I was in the land of deep sleep when my wife said to me, “Do you hear that?”

I struggled to swim to the surface, listening, listening in the dark. And then, through the fog, I did hear it: one faint little chirp from the other side of the bedroom door. And then—maybe thirty seconds later—another. Then another…and another…. Nope; not a cricket; just a dying battery in the carbon monoxide alarm in the middle of the night. Sigh!

I put the pillow over my head, rolled over, and tried to go back to sleep. Tried, I said. My wife, on the other hand, is an inveterate problem solver, and sure enough, a few chirps later, there she was out in the hallway, light on, standing on a chair, tugging on the cover of the offending alarm. Wouldn’t budge. I went to watch, much too sleepy to be of much use. Despite her efforts, the cover of the alarm refused to cooperate, so she whacked it once with the flat of her hand and then we both stared it down, threatened it with a hammer, daring it to chirp again. And miraculously, the chirping stopped. We held our breath and when a minute or two had passed, we went back to bed and tried—tried so hard!—to fall back to sleep.

Ten silent minutes went by. We tossed and turned but at least the chirping had ceased. And then, just as I began to drift away, it started again: chirp…wait…chirp…wait….chirp. In the darkness, my brain began to count the seconds between chirps; sleep slipped further and further away.

Of all life’s little annoyances, is anything worse than a failing battery, chirping its sad little song in the middle of the night? I sighed, tossed off the covers, turned on the light, and went to do battle with the chirping dragon in the hallway. I twisted and turned the cover: nothing. There had to be an easier way to dismantle the confounded contraption. I tried to pop off the cover and that was when the chirping began in earnest: urgent, insistent, provocative. I got my glasses and read the fine print on the cover of the alarm: “In case of active alarm, seek fresh air immediately.” We were at Defcon 2.

But somewhere, deep within the recesses of my sleep-deprived brain, a little voice whispered “Hinge. Here.” I probed the top of the alarm—remember, I’m standing on a shaky chair at the top of a steep stairway in the middle of the night—and there it was: a little latch. I fumbled, pushed, and lo and behold the cover fell away to reveal the little nine-volt nemesis just staring at me. Laughing at me. “Gotcha!” it said.

I showed it no mercy. I removed that Duracell cancer, resisted the impulse to throw it down the stairs, and climbed back into bed. “Did you fix it?” my wife asked.

“Yes. There was a hinge on top and it just opened.” I showed her the dead battery.

“Good job.” She rolled over and was soon fast asleep.

I lay there for a while, weary but feeling slightly heroic. I’m not the handiest guy so even the smallest victories can feel good. Eventually, I drifted off to sleep, the now-dead battery, silent once- and-for-all, under my pillow.

In the calm of the next morning, I climbed back up on that shaky chair and installed a new battery. I declared victory. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine. Two collections of his essays (“Musing Right Along” and “I’ll Be Right Back”) are available on Amazon.Jamie’s website is www.musingjamie.com

This past weekend, Scottie Scheffler won the Masters. Kudos to him! But maybe the bigger story was written by Tiger Woods. Now I know he gets the lion’s share of golf attention, but nevertheless, his return to Augusta was nothing short of miraculous. Remember: just over a year ago, he was so badly injured in an automobile accident that doctors seriously considered amputating his right leg. Fortunately, they didn’t, and since that day, Tiger has been fixed on one simple star: playing golf again. And at Augusta, one of the most demanding walking courses on the planet, he did just that. No, he didn’t win, that is if you measure winning by the player with the fewest strokes over four days. But if you were to measure winning by another standard—say, overcoming seemingly insurmountable medical obstacles—then you’d have to give Tiger the trophy. Or another green jacket.

After Tiger finished this final round, he was, of course, asked to reflect on the past fourteen months of recovery and rehabilitation. He thanked the people on his team—doctors, physical therapists, psychologists, trainers; his children and friends; his fellow players; his fans; and last but not least, he thanked ice. “Ice baths,” he said. “They really suck!”

That got my attention. I’ve been aware of cold therapy for some time: how it helps to manage pain, reduce inflammation, enhance recovery, and stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system. But a little research opened my eyes wider. It seems that cold therapy—Tiger’s ice bath—is now being used to treat depression and other mood disorders, anxiety, even chronic diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and fibromyalgia. Frozen water: the new miracle drug! Who knew?

