Longtime readers of this blog know that I was raised in Palos Verdes, a little bump of dirt that sticks out into the ocean at the bottom of Santa Monica Bay, that part of the Pacific Ocean trimmed by all the beaches of Los Angeles County.
This will seem like a non sequitur, but once when I lived in Haines, Alaska, one of the guys who worked at the one radio station in town -- a public radio station, naturally -- mentioned that he was from Marblehead, MA, a place he described as being "on a peninsula and built to stay that way."
Palos Verdes is kind of like that, too, the Los Angeles version of that anyway. Or it was. I haven't been back in decades and can't think of a reason why I would in the future, so it may have changed, but that's how I remember it.
The thing is, being in Los Angeles County, where the skies are uniformly pink all night from dusk to dawn because of all the streetlights, Palos Verdes, even with its intention to be and stay elite and also pseudo-countrified, had tons of streetlights, too. I could walk anywhere after the sun went down -- once I was old enough, of course -- and there would be light on my path, or on my road. Just about anywhere. I think there were some parts of the Portuguese Bend area where I used to race around in my VW bug just to fly over the bumps and around the nigh-hairpin turns where there weren't a lot of streetlights. But even there I remember them, even out where nobody lived because the earth was too unstable and every time they built a house it ended up in the sea.
Even Northern California, where I lived before we moved to this coast, had plenty of streetlights, even in wooded and other semi-rural areas, as long as they were residential.
So one of the things that has freaked me out about living in Massachusetts has been the lack of streetlights. It's one of those things that makes me feel like I live in a foreign country. Once you leave the center of a town or city, there are practically none. When I walk around after dark, even here in town, if I don't pass a house with lights on, the sidewalks are often pitch black. I'm not sure if it's because this is one of those New England things that have just always been this way, if this is a conscious choice to save money and resources, or if this is a conscious choice against the very sort of light pollution that makes L.A. a huge bowl of pinkly glowing mere night-ishness where you cannot ever see the stars in the sky unless you go far up into the hills and mountains. Because I see more streetlight hardware in Massachusetts than I see lit streetlights, I tend to suspect a combination of the latter two, and I respect those choices even though they are not the safest, not for drivers, not against crime, and not for night walkers, or in winter, late afternoon walkers.
The sidewalks around here, like the streets, are not smooth. Tree roots and simple decay have made their mark on pavement, where there is pavement. Also, besides the bumps and chunks of pavement, gravel, and loose rocks, there are obstacles, debris in autumn, snow and ice in winter, dog leavings and a certain amount of human-source litter always.
Longtime readers of this blog, besides knowing where I spent my childhood, also know that I do not walk around entirely on standard issue body parts. Several of my longtime readers and many casual visitors also do not walk around on two human legs. But we do walk around, or crutch around, or wheel around. And though I cannot speak for the others, I certainly refuse to be stopped by darkness. Nights are beautiful, and businesses are open after sunset, and I will not be excluded from the darkly beautiful parts of my own life or prevented from doing business after 5:00 once we're off Daylight Savings Time just because I don't have all my original agility, such as it ever was.
Day or night, I trip a lot, and I fall sometimes. I don't really mind. I take it all in my stride, as it were. The tripping, though, sometimes it hurts more than a fall. I will stub my prosthetic foot on some unseen obstacle like a little unexpected hill in the pavement or something, and the suddenness with which my stump automatically clenches in response often results in a very painful muscle cramp powerful enough to stop me in my tracks. I have to stand and consciously relax the muscles before I can move forward. It's not horrible, but it is kind of a drag. Since I don't yet seem able to train my stump not to respond this way, I like to avoid it wherever I can.
To do that, I have to be able to see where I'm going. Specifically, I have to be able to see the pavement.
Because I don't have the right size batteries for my tricycle's headlamp, and also because I recently accidentally broke off the front reflector (and it will make awesome earrings; just wait and see), tonight I decided to walk to the post office. This is what the pavement looked like two houses past the post office on the way home:
This is what it looked like after a car drove by:
This is what it looked like when I photographed it with a flash:
Not too bad; there's worse on my way home than this. Still, the road definitely rises up to meet me in not entirely predictable ways. Fortunately, I am ever armed with this:
Yes, I have a purple pen light, specifically a MAG Solitaire flashlight! It is an outstanding thing to have, too. (Sorry, the website doesn't seem to sell the purple ones.)
No, it is not as powerful as a big ol' honkin' flashlight, the sort designed to light up the night and also that you could use to strike someone over the head and knock him out in an action movie, but those are kind of a drag to carry around, what with being all big and heavy and stuff. Besides, if you are anything like me, even if you own such a thing, the likelihood that you will remember to grab it on the way out the door at the beginning of any given excursion is probably slim to none.
You've got to have your keys, though, right? Most of the time you will remember to bring your keys. A pen light, as you can see, can easily be attached to your keychain and will likely not take up significantly more room in your pocket than a small Swiss army knife.
I tried to take a picture to show you how great it is to have a pen light when you are walking black and lumpy sidewalks in the dark. I'm not sure you can tell from this.
Seriously, though, it's a big improvement. And it's only nine bucks, and it fits on your keychain. So if, like me, you already have complications in your gait and don't need to battle with random external ones, I highly recommend you get yourself one.
I'm supposed to be in class tonight, in the fourth of the four-class series. I missed the third class in this series because my true love accidentally took the car to work and didn't realize it until he was too far away to come back, but it didn't matter because I was being hammered by my personal biology anyway and probably couldn't have gotten much out of going. So you'd think that tonight I would make an extra hard effort to get there, especially since I actually like this class better than the other one, as it has netted me more practical skills that I can actually use in the future, at home, without flame. However, right as I was leaving the house, the quarter-pound of delicious organic prunes I ate today decided to remind me of their existence all at once. This meant I would be late. What with one thing and another, tricking the cat into eating something good for him, trying to clean up the living room in prep for my true love coming home from a weekend in D.C. tonight, etc., suddenly I was very late, rudely late. So I decided to blow off class, stay home, do laundry, and crochet.
I hope the instructor does not take it personally. I sort of felt like forces were combining to prevent my attending. Still, I feel bad that I didn't say "thank you" or "good-bye." I hope that I can get a chance to try to take another class from her, even though I freakin' hate school and hate having this huge block of time pre-carved out of my week.
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