Gary Lloyd
Each mailbox, some 20 feet apart, others 35, is a can’t-miss historic landmark around here. I suppose the yellow fire hydrants are, too.
Every sewer top is a mountain to leap from, only to turn back to their deep openings in the ground to take in whiffs of bags of wet grass, rainwater and the occasional Chick-fil-A bag. Every left-outside basketball should roll, every bicycle pedaled. Two small yard signs adorned with fluttering balloons for some special occasion — graduation, maybe, or birthdays — are like miniature scarecrows in one yard, so Sonny tugs his red leash a bit harder and growls.
Sonny is older now, pushing 10 years old, so that pull on the leash isn’t what it once was, but his need to let all of Trussville know his daytime whereabouts confines us to the dark. We have been walking laps around sections of our neighborhood most every night for a few months, me to break up lengthy writing and video assignments that keep me stuck at a laptop, and Sonny to stretch brown legs that have pounded, pranced and propelled around Trussville pavement for almost a decade.
I notice that we look down a lot, Sonny and me, at pee-stained mailboxes and fire hydrants, at forgotten basketballs, at bicycles that will be covered in morning dew. We see other dogs’ excrement that lazy people left piled in others’ yards. We look down necessarily, to some degree, because folks in the neighborhood Facebook group have seen snakes recently, and mild nights feel likely to encounter Mr. No Shoulders. We stare — not Sonny, but you and me — into the blinding glow of iPhones while we walk mere feet from speeding motorists who, most likely, are staring into those same dangerous glows.
Each night, we make a specific right curve in our neighborhood that opens to an expansive horizon view of the moon, stars and Southwest 737s on their final descent to nearby Birmingham. It’s as if a curtain of brick homes is peeled away, revealing our galaxy.
“Many men walk by day; few walk by night,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in his “Journal” on July 16, 1850. “It is a very different season. Instead of the sun, there are the moon and stars…” Thoreau goes on and on to describe the croaking of frogs, potatoes standing up straight, conspicuous shadows of objects and much more.
Thoreau, of course, wrote more about the night, specifically in the appropriately titled “Night and Moonlight.”
“Of what significance the light of day, if it is not the reflection of an inward dawn? — to what purpose is the veil of night withdrawn, if the morning reveals nothing to the soul? It is merely garish and glaring.”
I look forward to that dark curve on each walk with Sonny because it’s a daily reminder, even if it is 15 hours into my day at 9 p.m., to stop looking down and start looking up. My hope, my goal, is that each subsequent morning reveals something to my soul.
Gary Lloyd is the author of six books and a contributing writer to the Cahaba Sun.
