Around and about in Palo Alto

with goats

When my husband and I moved to Palo Alto, our oldest son was five and our middle son was 18 months old. A year later, I gave birth to our daughter. I’m not great at math, but the number of miles I’ve walked and run on the streets of Palo Alto is a lot. I’ve pushed strollers (single, then double, then single again), sprinted after wobbly bikes and scooters and toddlers determined to fling themselves into traffic, and, after my daughter was old enough for preschool, gone on long runs from south to north (along Bryant Street, across Oregon Expressway, across Embarcadero Road, through downtown Palo Alto, over the San Francisquito Creek pedestrian bridge, and into Menlo Park) and east to west (across Oregon Expressway, up California Ave., through the pedestrian underpass (aka The Fish Tunnel, so called by my children because of the underpass walls are painted with bright underwater scenes), beneath the railroad tracks, across El Camino, and up through College Terrace, and into the tawny hills above Foothill Expressway. On such runs, I was never without my iPod shuffle (RIP), because no one needs to listen to the sound of their own suffering. My power song was Bonnie Tyler’s “Holding Out for a Hero,” although I was also partial to Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” and will.i.am’s “I Like to Move It.” Don’t judge.

My running days came to a close after I hurt my knee, and once my knee recovered, I realized I didn’t like running enough to miss it; I just liked the feeling of having run and bragging about how far I had gone (not how fast, because like the peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the children’s book Stop That Pickle!, I may not be the fastest sandwich in the world, but I do have great endurance). So I started walking.

Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

Walking gave me time to think, which is generally easier to do when you’re not gasping for breath or questioning your own sanity. But I did not particularly care for my thoughts—which revolved primarily around my children, who were struggling, and around my bitterness at being duped by the Palo Alto dream, and around how much I envied everyone else who lived here and seemed to be having a perfect life even though I knew that no one’s life is perfect. I wrote in my memoir that Palo Alto was “a town both charmed and haunted, kissed by abundance, built on a bedrock of barely contained dread,” that it was a cursed place that “lured us in and turned us into swine.” (Not to be braggy, but still pretty proud of that line.) To distract myself, I started listening to podcasts while I walked and became obsessed with Ruined!, in which one of the hosts, who loves horror movies, relates the plot of a horror movie in great detail to her co-host, who is terrified by horror movies but needs to know every detail, especially the twist. I’m firmly Team Terrified but Fascinated from Afar when it comes to horror, and Ruined! felt like a perfect escape from the real-life horror happening at my house. Also, the co-hosts, Alison and Halle, are freaking hilarious.

But over the past year and a half, something shifted. I started walking without headphones. I stopped being afraid of my thoughts. What precipitated the change? I don’t know. Maybe it was getting my memoir out in the world. Maybe it was my realization that my husband and I and all three of our children were stumbling along, learning, doing our best—maybe on a different timeline, maybe in a different way—but doing it. I also made a number of important discoveries, among them

1. that it’s easier to come up with ideas for what to write when I’m walking without music or a horror movie synopsis blaring through my headphones. (My friend Elyse, who is an extravagantly talented writer—so much so that I don’t even hate her for getting this essay published in Modern Love even though my submissions were rejected multiple times—is a runner and evaluates her runs based on whether they were good for plot.) Hence, what I now call my plot walks.

2. that I don’t actually hate Palo Alto. What I hated was that my children were unhappy in Palo Alto.

3. that if you look carefully, Palo Alto is full of hidden treasures. Behold:

   

   

   Photos courtesy of my friend Susan. If you don't follow her on Instagram at @swimmersuze, you should be.

Speaking of hidden treasures: last year, I was walking along a hidden path in midtown Palo Alto, minding my own business, and came across a life-sized white ceramic goat nestled in the ivy, seemingly also minding its own business.

At least it wasn’t a cow. But still. If you’re not expecting it, a white ceramic goat randomly sitting in some ivy can startle a person.

So of course I was like, what is happening here, and because this is how my mind works, I immediately decided that the white goat was the sister of Black Phillip in the 2015 film The Witch, featuring baby Anya Taylor Joy. (Of course I haven’t seen the movie—are you nuts? But Halle and Alison do a bang-up job with it on Ruined!, and even though I can’t link specific episodes here, it’s Episode 71). To learn more about Black Phillip, click here (at your own risk):

But when I showed the white ceramic goat to my friend Tracy, Tracy said that the goat looked too nice to be related to Black Phillip and that its name should be Bob’s Sister, which is from a This American Life episode called “What Lies Beneath. In the episode, Bob’s Sister (spelled Bobsister) is the creation of a class of third graders who have determined that Bobsister has no gender and is actually not a sister (and actually there’s also no Bob), and I personally think that that’s a perfect name for a white ceramic life-sized goat nestled in some ivy. I will never, not ever turn my back on that goat, but I love that it’s there.