My little walking group meets on Tuesday mornings for walk and talk and coffee and more talk and walk, and I’ve noticed my friends often cross the street on a diagonal or meander rather than going to the corner and crossing straight across to the other corner. The tidy mind rebels.
I’m reminded of pug walks. Neil (my husband) provides pug day care for my daughter’s pugs, which includes walking them. Our walking patterns have since changed, but a few years ago ago I’d often go with him on the pug walks. When I was with them, we’d all go straight across the street. However, I noticed that sometimes the pugs would start off on a diagonal, spilling the secret that when I wasn’t along, Neil would cut corners. Aargh.
So why was (and am) I so uptight about not cutting corners? Why do I insist on going all the way to the corner and then going straight across???
Let’s go back a few more years, back to when I was taking walking classes at the local college. At the end of each class, the instructor had us walk circuits around the basketball court with no cutting corners! Some number of circuits equaled one-quarter mile, and we usually needed some number of circuits to make our mileage goal for the day. Can’t remember the number, but can remember no cutting corners!
I made very sharp turns on those basketball court corners, remembering the marching commands column left and column right; maneuvers that involve putting one foot slightly behind the other, then rotating sharply on the balls of both feet in order to be facing at a right angle from the original position.
I learned those commands when I was on the traffic patrol in 7th and 8th grades – way back in 1949-1951. Traffic patrol was a big deal. I was ecstatic to be selected and very conscientious about attending every drill. We marched around the playground in groups of four, proudly wearing our white belts, something like ammunition belts that went across one shoulder and around our waists, shouldering our stop signs as if they were rifles. We practiced marching twice a week; our instructor must have been a drill sergeant during the war. I can hear his voice yet: Column RIGHT HAR! and we’d march along for a while, then Column LEFT HAR! We would pivot as one and march some more, around and around the schoolyard.
Marching was one of the coolest things about being on traffic patrol because we got out of school to practice. The other cool thing was leaving class five minutes early to meet on the playground, march around importantly (column RIGHT HAR! column LEFT HAR!), and then march out to the street, each foursome responsible for one of the four intersections around the school. And – oh, yes – the leader of each foursome had a whistle. If anyone would be so foolhardy as to try to cross the street without our being in the crosswalk holding up the stop signs, a sharp blast on the whistle would paralyze the scofflaw in his or her tracks. And of course we never tolerated cutting corners.
