made a good first step,” Harriet said, hoping for more than words. “I have to see results.”
“Some of us are never satisfied.” Chip wished he’d found a better way to express his thought. Was it too late to correct the situation?
Another peal of bird song suggested that life and time were both generous. After they boarded a trackless trolley that chortled by, they found a way to see their case from a new angle and tried to smooth out their circular give and take. Chip finally understood that Harriet needed to see that he would abide by his promises to her and what he said about love.
