I volunteered at Kiddie Park recently and ran the truck ride. A young staffer handed me a stopwatch and said “Three minutes per ride, and oh, here is a walkie talkie just in case it breaks down. It’s from Italy and the instructions are in Italian so, just saying.” What a fun time watching all the smiling faces of grandparents, parents, and children as they were all kids once again in this classic park that has been a gathering place since 1953.

I’ve been thinking about unique places like Kiddie Park, a place with a history that helps make our city unique. Sometimes places are more than just places, they are the fabric of our identity, a place to belong, like the television show Cheers, where everyone knows your name. Enjoying the birth of four grandchildren in one year makes me think about their future. Who will call their name? I imagine a scene ten years from now. I’m walking out the door and my granddaughter asks me where I’m going and I tell her that I’m going to the grocery store to buy a loaf of bread. She says, “You don’t have to do that anymore. Just order online and they’ll deliver whatever you want.” I pretend to not hear and walk out the door.

To actually love the world around us, we have to get out into it. To love a place is to have a memory of its people and places that can only be found in that particular place. And so I go buy bread at the store because we were made to move about and bump into one another. To see people out walking and to ask what kind of dog they have, to give a thumbs up to the firefighters washing the ladder truck, to see people at familiar places and ask about their family. Here are a few of my moments sauntering about town:

In the parking lot at the store, I bump into my old baseball coach, a legend who coached some of Bartlesville’s greatest American Legion teams, Tug Baughn. He tells me a corny joke, tells me how much he appreciates his Taylor Homes house. He tells me that if I had continued to play baseball, that he would have brought me in from the bullpen to throw my curve ball behind all the flamethrowers he had on his staff. I never totally believe coach Baughn when he tells me that but I walk away with my chest stuck out feeling good about myself and what could have been if I hadn’t quit baseball to play golf. Coach Baughn knows my name.

I played at Adams Golf Course recently, walked into the golf shop and shook the hand of Jerry Benedict, the same guy who ran junior tournaments when I was a kid taking several dozen junior golfers in polos to Pizza Hut for a feast after our annual end-of-summer tournament. Jerry still knows my name.

There were once stores in every neighborhood. Cardinal and IGA and H&H and Munich’s polish specialty. Going to the store was a gathering, a harvest of sorts, a place to practice math and budgeting skills in the crucible of temptation and hunger. I learned honesty at the grocery when I ate a grape in the produce section. Mom made sure the clerk was aware to add a bit more to the bill to account for the confiscated grape as I looked on sheepishly. They knew my mom’s name at the store. 

They know my dad’s name at dining establishments. Eating at Murphy‘s on a Friday night was a treat. We gathered in the lobby until a corner booth opened and people would call out my dad’s name, I suppose because he built houses around town. I ordered strawberry soda and tore the end off the straw paper wrapper and blew the paper wrapper across the table at my sister. I missed and hit the man in the next booth upside the head. After getting our fill, we climbed what seemed like a mountain, water tower hill, across the highway near Sunset boulevard.

And so it goes. In my vision ten years hence, I return home and tell my granddaughter about my morning sauntering around town and she asks what sauntering means. I tell her that in the Middle Ages people went on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when villagers asked where they were going, they would reply, ‘A la sainte terre,’ ‘To the Holy Land.’ And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers.

I tell her that I hope she knows how to saunter, to move about her world with less efficiency and more playfulness, like bumper cars at Kiddie Park while buying bread at the market. Rest your eyes on the horizon behind and the story told from within your bones, risen from the dust of what it is that nourishes you, bread and belonging, and the constellation of people and moments that move and shape you.