I guess my friends at Special Olympics have known it for years. They’ve been talking otherwise reasonable people into taking the Polar Bear Plunge for a few decades now to support their good cause. Why else would a few thousand people jump into the Bay in mid-winter if, in addition to raising funds and awareness to support people with intellectual differences, their own well-being were enhanced in the process? Moreover, it seems that cold water swimming is gaining in popularity around the world; more and more people are jumping into ridiculously cold water—forty degrees!—and swimming considerable distances to get a little exercise while staving-off hypothermia. 

There is, of course, a limit to cold water therapy. When the Titanic went down (110 years ago this week!), the water in North Atlantic was between 28 and 32 degrees. Many of the souls who were lost that night didn’t drown; they simply froze to death. That is, of course, the tragic extreme of cold water; no one can survive more than a few minutes at those frigid temperatures.

But we’re thankfully not talking about water that cold. Tiger’s ice bath is probably somewhere between fifty and sixty degrees; plenty cold, to be sure! The ratio of ice to water in his tub is likely 3:1, and ten minutes would provide more than enough time to reap the benefits of cold water therapy. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Tiger took several cold baths a day, so do the math: maybe an hour each day in freezing water, months and months on end. That’s what it took to enable him just to walk those Georgia hills, let alone play golf at the highest level. It might have looked lovely on television, but there was definite limp to his gait and I’m pretty sure I caught a grimace or two along the way. Still, heroic; triumphant, even.

Anyway, I was so impressed by Tiger’s drive, perseverance, and mental discipline, to say nothing of his golf game, that I was tempted to go out and buy three big bags of ice, fill the tub half full with cold water, dump in the ice, and sit there for ten minutes. 

Tempted, I said. But I wrote this instead.

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine. Two collections of his essays (“Musing Right Along” and “I’ll Be Right Back”) are available on Amazon. Jamie’s website is www.musingjamie.com

 

 

 

About this time every year, I start thinking about summer. Sunny cups of morning coffee, lingering afternoons on the golf course, late evening chats on the front porch, life discalced. Shoeless, like St. Teresa of Ávila and her shoeless nuns, living in poverty and simplicity, devoting their time to prayer and to serving others. Not that I want to be a nun, of course, but the shoeless part does appeal to me.

But then along comes another arctic air mass, this one an especially frigid blast with snow flurries, afternoon temperatures in the 30s, and wind chills in the teens. I guess I’ll have to postpone my discalced dreams for another few days in favor of thick wool socks and duck boots. Sigh.

But things could be worse. Comrade Putin, tired of being bogged down in Ukraine, might decide to set his sights on the Eastern Shore. Ketanji Brown Jackson, the most popular and qualified Supreme Court nominee in years, might lose her cool a la Will Smith and decide to punch Ted Cruz. The St. Peter’s Peacocks, the Cinderellas of this year’s NCAA basketball tournament, might have their glorious bubble burst by the North Carolina Tar Heels by twenty points… Wait; what? They did? I say again, “Sigh.” (But wasn’t it fun while it lasted?) 

All these cobblestones lead me down a street to a quote I rediscovered the other day. It was a line from “Gilead” a novel by Marilynne Robinson. “There are a thousand thousand reasons to love this life, every one sufficient.” And there you have it: hope in a nutshell.

It’s all too easy to feel defeated by all that is bad in this weary world: everything from a late season arctic air mass, to an unprovoked war, to the taint of racism, to even the dashed dreams of a bunch of kids playing way above their heads. The only antidote I know is over there on the sunnier side of the street in the myriad little details that somehow make this life one worth loving. They poke their heads up through cracks in the sidewalk, bright yellow dandelions, color in the most unexpected drab places.

For reasons I cannot begin to understand I awoke this morning thinking of old friends. (To be clear, by “old” I mean longstanding, not ancient.) Friends like Federico who, upon retirement from a distinguished teaching career, moved back to his native Albuquerque where he can sit an evening and read the racing sheets while watching the sunset slide down the slopes of the Sandia Mountains. Or Darcy who just returned to Amman, Jordan to direct a reforestation project. Or Janel who showed up on our front porch after nearly twenty years with her teenage son Jack to talk about colleges. Or Drew who found surfing peace and a state baseball championship on the Delaware shore. I could go on and on, but you get the point: a thousand friends making a thousand thousand reasons to love this life.

