The St. Jerome school

 Years ago, I memorized a bit of advice from St. Jerome:

To solve a problem, walk around.

Jerome and I are in the same class of writers: we’re pacers.

If I’m stuck, I get up and walk around.

As a newspaperman, I walked to the coffee pot a million times. The Old Editor once said that I was the only reporter he’d known who spent 45 hours of a 40-hour week walking back and forth in search of coffee.

I was writing while walking to the coffee pot, unsticking the stuck thinking that is always the problem behind stuck writing.

And walking too the coffee pot, is to my mind, more seemly than pacing. But if there were no coffee in the world, I’d pace.

People walk for many reasons.

A lot of people walk for their health.

I like to walk in the forest, to see the place.

Recently, while in the forest south of Stone Mountain, I ran into a thicket of wild azaleas. It was, I’d guess, about a thousand square feet of solid blooms, about the size of a cottage in the old neighborhood. As bouquets go, it was grand, and I was overwhelmed.

I came out of the woods and saw another walker going in on the trail. He had earphones on and was walking for exercise — trying to blot out all the other stuff, the distractions.

I like to walk the woods with my eyes and ears open, but I know, from all that pacing I’ve done while writing, that people who walk are often up to different things.