Week 12 - Night Walking

The birds at my apartment complex still sing at night, which unsettles me. Also unsettling is how the wind blows stronger and colder and all at once; feeling the chill of it, and hearing the roar of it in distant trees, and looking up to see the rapid shifting of silver clouds overhead, I felt like the friendly comfort of being outside on a beautiful day had been replaced by an unpredictable and uncomfortable smallness. It was very late on a Thursday night, the robins were trumpeting their hearts out in the artificial lighting of the parking lot, and my roommate and I were going to go play pickleball. 

When Woolf takes a night walk, she pretends she is buying a pencil. My roommate and I are both too busy to do things together except late on Thursday nights, so we really were going to play pickleball.

We passed by the complex where we had made snow angels at the start of the first big snowstorm, where I’d dropped my phone with all my cards and by the time I realized thirty minutes later, the snow had buried it forever under a half-mile stretch of inscrutably perfect white. We passed the field where a few nights before I had seen some boys trying to skimboard in an especially big puddle. We passed by some men loitering outside a flashy sports car on our way into the store, where I wandered the aisles looking for snacks while someone else – a buff, bald man holding in his arms a beautifully shiny golden corgi – came in, checked out and left. I checked out at the gas station, and we continued on. 

While walking at night, Woolf seems to become enraptured with the beautiful, bizarre lives of each person she passes. So, too, sights like the lights of the city, a cat along a garden wall, and closed curtains offer themselves to her imagination. Like Mary Oliver finds the natural world rich and intricate, Woolf understands that the night is inherently an intimate place, where the goings-on become private and personal, where things are done with secrecy or subtly, and where the crowding-together of a city’s inhabitants reveals, through glimpses, the immense complexity of each private sphere. 

Next the pickleball court, two boys were playing basketball in the dark. My roommate began calling them hoopers, which I’ve only since learned is an actual piece of slang. While we unsuccessfully tried to play pickleball in the dim light from streetlamps, the hoopers yapped between each goal. We couldn’t make out their conversation. Occasionally, they would both go quiet and disappear from view, and just when I got nervous and started checking the doors on the pickleball court, then one of them would return again, coughing and hacking up a lung. My roommate and I speculated about the hoopers: were they high school students or adults? We couldn’t tell. Maybe they were basketball champions training for a big game. Maybe they were rivals. Maybe they were middle schoolers; in the dark, we couldn’t tell. But when they left much later, wheeling bikes under the cold streetlamp, one looked at his phone called out to the other: his dad wanted to know when they’d be home.