Walk This Way

I've been known to leave a book hanging with only a handful of pages left.  Like a misbehaving sea dog whose shore leave is up, I can walk away, guilt free, and say "Last night was fun, but I've had enough, thank you."  And I've also found out that Oprah's stamp approval often is a visual clue to me that I might not like anyone inside.

Endings, I believe, are very hard to write.  As are compelling characters.  And readers are a fickle bunch, each of us bringing our own brand of hopes, dreams and needs to the pages before us.

God help the author who delivers the wrong dish to our tables.

Ah, but to those whose writing is crisp, whose characters are not afraid of their humanness and whose plots possess the tenacity and wispiness of a spider's web?  I bow down to thee.

As a reader, my own inclinations lean toward small lives whose stories are well told and whose days are courageously lived, despite everything.  I think that's why "Olive Kitteridge," a Pulitzer-prize winner, slowly has found its way under my skin.  After my friend Larry raved about it, I knew I'd read this collection of stand-alone stories, loosely held together by the feisty, sometimes frustrating title character.

There is no booming soundtrack to this book, but the collective effect of its stories is hard to ignore.  Full of heartache and humor, lousy decision making and invisible good deeds,  more often than not, "Olive Kitteridge" feels strangely familiar, despite its ocean-side setting.

This week, I also started the book "Wild," a biographical account of a woman's three-month trek across the West Coast's rugged Pacific Crest Trail.  I fell in love with it by the third paragraph.

No surprise, I suppose, since I seem to have a propensity for books about walking (In "The Long Walk," Sławomir Rawicz recounts his harrowing, mind-blowing, 4,000-mile walk to freedom that began with an escape from a Siberian gulag; and in "A Walk in the Woods," I am transported to the wildness of the Appalachian Trail, entertained along the way by Bill Bryson's irresistible writing and often humorous recollections).

Walking, it turns out, represents--both symbolically and practically--what most moves me in life.  It is of the earth, it requires no special equipment, it takes its time and it puts me in touch with both my self and my world.

True, you will find no piles of excess fat mixed among the leaves along those routes I walk each day.  But, look close, and you might see a small mound of detritus from imagined arguments I've let go of, or tiny piles of problems mostly solved.

I feel hugged by all this smallness, from the way Olive miraculously wakes each morning and moves her lumbering, imperfect way through her ordinary days, to the devastating losses and moving revelations "Wild's" author tackles on a rugged mountainside, and, finally, in my own predictable, steadying walks with Finn each day.   Aching feet finding their way to the ground to which they ultimately are rooted, one step at a time.