Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

….and we’re stopping.

When I was a boy, I walked to school. From Greenfield Avenue down the Miracle Mile, onto 4th Street, stop for a moment under the vent at Bordenave’s Bakery to take in the scent of fresh sourdough, then on to H St, 5th Ave, and West End Elementary. It was just under a mile, but it seemed a long way to my 5th grade legs.

When I graduated to 7th grade I switched to Davidson Middle School, down on Woodland Avenue. It was twice as far (a mile and a half away), but I walked there, too. My parents didn’t know that I walked all that way; not until one day, halfway through the 8th grade when I came home soaked to the skin, having gotten caught in the rain. All that time, they thought I had been taking the bus.

The bus had always been an option. Stopping up at the corner, it was driven by a woman we called Cleopatra (in honor of her penciled eyebrows, heavy blue eyeshadow, and crop-cut Prince Valiant hairstyle). I took the bus precisely one time, back in 5th grade, when we first moved onto Greenfield Avenue, and I quickly learned that riding the bus had two major problems.

First, there were other kids on the bus. I was not a popular kid. I was bookish, shy, and newly bespectacled. In grammar school, my party trick was reading faster than anyone else. (Ironically, now I read slower than most everyone else.) When I started learning the violin, carrying it to school every day, well, let’s just say that the value of my social currency experienced a sudden drop in investor confidence. So, riding “amongst my peers” was an experience just this side of emotional torture.

Second, I couldn’t read on the bus.

But I could read while I walked. And I did.

I walked, nose in a book, ears alert, peripheral vision working overtime. I knew every uneven crack in the sidewalk, every tree root that stretched across my trail. With my brown-bagged lunch in one hand, open book in the other, I walked my ritual path, reading, reading, reading. Sometimes I took the long way home, just to extend my time.

The thing is, for all that reading, I cannot for my life remember a single book that I read. And the books I was supposed to read for school, I rarely did.

My own history is a mystery, at times.

k

PS. Ten points to the first person to name the movie referenced in the title/first line.