A Change of Routine

I went to work an hour and a half early the other day. This meant that I walked down my street at the quiet time of 6:20am. I wasn’t thinking much about anything, until I noticed who was walking in front of me.

It was the woman who lives in the white house on the corner.

Little Edie in front of Grey Gardens

Her house has boarded up windows. It also had peeling paint until earlier this summer when one of her nephews painted it the color nude pantyhose. I don’t know the woman’s name, but I can spot her a mile away. She dresses in layers of lace, flowered patterns, sparkles, and fake fur. She’s like the Little Edie of Juneau. Even though there’s something totally off-kilter about the way she dresses, her outfits are invariably bright, fun, and strangely beautiful. On summer mornings, when I’m up extra early to drive Andrew or my parents to the airport at 5am, I see her out in her small overgrown yard, cutting the grass with a steak knife. She grabs a fistful, pulls it up like you would someone’s hair, and then saws through. I always wave and say good-morning and she always waves back.

Other days, we’ll come out of the house and look across the street to find that she’s set up a tea-party on her lawn. She brings out all kinds of things: pots, fake flowers, buckets, rolling office chairs, stuffed animals, and arranges them in a semi-circle as if she’s had all sorts of company while we’ve slept (although I’ve never seen anyone at her house besides the young man who painted it). The tea-party will sit on her lawn for the day, or even two, and then just as mysteriously disappear. It’s rare that I see her out during the daylight hours.

So, to suddenly find myself walking behind her into town was a surprise. Where was she going at 6:20am? Was she just going for a walk? Was she going to pick something up? To meet someone? Does she do this every morning?

I passed only two other people. I caught myself studying them, inspecting their clothes, their faces, the directions they were walking. What were they doing?

A slight shift in my routine had suddenly revealed to me an entirely new set of questions.

What else am I missing?

Book Talking, Reading, Walking

      You may not believe it, but the characters in a play are supposed to be real people. They are supposed to do things for reasons of their own. If a man is going to commit the perfect crime, he must have a deep-rooted motivation for doing so.
      Crime is not an end in itself. Even those who commit crimes through madness have a reason. Why are they mad? What motivated their sadism, their lust, their hate? The reason behind the events are what interest us. The daily papers are full of reports of murder, arson, rape. After a while we are honestly nauseated with them. Why should we got to the theater if not to find out why they were done?
      A young girl murders her mother. Horrible. But why? What were the steps that lead to the murder? The more the dramatist reveals, the better the play. The more you can reveal of the environment, the physiology and the psychology the murderer, and his or her personal premise, the more successful you will be.
      Everything in existence is related to everything else. You can not treat any subject as though it were isolated from the rest of life.

                                                                       - The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri

On our trip up into the interior, Tim Lash and I had a lot of time to talk books. The craft book that he recommended the most was Lajos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing. I’m only about forty pages in, but so far it’s been a good, thought-provoking read. It’s focused on playwriting, but is applicable to any narrative form.

With this book I started experimenting with a new way of reading: reading while walking. For the last week and a half I read while I walk between my house and work (10 minutes). This has added a full 40 minutes of reading to my day as I walk home for lunch as well.

The walk home with the mansion lurking.

The stretch of road I walk is one of the oldest streets in Juneau. It takes me past the Governor’s Mansion (yes, where Sarah used to pretend to live), past Cope Park, across Gold Creek, and home. It’s the main evacuation route for the downtown area if the highway is ever closed off by an accident, so it’s a bit wider than other streets and more cars drive it at higher speeds than they ought to.

The reading while walking is going well. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to focus on my reading, that the walking part of the equation would prove too heavy. Weirdly enough the opposite has been true. Two activities of such high focus are all my brain can handle and there is no space left for wandering thoughts. The only time I lose focus is if I start paying too much attention to how close I am to the edge of the sidewalk. I’ll spook myself into thinking that I’m about to fall off and I’ll miss-step, bring my foot down too hard with my knee locked and give myself a jolt.