So be not discouraged by this most recent bout of cold air. It, too, shall pass. Think, instead, of all the beauty of this world, some of it hidden, some of it in plain sight. And once warmer weather finally does arrive to stay for a while, take off your shoes and feel the grass between your toes.

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine. Two collections of his essays (“Musing Right Along” and “I’ll Be Right Back”) are available on Amazon. Jamie’s website is www.musingjamie.com

 

The tulip tree across the street is in full flower. The forsythia in the backyard is dressed in vibrant yellow. All around us, spring is springing and while I’m sure there will be some backsliding in the days to come, it feels like we’ve turned another heavenly corner. 

And yet, amid all this vernal beauty, the tragedy that is Ukraine continues to unfold. I wish it weren’t so, but every day the images keep flooding the news—images of death and desecration, of children crying, of brave men and women trying desperately to stem a tide bent on destroying their homeland. And while the rest of the world wrestles with effective ways to respond to this crisis, the fuse that was lit by a megalomaniac in Moscow continues to spark and burn its way toward Armageddon.

Sometimes, the incongruity of this world boggles my mind. The dichotomy between spring on the Eastern Shore and war in Ukraine couldn’t be more stark, and I find it hard—almost impossible—to hold these two realities in my mind simultaneously. Just the other night, I sat on a porch with friends watching a wondrously full moon rise across the river, a pale pathway of shimmering silver light stretching from riverbank to riverbank. Nothing could have been more sublimely serene or more peaceful. And then it hit me: that same moon had just set over cities, towns, rivers, and fields half a world away, places destroyed and families broken apart by a ghastly war that had engulfed them on a madman’s whim. How does one reconcile such disparate scenes from the same long, dark night?

By now, we know—or should know—that “no man is an island, that we are each a piece of the continent, a part of the main; that if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less.” Trust me: like it or not, we are all involved in what is going on in Ukraine and John Donne’s sad bell tolls not just for countless Ukrainians, but for every one of us. That’s an incongruous, harsh truth.

All this begs the question of what should be done. Lamentation is appropriate, but it falls far short of a worthy response. Economic sanctions are a step in the right direction, so is providing defensive arms to Ukrainian forces. The unity of the Western alliance has been both surprising and comforting. But still the war goes on like a drumbeat. People I respect plead for a more aggressive policy, but the line of demarcation between East and West is far too blurred to risk direct confrontation, and that, my friends, is an incongruous and utterly sad truth.

After a long winter, I long for spring. Mark Twain suffered from spring fever, too.  “When you’ve got it, you want—oh, you don’t quite know what it is you want to do, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!” That’s also very much how I feel about the incongruity of this beautiful season and this senseless war.

There are small steps to take: contributions, donations, remembrances, even words like these. I walk in the garden and it seems like each day, I see some new green shoot, some new bud. I hold these in my heart and search for ways to share their hopeful promise with desperate people far away. As Sir Elton John might sing, “It’s not much, but it’s the best I can do.”

We like to keep a wreath on the front of our home. This year, it includes a ring of blue and yellow flowers, a sunflower in the center. We’ve also planted a row of blue and yellow pansies under the boxwood that frames the porch to remind us of all the incongruity of this season of new life and old atrocities. 

Sigh.

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine. Two collections of his essays (“Musing Right Along” and “I’ll Be Right Back”) are available on Amazon. Jamie’s website is www.musingjamie.com

 

 

There must be some subliminal messaging going on in the world these days. It seems that every time I open my eyes, I’m seeing two colors everywhere: blue and yellow. It’s not as simple as the proximity of blue and yellow on the electromagnetic spectrum; after all, Mr. and Mrs. Green live comfortably between those two hues. Something else is afoot. Hmmm…

The other evening, I was fortunate enough to watch the sun set over the Caribbean Sea and instead of seeing the usual crimsons and golds I often associate with the end of day, there they were again: blue and yellow. The next morning, my wife and I took a walk into town and there they were again: a seaside restaurant painted in bold blue and yellow; yellow buoys floating serenely across a pastel blue inlet; a tiny bird bejeweled with bright yellow and blue feathers waiting for breakfast crumbs. What had begun as a one-time phenomenon had phased first into a series of odd coincidences and then into an unmistakable universal messaging board telling me I had better start paying close attention to other events unfolding half a world away.

