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A Cleaner Mud

One recent Sunday, one of those Sundays that you want to freeze in time - it’s so beautiful, temperate and peaceful - we settled into a long walk around our picturesque downtown neighborhood. We embraced an idle pursuit, and at the same time poisoned the well of rage I hoped to drink from later in the walk. Sometimes a useless exercise is surprising filled with meaning.

We were walking the dog. Walking is my primary source of exercise. Not power walking, but rather something approaching a brisk meander. Usually I’m with my dog, and if I’m lucky, my wife Keely will come along. We’re both busy people, so when we’re together we like to take things slowly to give us a chance to soak it all in and live in the moment. Also, I hate running on concrete with a blistering passion that approaches madness. Keely is no great fan of the sport, either. So, walking it is.

We brought the dog with us and spent sometime in the park, where Keely scolded me for curating an emerging gut, and then suggested we go for some ice cream. Although the mixed message was not lost on me, I decided to let it slide in favor of a cone of butter pecan.

I waited with the dog outside at pizza place in our neighborhood that has the good sense to double as the only ice cream parlor in the vicinity. Keely went in and ordered our cones. Ice cream is, of course, frozen and Keely was slow to return. I sat on the patio catching some rays and cuddling our poodle.

Across the street a man was sweeping with vigorous resolve. I caught him out of the corner of my eye, which was not hard given his large size and scurvy grooming habits, and assumed he was generously sweeping the walk in front of he and his neighbors apartments. How nice, and how grateful his neighbors will be! As I turned my head to admire his selflessness, I was greeted with an enormous plume of dust in my face.

As I gagged and teared up, I could see through my burning tears that the man, who I had quickly deduced to be a resident of the recovery center in front of which he toiled, was not cleaning the walk, but in fact sweeping the street. He had lost patience with the relative speed of the city’s street cleaning crew and had taken it upon himself to walk in the gutter and vigorously disperse of all accumulated dirt five feet out into oncoming traffic and into my face. I thought about stopping him. And yet…

I think it’s important for people to feel useful, even when they are clearly pursuing useless goals. Many addicts, serious addicts to heroin or booze, when they kick the stuff you’ll find they’ve taken a cultivated approach to smoking cigarettes. They might not analyze this new habit the same way I do. You might hear them talk about taking things one day at a time, and living in the moment; making a change today that will lay the groundwork for a better tomorrow for which they cannot plan, lest they slip up and back. And I know that they are sincere and make difficult choice after difficult choice, often for the rest of their lives, and they should be applauded. I applaud them.

But I also notice the plume of smoke. I carry one with me regularly. Smoking is disgusting, but tolerated. An intentional sandstorm in my direction, kicked up by a contemporary and recovering Sisyphus, even if therapeutic in the extreme; this is simply intolerable.

I hacked, I wheezed, the tiny dog laughed (or was he crying?) and I could not shout at the man over the din of traffic and was not prepared to deal with the consequences of confrontation, now that my wife had returned and placed an ice cream cone in my hand.

As a thin layer of dust settled on the ice cream, Keely whisked me away, and I left the sweeping many to avoid the oncoming traffic and move the dirt around. To ease my need for retribution, I thought about all the good he was doing toward finally creating a cleaner mud, for all of us.