The subtitle of this endeavor of mine is, "A reading and walking blog". It would be hard to determine which of those two activities I do more, especially since I often read books on my phone (a literal pain in the neck, but if the book is that good you must make sacrifices) or listen to audiobooks (which I still often call books on tape what is wrong with me) while walking. According to the Health app on my phone, I averaged 3 miles a day last week, 4.4 miles the week before, 3.4 the week before that.
All this to say, I walk a lot. I am an experienced walker. I am good at walking.
Let's be clear. This walking that I do isn't just walking. It is Walking while Woman which makes it a dangerous activity, an extreme sport. Before I go any further, I want to recognize that I can only speak as a white cisgender woman, but I do realize that transgender women and women of color have to deal with sexism in addition to transphobia and/or racism and that makes it even more dangerous for them.
Recently, there has been another wave of awareness about what it means to be a woman. One of the posts that went viral was this:
"Every woman you know has taken a longer route. Has doubled back on herself. Has pretended to dawdle by a shop window. Has held her keys in her hand. Has made a fake phone call. Has rounded a corner and run. Every woman you know has walked home scared. Every woman you know."
I've walked in places and at times and in situations where no one, woman or man, should have walked because it was not safe but I've also walked in places and at times and in situations where it should have been perfectly safe, but it wasn't just because I am a woman.
I read a book once called Down These Mean Streets, a memoir by Piri Thomas about his experiences growing up rough in NYC. As a general rule, I do not enjoy non-fiction and do not appreciate the art of memoir, but I read this book on the recommendation of someone I fancied myself in love with who quoted the last line of The Sun Also Rises to me the first time I met him and so of course I would do anything for a man like that, even read a memoir. I think I ended up actually liking the book, although I was so under the influence of the aforementioned rare and wondrous reading MMA fighter that I can't trust that I liked the book for the book itself or because I liked the person who recommended it to me.
Whether I really liked it or not, the book has stuck with me ten years after reading it, much outlasting my feelings for the man who introduced us.
Sometimes I will set off on a walk around my neighborhood, a suburb in rural, coastal North Carolina, and I will say out loud to my dog, "Here we go, down these mean streets." And then I will laugh at myself -- partly because I am talking out loud to my dog in public and partly because these streets only resemble the drug/crime/violence heavy streets of Spanish Harlem in the 40s and 50s in that they are both flat and grey and not as well maintained by the city as they should be considering the tax rate.
But here is the thing, the crucial thing. All streets are mean when you are Walking while Woman. I am not trying to exaggerate in order to shove some feminist tirade down your throat. I just want to tell people who are not feminists that feminism isn't a dirty word, it isn't an attack on men, it is a RESPONSE to the ways men have attacked us.
I'm not a radical feminist but I am a feminist. I don’t want to preach to men until they feel lesser than. I don't hate men. But what I hate is that I feel like have to say all those things to smooth the way for the stories that I am about to tell. I hate that I feel the need to placate men before I tell true stories that happened to me personally on my blog. I'll do it though. I'll tell you the truth, that I understand it is "not all men", in exchange for any man to listen to my story without getting defensive. For any man to hear my story and respond with "I'm sorry that happened to you" instead of "I would never do that".
I don't have any real answers for how to fix things, but I want to have civil conversations about it. I want to tell my story to help men understand that if some women can't talk to you about this subject without getting angry, that there is a reason for that. We have a reason to be angry and loud about the way (not all but a lot of) men treat us. These aren't isolated incidents, stuff like this happens every day and has happened to every woman. We are frustrated because this continues to happen and silence isn't helping so we are speaking out. My opinion is that a conversation between a man and a woman about how a man can do better can only happen after the man understands that women deserve to be loud and angry on this issue.
Mostly, I want to tell my stories in my voice on my blog. These things have affected my emotions, but also my actions. It isn't that I haven't had uncomfortable situations happen to me on my nightly walks before -- I have -- but these two incidents were so blatant and so close together that they've shaken me. They have made me start taking my walks earlier and they have made me not take walks that I would have taken before. These interactions have taken some of my power away from me. I hope that by telling these stories here, I will get some of that power back.
So anytime you start to feel like I am (or any woman is) preaching to you, please just remember why I am (or why she is) telling these stories.
These are the two things that happened to me in the same week in March 2021. Both were in broad daylight. Both were in my safe little neighborhood. Both were things that I am sure would not have happened to a man. Both were things made me feel very unsafe and have made me anxious about every walk I have taken since then.
