Pilgrim's progress

I did a lot of walking this weekend.  Since summer school is over and I have a week of nothing before leaving for Dallas and then Ukraine, the next five days are spread before me like an enormous oil slick, whose edges disintegrate and blur into the shimmering horizon.  It's also been overcast and stormy practically all month in Boston, adding even more fodder for hours-long restless, lonely rambles.  Last night, after a particularly epic thunder session that twice killed the power and made the windows rattle in apocalyptic fashion, the rain finally gave way to a glowing twilit sky covered in the haggard remnants of storm-clouds.  I threw on my husband's old Harvard Law sweatshirt, the one I'd cheerfully defaced with an anarchy A just a short year ago, and set off for a hike around Brookline.  

After living in the graffiti-and-broken-glass neighborhood down the hill, it's still a shock for me to walk down block after block where the only sounds are fountains, wind-chimes, and the plaintive shrieks of spoiled children.  After eight o'clock on a Sunday night, the only people out are men in bermuda shorts being tugged around by the family dog, and women in yoga pants immersed in their power-walk.  The street side of the sidewalk is lined with recycling bins, all neatly sorted into plastic produce containers, flattened cereal boxes, and bottles from expensive booze.  To the house side, tall roses and sunflowers lean out from mulched gardens to graze the shoulders of passing pedestrians.  At the top of the hill, there's even a house that sports a row of tomato vines right on its front lawn, the fruit ripening in blissful self-assurance of never being stolen or trampled.  Dusk settles slowly around the colonial-style houses and puts a soft focus filter over the yellow light in each window.  

It must be quite the pretty sight when you're behind the glass of one of those warmly lit windows and look out onto the blue-black street.  But I was shuffling aimlessly in the dark, hunched over to hide in my hoodie, the hems of my baggy jeans soaked in puddle water.  I realized then that the letter emblazoned on my chest was taking on a very different meaning from the one I'd intended when I shuttled my time between Allston and Cambridge and still thought I should épater le bourgeois.  Who am I kidding with the rebel loner business.  More like: A lone, prowling wolf in a world of happy fatted lambs.  A bedraggled outcast slinking through the safe suburban shadows.