The messaging didn’t end in the Caribbean. When we returned home last night, my wife and I tuned into the first episode of a new season of one of our favorite television shows. As we settled in to watch, it seemed to me that every other scene featured subtle background shots featuring blue and yellow: a Vermeer blue headscarf in front of soft yellow sunlight streaming through a window; a yellow house under a pastel blue sky; a field of flowers—guess their colors. “Odd,” I thought. “This episode must have been shot months ago; why am I seeing it like this now?” In the five previous seasons, I had never noticed an underlying color theme lurking in the background. Why now? Why these colors? Was there some post-production trick of cinematography that cast original scenes literally in a new light?

Or am I seeing the world differently? I think I know the answer.

In Ukraine, brutal aggression has been met with brave resistance. A few months ago, few of us would have recognized the Ukrainian flag: blue over yellow; a cloudless sky over a field of sunflowers. Now, the world watches and holds its breath as cities are decimated, hospitals are bombed, children flee, and brave men and women fight to the death for their homeland. Now, the colors blue and yellow are painting a new picture, an image of heroic resistance against an overwhelming red tide that is bent on destroying everything in its path. In the short term, the tragic outcome seems inevitable, but the truth of the longer term hasn’t yet been sketched, let alone painted. America, our European friends, and our allies around the world are doing what we can, but despite our best intentions and the not inconsequential effect of sanctions, we can’t seem to stem the tide and secure a different outcome. Our efforts feel colorless.

Blue and yellow are hardly despondent colors. On the contrary; I always found them to be cheerful, bright, hopeful. We’ll see. While physicists may be able to explain the universe by means of the electromagnetic spectrum, that explanation floats way above my pay grade. All I know is this: that Caribbean sunset I saw last week? It was a prayer for Ukraine. Please say it with me.

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine. Two collections of his essays (“Musing Right Along” and “I’ll Be Right Back”) are available on Amazon. Jamie’s website is www.musingjamie.com

 

I used to play chess, but I’ve lost the habit. Not a great loss; I wasn’t very good anyway. But lately—perhaps because of the pandemic or maybe the waning days of winter—the chess board has magically reappeared on the coffee table, and my wife has been imploring me to teach her to play. I’m not so sure about that; it seems yet another slippery marital slope.

Chess is a mind sport, a game of abstract strategy. There’s no contact in chess, although I suppose there’s always that possibility. There’s also no luck in chess: no fluke of classical mechanics from rolling the die as in backgammon; no drawing of random cards as in gin rummy; not even a wonky cardboard spinner as in Chutes and Ladders. There’s just you and your opponent and all that sinister space between your two minds. Somehow, that doesn’t sound like a savory recipe for enhanced marital bliss to me.

Nevertheless, we probably should find some mutual pursuit to pass our time together. She is a busy little bee who doesn’t know the meaning of “down time.” My idea of action is watching the Golf Channel. She could play backgammon for hours, while I struggle to count to twelve. A deck of cards is just another opportunity for her to drink wine and chat—trust me: she’s a grandmaster of both—while I prefer getting lost in a good book. I guess we’re just mismatched socks, but hey, even mismatched socks can make a pair.

But back to chess. The current form of the game originated in southern Europe during the 15th Century, after evolving from chaturanga, a similar game of much older Indian origin. These days, according to Wikipedia, chess is one of the world’s most popular games, which might explain why the divorce rate is exploding.

There are sixty-four squares on a chess board, arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. There is no hidden information, no wild card, not a whiff of any element of chance. Just you and your opponent’s mind. And time. Chess does require a lot of time, unless you’re playing speed chess which involves two alarm clocks and a lot of slapping. I’ve never played speed chess; I find the permutations of the game intimidating enough, hardly in need of anything so complicated as time thrown into the mix.

But as complicated as chess is, the object of the game is simple: capture your opponent’s king. Kind of like what Comrade Putin is trying to pull off in Ukraine but without the incumbent tragedy. Come to think of it, I wish Putin would have just challenged President Zelensky to a game to settle the score once and for all. I know there are a lot of grandmasters in Russia, but my money would be on Mr. Zelensky. He’s the real deal.

In the last few decades, a lot of very intelligent people have invested countless hours in connecting chess to such human fields of endeavor as mathematics, computer science, even psychology. As far as I’m concerned, that’s time down the drain. I’d be much more in favor of all that brain power being devoted to solving other riddles, like who came first, the chicken or the egg, or why professional athletes are paid infinitely more than nurses or teachers. Don’t get me started!

