bunny stops by the yard for a quick breakfast
kitty sees bunny and considers breakfast
bunny sees kitty and keeps eating
kitty sees bunny seeing kitty
one inside, one outside
only a screen between them
understanding
each is safe
but what goes on in their heads?
—
“it is easy to be brave from a safe distance. “
-aesop
on a long walk in the park each day
i see people and animals outside
staying a safe distance from each other
alone
alone together
—
“nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance;
they make the latitudes and longitudes.”
-henry david thoreau
my first step in the parks in my first pair of shoes
steps in the parks somewhere in the middle
my last step in the parks in my last pair of shoes
—
with all of this stepping into the parks
i thought it was be easy and interesting
to look back and see just how far i had walked
using multiple sources
and multiple attempts
it turned into quite an impossible task
as each park was shaped differently
i had walked in no particular pattern
and converting the 2061.6 total acres into distance
proved to be a bit more complicated than i expected.
s0me of my early rough calculations
(having dinosaurs on the paper seemed fitting)
scenes of me asking the big questions
with no definitive answers
i went to my daughters
who tried to create an algorithm for me
but they again pointed out that i had no consistent shape of the acreage
nor did a have a consistent path of travel through them
—
i then went online to an international group
of physicists, mathmeticians, engineers, etc. to seek their answers
here is a sampling:
can’t convert an area into a distance… If you walked the entire area of the parks so as to pass within 20m of each point, this would be 250 miles at least.
While metric units are usually easier to work with, an acre represents an area of a chain (22yds or 20m) x a furlong (220 yds / 200m) which is 1/8 of a mile. If you were a medieval ploughman, an acre (from the Latin ager = field) would be a strip 22yds wide and 220yds long. But now it’s any shape at all with that area of 4840 sq yds or 1/640 of a square mile.
Best way to work out your distance will be with a gps app. Download the Viewranger app, get it to record your track, then it’ll tell you the exact distance. Other gps apps are available.
There is no way to tell. You tell us areas but not distances, nor do you give us times or velocity.
—
i have decided that according to my calculations
my final answer is that i traveled pretty far
during the time i spent covering the 2,061.6 acres
and interesting coincidence
the last park on the list
the last steps i took
were in a park at the top of the very street
where i first lived in ann arbor
in my rattletrap apartment with no money
when i moved here at age 40
having quit my job to go to grad school
and change the course of my life
this long journey with it’s twisty and immeasurable path
had somehow led me straight home.
—
‘only those who will risk going too far
can possibly find out how far one can go.’
– t.s. eliott
i have at last found the perfect way
to measure my walks through the parks.
reindeer know what’s up.
happy birthday to my eldest daughter who lives in a very different time zone and place and across the seas and over the lands and on the other side of the international date line and below the equator and in another hemisphere. as far away as we physically are from each other, our letters – long and flowery, on beautiful papers, or short and scribbled on scraps, or captions made on things to note, using pens and pencils and markers and paint and crayons and cut-outs and news, are one of the things that keep us so close.
today, i think of you and picture you opening the letter that i have written for you to celebrate this very special day. and who knows? one day, you may even look into your rolling ocean and see a bottle bobbing there, or look to your blue sky and see a balloon tied to a note, or turn to a colorful bird, sitting atop a lovely flower in your front yard, holding an envelope in its bill, or watch a kangaroo jump towards you with a packet emerging from its pouch, and know there is a message in there, from me to you, just waiting for you to open –
More than kisses, letters mingle souls. – John Donne
—
I didn't have my glasses on.... 