The first was on Thursday of that week. I had left work early because it was one of the first warm days of the year and I'll be damned if I waste my life at work when the sun is out. I'll sleep when I'm dead and work when its cloudy and don't ask me to do either outside of those particular situations. I changed into a pair of yoga pants and a tank top, worked out, and then headed out on a walk with Duffy, hoping to get some much needed Vitamin D. You really don't realize how your mood is affected by the lack of sun until the sun shows up and then your like, "Oh, this is what happiness feels like."
We were about 2 miles from home when I heard a terrible noise of tires screeching behind me. I whipped around, afraid that I would see a crash in real time or that a driver had lost control and was careening toward the sidewalk where I stood. It took a second for my brain to process what was happening because it was so incongruous with the sound I had just heard. All I could see was a new-looking SUV heading safely toward me, on the correct side of the road and inside the lines. While I was still trying to understand what was happening, the car came along side me and slowed way down, the driver staring at me, craning his neck to look at me even as the SUV pulled slowly away.
Here's the thing, men. It is not flattering when you squeal your tires, scare the shit out of someone, and then stare at them. Here is the other thing, I was not even mildly attractive on the day this happened. You might have heard yoga pants and tank top and thought that I was just "asking for" someone to take notice of the shape of my ass and the exposed skin of my shoulder. Please just remember that I have lymphedema of my right lower extremity and bacne and so this man was looking at a deformed and pimpled posterior view of a person. I was not bakkushan. Not that it would have made that man's actions more understandable if I was more attractive. I'm just trying to make the point that simply being female was enough for that man to sexualize me.
I was so relieved when he kept driving because this encounter happened on a stretch of road where there are less homes and more businesses which were not open at that time of day. Even though it was still daylight, I was scared. I started to walk a little faster, cursing my lymphedema which makes it harder for me to run, something I desperately wanted to do in that situation.
I turned right at the end of that road to get back on a street where there are more houses and more witnesses that might potentially discourage any sort of attack. I had made it only a few houses down from the corner when I heard that same noise. My heart started to beat erratically and I thought, "Please not again." But of course it was him again. This time he pulled to a complete stop beside me and rolled his window down. I saw this out of the corner of my eye because I did not look at him directly. I was fumbling for my phone, the only weapon I had against this threat. He drove slowly beside me without speaking, just fast enough to keep up with my frantic pace. This continued for what felt like forever but was likely just a few houses worth of road and then he just drove away when I didn't acknowledge him. I called Wes and asked him to talk to me until I got home, terrified that the man would find me again. I cut out two roads that I normally take and power-walked straight back home.
Fuck that guy, the piece of shit.
As the weather does, it changed quickly and two days later it was very cold when I set off for my walk. I was wearing a calf-length coat and walking on the side of the road with my earphones in. I live on a busy road without a sidewalk so I have to walk through my yard and 3 other yards before I get to the less busy roads where we walk. I had just made it to the yard next to mine when I saw a truck heading in the opposite direction of me slow to a stop. I looked over and saw an old man who had rolled his window down, clearly intending to talk to me.
I took my earphones out, a smile forming on my face like the fucking simpleton I am. I was expecting this old man, this fucking stranger, to have something nice to say. Why else would he come to a complete stop on a busy road? Maybe to ask me for directions or tell me he liked my dog and he once had a cattle dog too, something like that. Instead, this man started yelling at me as loudly as his six-to-seven-decades-old-lungs would allow. "You are gonna get killed out here! What are you doing walking on the side of the road?! You are walking the wrong way anyway! You are supposed to walk facing traffic! You are dressed too darkly! Cars will not see you! You WILL get run over! You WILL die out here! You WILL die!"
The smile had of course faded from my face by this point. I didn't say a word, I couldn't. I just stared at him and let him yell at me. I don't know if I did this because a million years of patriarchy had ingrained in my subconscious that a man has a right to speak to me, a lowly woman, like that or if I was just too surprised to act, but I just stood there like an idiot and let it happen.
Please just sit for a minute and think about how it would feel for a stranger to scream "You are gonna get killed out here!" at you out of the blue and then to continue to scream "You WILL die!" at you repeatedly.
I didn't even want to scream back at him like he had screamed at me. They say women are too emotional, but I can tell you I've never had a woman yell at me like a hysterical (hysterical is not a word I use lightly because the historical implications of it are very important to recognize) maniac for no reason while I'm just minding my own business.
What I wanted to do was to ask him to pull over so I could rationally explain a few things to him.
Hi, sir, you are the one who is in greater danger of being run over. You are the unsafe one in this situation. You stopped your car in the middle of a very busy street and took your eyes off the road.
Hi, sir, I am walking with traffic because I have to in order to get to a safe place to walk. I only walk with traffic for 4 houses and I walk well away from the road and probably too far into the neighbors' yards for their comfort because I am well aware of the dangers that heavy objects moving at high speeds can do to the bodies of a woman and her dog.
