The Way

Have you seen it?  My guess is no.  It hit the indie film circuit last fall, and came to and left the Arbor very quickly.  I loved it.  Martin Sheen stars as a father who goes to France to claim the body of his son, who died walking the Camino de Santiago, a 485-mile pilgrimage that starts in France and ends at what is believed to be the burial site of St. James in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.  Realizing that he really didn’t know his son, he decides to try to connect by completing the pilgrimage for him. It’s a beautiful story of grief, redemption, faith and the healing power of walking. 

What it got wrong – hilariously wrong – was that you never saw anyone limping.  Oh, every so often someone would make a joke about their aching feet, but never did you see anyone, say, rise from the table, hold on to it for dear life as they wait for their joints to snap into place, and take two or three hobbling steps before emerging into an upright position.  That’s me on a good day.   Anyway, it’s out on DVD now and worth catching.

Saturdays can be tricky.  You know you have all day, and before you know it, it’s 6:00 pm and you still haven’t walked five.  Banks and I finally got around to it at about 6:15.  I took the opportunity to explore that new trail I discovered about a week ago.  The route we took was short and straight, and let us out on the other side in 15 minutes.  So we proceeded east and somehow ended up near a Home Depot.  I figured just one trip around that monster would eat up a mile, so we headed up the hill, but just to the right I noticed a sign for a cemetery.  I love cemeteries!  They’re so peaceful, so dignified, so sacred, really.  Well, most of them are. This one, I discovered quickly, has a garish quality, with loud and brightly colored plastic flowers on each grave.  We left quickly and won’t be back.

I went back and forth on whether to share this next part, but I have determined that this will be an honest blog, so here goes: about 50 minutes in, I had to go number two. Badly. The feeling would come and go, and I’d vacillate between thinking I absolutely couldn’t wait, and that I could hold on til I got home.  The first feeling won out.  Thank God it was dark.  I was on the north edge of the St. Ed’s campus, near the running track, but saw that there were several people on it. I scanned the place furtively, and saw the ideal spot….a small grove of trees would shield me in the back, a large trash can would hide the front of me.  Done. 

It was the oddest feeling.  On the one hand I was slightly panicked at the prospect of being “caught,” but another, defiant part of me felt this was a perfectly natural occurrence, and probably an unavoidable one in the course of a year of five mile walks. What's the big deal?  I practiced my insouciant speech in case anyone saw me:  “Sorry, we just walked four miles, these things happen.” I got home, threw my jeans in the wash, took a hot shower.  And I’m feeling weirdly, inexplicably proud of myself.