I had a busy day at work today. For me, that looks a lot different than you might expect. For a firefighter, a busy day involves riding in the truck, running into burning buildings, sliding down the pole (do they still do that?), etc. For my mom, who designs closets, a busy day means driving about 150 miles to and from building sites to measure rooms and talk to clients. For my girlfriend, who is a teacher, whose days are unfathomably busy; even a regular day means chasing after kids who run and cry and desire candy bribes and so on.

But me, on a really busy day, I barely get out of my chair. I sit and look at a computer screen and mold invisible alternating electrical currents into messages. Like a hallucinatory sculptor.

If I’d worn my pedometer today, it would have had an extremely high count, but that’s just because it’s a cheap freebie, and it counts more steps when you’re sitting than when you’re walking. Kind of poetic, actually.

Most days I try to take a walk during my lunch break. In nice weather this means going outside around our beautiful walking paths. In bad weather I circle the six floors of our gigantic building, starting at the top. Down to one end, down the stairs. Back to the other end, down the stairs. Like an egg in a Rube Goldberg machine. Except I’ve got an I.D. badge.

But today I didn’t even get a chance to circle my own cube. I spun in my chair a few times, and while that may have helped get the blood moving in my limbs, it doesn’t qualify as exercise.

So it was understandable that this evening I wanted to take a walk. This I did, with some determination, despite the risk of missing the end of the Red Sox-Yankees game, which by that time had already gone to extra innings. At around 8:30pm I suited up in coat and hat and gloves, and left the baseball game to fend for itself.

My reasoning was thus: it’s tied in the top of the tenth, they’re going lose, maybe if I leave, they’ll get distracted and win. I have a theory about my influence over the outcomes of distant televised baseball games. It is a shaky and unsubstantiated theory.

But what theory isn’t, really? Alas.

So I grabbed the trash and headed out the back door. After the garbage can, I had no destination in mind. On a cold night, when you’ve dressed adequately, it’s rather comfortable to be outside. It’s just you and the yellow patches on the sidewalk. And the crazies.

But not in my neighborhood. Don’t worry. No crazies here. Well, not many, anyway.

Just in case, though, I followed the path of most streetlights, which is also known as the path to Como Avenue. It winds through the Luther Seminary grounds, under a grove of tall, sprawling oaks, and toward the little commercial cluster at the center of our neighborhood.

I got to the gas station, its bays all lit up, with cars waiting outside like patients in the hallway of an overcrowded hospital. From there I could see the neon ‘open’ sign of the library. My feelings about the library are pretty straightforward: it’s awesome. It’s just an awesome library. It was built at around the turn of the century as one of the many hundreds that Andrew Carnegie (dare you to pronounce his name right) funded across the country. It has three-story arched windows and beautifully detailed masonry; it looks like an architectural drawing.

The only thing I dislike about the library is its open sign. A library of such historic beauty shouldn’t have a modern, swooshy, oval-shaped open sign. It should have an old-fashioned sign. Hand painted. Or maybe just a porter standing at the door, letting you know if the place is open or not.

Then again, the nice thing about modernity is you can see it a block away. At ten-to-nine on a cold fall night, a warm, bright library looks pretty inviting, even if the invitation comes from a buzzing tube of inert-gas-filled glass rather than a nice old gentleman wearing a cap.

“Who goes to the library at this hour?” I asked myself. The only answers I could think of were: “Crazies,” and “Nobody.”

I went in to check it out, and I was definitely wrong on the latter. There were lots of people in the library; over a dozen. And when I looked over to the right, at the bench by the new fiction, I saw none other than my dad and my little brother. So maybe the neighborhood isn’t as sane as I thought after all.

They had stopped for a moment after returning a movie they’d checked out (it’s only a historic library on the outside, inside it is more neon-sign than cap-porter).

“Hey, how’d you know we were here?” my brother yelled, much too loudly. My dad laughed. I answered, again in too loud a voice, that it was the gentle hand of fate that brought me here, a.k.a. the path of most streetlights. No one said anything about our volume; apparently the rules get a little lax toward the end of the day.

“Believe it or not, I was on a walk,” I said.

“Belie’ dat,” my brother said, or I imagined him saying. Sometimes I wish he were more of a little gangsta’.

“My fish died,” he said, somewhat unconnectedly.

“I.F.S?”

“No,” he said, “a new one. I hadn’t named it yet.”

So sad. The -tomb- toilet of the unknown -soldier- fish.

My brother was reading a spy novel. _The Eagle’s Eye_ or _Operation Beak_ or something like that. He blows through those books in a matter of days, sometime hours. My dad was looking at a picture book about penguins. I think he’s getting old. He used to read books with words. Now it’s penguins.

When the librarian started kicking everyone out, my dad offered me a ride. It was tempting, since I suddenly remembered about the baseball game, but I declined. Serendipity had brought me there; it didn’t seem right to let a minivan bring me home.

So I walked back up toward the seminary, the tall library windows behind me, the tall oaks up ahead. And waiting just a few minutes away? A baseball game and a warm house.

And one more piece of evidence to back up my theory.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 19th, 2004 at 8:29 am and is filed under General, Minnesota. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.