Hi, sir, you have no right to comment on how I am dressed at all, even if it is to mansplain to me that my coat is too dark for a walk.
Hi, sir, if you feel the need to tell someone that you saw a dumb woman trying to get herself killed by walking incorrectly then you need to go home and call some other old man whose wife also divorced him because he, like you, never learned that men don't have inherent rights over women.
Hi, sir, maybe these comments are coming from a good place, maybe you are really concerned for my safety, but let's just put away all the other reasons I've just explained to you on why this was misguided at best and focus on the fact that if you are concerned and wanting to help someone in the future, don't open by yelling at them that they WILL die because that will just scare them and make everything else you say irrelevant.
Fuck that guy, the piece of shit.
Thank you for listening to my story, for hearing me. Now, let's move on to something a little lighter - a story about two men on a long walk during WWII.
THE WALK
Wes had to go to his company's regional headquarters in Wilmington one Friday and I decided to take off work to go with him so we could make a day out of it.
The sun was shining and it was warm for early March. This kind of day is hard to describe because it was filled with so much joy. There's just something in the air, something in your self, that makes everything that you see or smell or hear or taste more pleasant on a day like that. We had a very good day.
Wes's business at work took exactly 7 minutes and then we drove downtown and parked a few streets from the waterfront. I pulled up the LFL map on my phone and we headed to the closest one.
Here we are, walking in the residential section close to downtown, only to find that the LFL was no longer there. Although disappointed that we had burned calories that we really didn't have to spare without the reward of a book, it was still a very nice walk. The homes are old and beautiful and there seems to be ivy, the most beautiful of all invasive and dangerous plant species, growing everywhere.
We headed back downtown and had supper sitting on a deck overlooking the water as the sun sank behind the riverbank. It was glorious and the best meal I've had in a very long time but maybe that's just because of this...
After dinner, we sat off on another quest to find a LFL. When I pulled the map up, there were two within walking distance. One of those was at the Bellamy Mansion Museum. Wes and I toured that house the only other time I have ever been to Wilmington and I thought it would be fitting to get a book from there on my second trip.
Alas, there was no longer a LFL at this location either. At this point we're 0 for 2 and Wes has had it. He asked if I would be willing to let him write a little piece for the blog and call it "From a Husband's Perspective". Of course I agreed, but when it came time to write it, Wes said, "Just tell everybody they can't trust the damn map." So there you go.
Luckily, the next LFL on the map was just across the street.
LITTLE FREE LIBRARY
Lat: 34.2354618, Long: -77.9444389
From the website: "This Little Free Library was built by members of Temple of Israel in Wilmington, NC. It is next to the public sidewalk on 4th Street and ADA accessible. The Temple is the oldest Jewish House of Worship in North Carolina and was built in 1876. The color of paint on the Temple's Moorish architecture is matched on our Little Free Library. Our Little Free Library stands next to our Peace Pole bearing the inscription "May peace prevail on earth"."
This LFL was my third choice, and if Wes hadn't been so antsy to get back home in time for a basketball game (is anyone else picking up on a theme here?), it would have been even further down the list. After perusing the box, I was very pleased and surprised at the wide selection of books in this box. Unlike LFLs I have visited at other schools and religious organizations, it was not carefully curated to match the goal of the organization. There were, however, a few Jewish non-fiction books as well as fiction books with Jewish themes or characters. Like this one, which I have to share because the title, the cover art, the blurb on the front, are all *chef's kiss* perfection.
Alas, I did not go home with this book. I ended up taking two books home with me because I couldn't choose quickly and Wes wanted to get on the road so he convinced me I was not cheating on my blog by getting two books.
THE BOOK
For the blog post, I read City of Thieves by David Benioff. I'll try my best to critique and review this book, but in all honesty it was so good that I'm not sure what I can really say about it other than you should read this book for yourself. This is the first of the blog books that I would actually recommend.
Apparently, I am the type of person who has the most to say about things I don't like. I spent 1403 describing a total of 30 minutes of bad situations and only 73 words describing an entire day of perfection. Maybe that's a personality flaw I need to work on or maybe that's just the nature of things. Let me rewrite a famous line by a famous Russian author since we are reading a book about Russians.
Good books are all alike; every bad book is bad in its own way.
Good books are good because they are true, they get the human experience right -- even if its a book about aliens or Fae or vampires. But bad books can be bad in so many different ways that they provide a lot more fodder for review.
I would classify this book as historical fiction. It is the story of a half-Jewish Russian boy retold by his grandson many years later. In the prologue, the grandson explains why he wanted to write this book and tells of the process of interviewing his grandfather.
"For the first time in my life I heard my grandfather curse and speak openly about sex. He talked about his childhood, about the war, about coming to America. But mostly he talked about one week in 1942, the first week of the year, the week he met my grandmother, made his best friend, and killed two Germans."