I’ll be interested to see how long our chess board remains on the coffee table, beckoning but untouched. At some point—probably when the weather turns and we can move life back onto the porch—I bet the board will quietly disappear and the bliss of our union will be safe for another few months. In the meantime, I’ll do my best to avoid capture, unless by “capture,” she means the capture of my heart. Trust me: she’s good at that, too. She’s got a great queen’s gambit.

Checkmate.

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine. Two collections of his essays (“Musing Right Along” and “I’ll Be Right Back”) are available on Amazon. Jamie’s website is www.musingjamie.com

 

 

I found this little drawing many years ago at a yard sale. I had no idea of its provenance, but ever the optimist, I bought it for a dollar or two, convinced it was an undiscovered masterpiece by James Thurber that would keep me in high cotton once I hit retirement. Well, that day has long since come and gone, and now the sketch hangs over the crib where the last grandchild naps when she comes to visit. It’s worth a lot more to me for that duty than for any value I presumed it had when I purchased it for such a song way back when.

Value is like that. It’s not so much about actual worth as about personal meaning. Many possessions might be valuable, but only a few have any real meaning because value is ascribed by others while meaning is self-determined.

My “Thurber” is just a simple sketch, whimsical and playful, and I like to think that it has brought sweet dreams to all those who have slept beneath it. I’m sure those babies never once thought about the drawing’s value—if, indeed, it has any at all—but I know one or two have pointed to it upon waking and delightedly said “Dog” or “Birdie,” “butterfly” being well beyond the horizon of a sleepy crib monkey’s vocabulary. Maybe in years to come, one of those monkeys will even remember sleeping under my presumed masterpiece the way I remember the little lamp that sat on the dresser in my childhood bedroom and played “Teddy Bear’s Picnic” over and over until I finally fell asleep. Plenty of meaning, but precious little value.

I’m of the opinion that an item may be valuable to us—even invaluable to us—not because we list it on a rider to an insurance policy, but because of the place it holds in our memory and on the register of our lives. Sure, some things can become more valuable over time, but remember, markets are like elevators: they can go up and down. Meaning is different because external factors don’t really matter; meaning is found, not made. It’s personal, not something subject to the influence of someone else’s perspective or events beyond our control.

My daughter was with me the day I found this sketch at that yard sale. She was in high school at the time. Now she is an accomplished artist, living and making her own masterpieces a continent away. Maybe that’s another reason I ascribe such meaning to this little doodle: it brings back memories of a time when a dog and a butterfly got along like two peas in a pod.

As to the value of my “Thurber,” I’ve never bothered to look into its artistic provenance. It’s probably just an offset print, one of thousands, matted and framed. I really don’t care if it’s authentic or not. To be honest, it’s its story that appeals to me. I’m infinitely more persuaded by the emotional provenance of this perfect little sketch: “Dog and Butterfly” means something important to me and, even more importantly, to those babies in the next generation who have slumbered beneath it. That’s both its true value and meaning, isn’t it?

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine.
Two collections of his essays (“Musing Right Along” and “I’ll Be Right Back”) are available on Amazon. Jamie’s website is www.musingjamie.com

 

 

 

 

 

Last week’s Musing was about the “burglar step.” This week, I’ve been thinking about steps in general. I suppose that’s a step in the right direction.

Not too long ago, some wag came up with the bright idea that I would need to take 10,000 steps a day (about five miles) to become my best self. I have two bones to pick with that assessment: why 10,000, and what, pray tell, is “my best self?” Do I have another?

A scratch of research suggests that the Fitbit Company came up with the 10,000 steps-a-day idea. Of course, they did. They reasoned that if they could successfully promote the idea of 10,000 steps per day, then people would have to buy something that could count all those steps. In other words, the good folk at Fitbit invented a compelling need for a product they had just built. I bet P.T. Barnum—the most successful promoter in the history of promotion—would have loved Fitbit! But then if you stop to think about it, maybe it was just as well that Fitbit turned stepping into counting. What a less-than-wonderful-world this would be if everyone walked around counting their steps all day instead of constantly looking at their cell phones! Come to think of it, maybe we’d be better off counting our steps because there sure isn’t much conversation in the coffee shop these days.

But hold on. I scratched a little more and It turns out there’s another theory about the 10,000 steps per day goal. Just after the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, a Japanese clock maker, hoping to capitalize on the fitness craze that was sweeping his nation, came up with a pedometer with a name that when written in Japanese characters resembled a walking man. It also translated as a “10,000 steps meter,” thereby creating a new norm for walking. If that is indeed the case, then maybe Fitbit is off the hook. They just picked up where that Japanese clock-maker left off.

