Center of Gravity

There’s this neighborhood right next to where I work. I go there every day while I’m on my lunch to walk around.

Cat
There’s this cat. Sometimes when I step outside my office, I’ll see her perched on brick wall nearby. I think she’s watching me. When I walk in the neighborhood, if I’m lucky, I’ll see her in the lawn or under the RV by the blue house. I know she’s always there; if I see her, it’s because she wanted to be seen. Sometimes she’ll come over and rub herself on my legs and ask for pets, which is just great. She’s grey and white and has a funny mouth. Good shape, sturdy and round. Strong meow.

Korean
The Pimsleur app has 30-minute Korean lessons, so for months I would do a lesson a day. I’ve long since run out of lessons, but it’s cool to think that I learned how to read Hangul and basic Korean sentence structure just by walking around on my lunch breaks. I might never go to Korea. I might never apply what I learned. I think that’s alright, it felt good to learn something new.

That one part of the sidewalk
There’s this spot on the sidewalk where a I’d regularly see this mess of little brown bits. At first, I didn’t question it. I figured it was just dirt or something. It was always that one spot though, and when I clocked the pattern, I stopped to take a closer look. Turns out they were dried mealworms—and not just a few. There were seriously like a thousand of them. They had a fragile crunch to them and smelled really bad if you got close. Sometimes they’d be there for days, untouched. Then, they’d randomly vanish, only to reappear a few days later in the same spot. This continued for months before stopping abruptly in June. For about a month there was nothing. Then just last week, in the same spot, another mess of bits: birdseed this time. Strange.

Tortoise
One time I was walking and saw, in the middle of the road, I kid you not, a giant tortoise. He was like the size of a microwave. From where I was walking it looked like he wasn’t really moving, or I guess he was moving slowly, which is how tortoises are supposed to move now that I think about it. Up close his feet were all scaly and dry and smooth, like they were made of stone or something. His bald head was swerving left and right, as if confused, and when I knelt by him, he considered me with a beady eye before slowly retreating into his shell. I made it my mission to keep him safe, stopping to direct traffic around him. Some of the cars stopped to see; they were like hey is that a turtle and I was like I think it’s a tortoise actually but yes isn’t it crazy? And they were like wow yeah that’s crazy and they took a couple pictures and continued on their way. The third car that came by the driver offered to watch him if I wanted to check with nearby houses if they knew what he was doing out there. And so, I did. The first person I checked was like oh yeah that’s our tortoise! He likes to sneak out sometimes he’s very quick, and I thought no he really is not. They thanked me and carried him back into their house.

Phone calls
Once or twice a week I’ll call a friend while I’m walking around. It’s a great way to stay in touch without getting in the way of other things I have to do at home, which is a sour way to think about it now that I’m writing that down (ideally, friendship maintenance shouldn’t feel like something I “have to do”) but hey that’s just how it is right now and I’m not trying to fight it. After a long day at work, sometimes I just want to hang out alone. Like, don’t get me wrong if my friends were there in person just hanging out that’d be nice, but with a phone call you have to be in Friend Mode and Giving Updates and that’s not very relaxing, is it? I can spare thirty minutes.

Tree
There’s this tree on the corner of one of the streets that provides the perfect amount of shade. It’s got nice leaves and there’s ants on the branches. Sometimes I like to watch them. I can imagine it looks pretty strange, probably, this guy in business casual clothes wearing shades just staring intently at a tree branch. The homeowner has come out a few times to say hi, and they said they’d put out a chair for me one of these days. Hasn’t happened yet, but I don’t mind.

Two laps
From the second I clock out it takes me 1 minute to get to the neighborhood. At a leisurely pace, it takes 11 minutes and 30 seconds to walk around the block. I’ll do that twice for a total of 23 minutes. That leaves me 5 minutes to stand under the tree before walking back to the facility (another 1 minute) for a total of 30 minutes. On my way back to my desk, I pass by Liz, our ancient record keeper. Without looking up, she’ll ask me if I had a nice walk; I’ll say yes, I did, thank you.