With that last sentence, the author gives us a roadmap for the book, a map you will refer back to with every new scene. Every time Lev meets a woman, you ask yourself, "Is this woman going to become David's grandmother?" Every time Lev encounters a German, you ask yourself, "Is this one of the two Germans he will kill?" There is no need to question the best friend, he appears in the second chapter.
In the first chapter, Lev is living alone in the apartment he used to live in with his father, mother, and sister. His father was a poet killed by the Russian government for something he wrote that was less than flattering to the Russian government. His mother and sister had fled earlier in the war to a safer part of Russia. Lev's apartment building was in Leningrad, called Piter by the locals because it was previously known as Saint Petersburg (and is known as Saint Petersburg now; Leningrad was the name of this city from 1924-1991 in honor of politician Vladimir Lenin, according to Wikipedia).
Lev stayed behind to be a firefighter and to help with the war effort. Like many young, dumb people, Lev longed for a grand adventure. I think we all used to wish that something, anything would happen to us. Something that would prove to the world that we are just as smart and strong and capable as we think we are.
Lev is caught by the NKVD (essentially Russia's policing agency) looting the body of a dead German paratrooper and is thrown into a prison cell with a Red Army deserter. The deserter is a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Russian soldier named Kolya.
Lev is the main character in the book, but his story would not have been worth telling without Kolya. Kolya is a larger-than-life character, he's that one guy in the bar. He is intelligent, out-spoken, over-sexualized, extremely crass, surprisingly kind, and so brave that you would think he was stupid if everything he did wasn't so clearly calculated. Lev is an ugly, skinny seventeen-year-old kid who finds Kolya difficult to deal with at first, but the fact that Kolya consistently saves the day makes all of his brash and flippant actions less annoying.
Amazingly, Lev and Kolya aren't immediately shot by the prison guards and are instead brought to a high-ranking NKVD official. The official is trying to throw an extravagant wedding for his daughter during the war, meaning he has to gather supplies for a feast in a city where people are eating bars made from book binding glue called library candy and Badayev Mud which was dirt that was packed with sugar taken from under a bombed food warehouse and any dog, cat, or rat that could be found. He tasks Lev and Kolya to bring him a dozen eggs for the wedding cake in exchange for their lives and their ration cards. Lev and Kolya set off to find these eggs with nothing but a bit of cash and the knife that Lev had looted from the dead German.
I have read many, many books about WWII. I have this theory that there are more books written about WWII than any other topic in the history of the world. Most of the books I have read are about spies or about people/organizations that were part of the effort to hide Jews from Nazis. These books are full of terrible things, food shortages and concentration camps and firing squads, but City of Thieves is one of the most brutally detailed books that I have read. That is really my only caveat in recommending this book -- you should be prepared for some dark shit that you will wish you had never read.
The little details are so powerful in demonstrating the everyday life of people in Leningrad at that time. A lot of the books and movies about WWII are action-packed, indeed they would be boring if they were not, but this book gives a glimpse into the long stretches of fear and inactivity that the citizens had to endure. One example that I can give without burning your retinas is that the author describes how the radio station in the city would broadcast a metronome between reports and the people knew that as long as they heard the steady tick of the metronome that the city had not yet fallen to the Germans. I can imagine a hundred families huddled together in their freezing apartments while bombs were dropped near and far, gathering a small bit of comfort from the ticking on the radio.
As Lev and Kolya trek through Russia in search of eggs, there are recurring themes that ground this grand and dangerous adventure. Kolya's constant quotations from his favorite book The Courtyard Hound. Lev's self-consciousness over his large nose and anxious, fearful personality. Promiscuous Kolya alternately teasing and educating virgin Lev on how to be a considerate lover. Lev's rumination on his father's literary career and his confused patriotism to a country that killed his father over a poem that very few people even read. Kolya's inability to have a bowel movement.
These two men, boys really, battle the harsh Russian winter along with German troops. They encounter starving citizens still willing to help their fellow men, a cabin full of Russian teenage girls that German troops are holding and treating as prostitutes, a group of partisans and snipers, a marching band of prisoners of war being lead by a small group of armed soldiers.
As all great Russian stories do (at least this story and the Queen's Gambit series on Netflix which are the only stories about Russians I have encountered recently) the entire success of their mission comes down to a game of chess.
That's about all I can say without spoilers. Do yourself a favor and read this book. You'll be humbled and disgusted and amused and angry and hopeful and thankful that your childish wish for a grand adventure did not come true in the same way that Lev's did.
Would I recommend this book to you: Yes, if you like books that show you exactly what it means to be human in all the extremes.
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