The More Loving One

More loving; decide it’s a place, a universal neighborhood, have good shoes…

You can’t decide to be more loving. That’s like imagining you’ll prevail over time itself. But you can decide to love the voyage and make this choice even though your mother was violent; though you were harmed as you played in the grass; though depression still gets the best of you.

I went on an excursion to the corner store. I walked the whole way with my eyes closed, my tired eyes. My guide dog conducted the route. I traveled. Loving as I went. How dear are the minutes. How dear are we. When we get home, I thought, I’ll tell my family all about it.

When I get home I don’t say anything. The kids are arguing about television. It’s starting to rain. How can my little spindrift joy excursion gone so trippingly along crooked streets only to end up at an uninspiring corner store be interesting? My privacies like rubies in the dirt; the dearness of tiny mythic journeys down customary sidewalks. Well, I tell myself, I’ll keep silent for now, though I’ve just surpassed Magellan and have sailed completely around the world with a yellow dog.

I walk straight out of my febrile noggin. Other times I walk in there—depends on the route, the morning, what’s happening in my wrist bone; thoughts, fast as water striding insects, twenty thoughts per footfall, god, blood, a bell—small as a fingertip—ringing in mind; walking without destination…

More loving; decide it’s a place, a universal neighborhood, have good shoes…

Stephen Kuusisto is the author of the memoirs Planet of the Blind (a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”) and Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening and of the poetry collections Only Bread, Only Light, and Letters to Borges. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and a Fulbright Scholar, he has taught at the University of Iowa, Hobart & William Smith Colleges, and The Ohio State University. He now teaches at Syracuse University where he holds a professorship in the Center on Human Policy, Law, and Disability Studies. He is a frequent speaker on disability and diversity issues around the US and abroad. His website is: www.stephenkuusisto.com.  He has written extensively for the Huffington Post, and has been interviewed many times.