But there’s still that pesky issue of me becoming my “best self.” Once upon a time, I was feeling pretty good about myself until someone suggested there was a better version of me out there, one rooted in the 10,000 steps per day routine. Now, if I don’t meet my daily step goal, I feel guilty and ashamed—hardly attributes of anyone’s better self. Here’s how that plays out in my world: the other day, it was getting late, I was sleepy, and it was pelting rain. I had just over 9,500 steps logged; what to do? Go for a walk around the block? I mulled it over for a few minutes and, thankfully my better self prevailed. I went upstairs and climbed into bed. I could be my better self the following day.

These cold winter days make meeting my daily step goal a real challenge. Oh sure, I joined the Y, but walking in circles on the track makes 10,000 steps seem a lot farther than they are when I walk them with my friends on a warm, sunny day on the golf course. Maybe that’s the trick: friends to share my steps with. Genius!

Fear not, steppers; there’s hope. A recent study found that women in their 70s who managed to walk an average of 4400 steps a day reduced their risk of premature death by about 40%, compared to women who averaged only 2700 steps a day. The risk was further reduced if the women in the study walked 5000 or 6000 steps a day. But then this happened: women who walked more than 7500 steps a day showed no additional health benefit; they had maxed out! As in all things, too much a good thing might just be nothing at all!

That’s it for now. I have to walk across the street to the wine and cheese shop. That’s exactly 132 steps, door-to-door, round-trip. I should know: I count them almost every day.

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine. Two collections of his essays (“Musing Right Along” and “I’ll Be Right Back”) are available on Amazon. Jamie’s website is www.musingjamie.com

 

 

 

 

Friends around the dinner table, the conversation flowing like wine, or maybe it was the other way around. Someone had to go upstairs to do what can only be done upstairs in our little house. “Watch out for the burglar step!” someone called out.

“The what?” I said.

And that was the first time I ever heard about the burglar step: one step in a stairway where the riser is a bit higher or the tread a bit more narrow than all the others, presumably installed to trip up a burglar about to do what burglars are wont to do upstairs. When you think about it, it makes perfect sense: an old-fashioned built-in alarm system that literally trips up an unsuspecting burglar and thwarts the best-laid plans of mouse or man or even a burglar.

But as is my wont, I began to ponder another dimension of my newly discovered burglar step. First, I had to see it for myself, and guess what: it actually does exist. One tread, one riser, slightly different from all the others in our humble-yet-steep staircase. We’ve lived in this house for ten years now, and I imagine that over that span of time, I’ve made thousands of trips up or down the staircase without once, well, tripping. (Not that kind of tripping, Eggman.) The same holds true for my wife; she’s never stumbled either. Which makes me wonder: if neither my wife nor I have ever tripped on the burglar step, why would I suppose an actual burglar would fall prey to such a quirky little trap?

And in the wake of that thought, along came another: I wondered what else—what other wondrous small details—have gone unnoticed, either in our little house or in my life, ‘lo these many years. What else is there—something so tiny and unapparent, something simply taken for granted, some architect’s folly or builder’s little joke or act of divine providence that I literally walk on every day, that I’ve failed to notice? I wasn’t particularly concerned about the fact that the burglar step on our staircase hadn’t done me in yet, let alone surprised a burglar, as I was gobsmacked about all the other little safety devices that have surely been built into the staircase of my life that I’ve failed to notice over the years. What fickle finger of fate or unseen hand has guided me over most of the pitfalls or traps that have lain in wait, ready to trip me up at the most unsuspecting of moments? We all know how life can change in a heartbeat, yet somehow, I’ve managed to make it this far without tumbling headfirst down a flight of stairs in the night or waking some brave homeowner who happens to keeps a baseball bat next to his bed, just in case…

I try to practice gratitude every day. Now that I’m aware of the burglar step in our staircase, maybe I’ll be more aware of, and grateful for, the other built-ins that have kept me (for the most part) safe through the years. Maybe I’ll try and be a bit more observant and appreciative of all the little details carpentered into the stairway of my life, especially the ones designed to keep me and mine safe and secure.

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine.
Two collections of his essays (“Musing Right Along” and “I’ll Be Right Back”) are available on Amazon. Jamie’s website is www.musingjamie.com