HOW FAR IS THREE MILES?

     No, really, we're going to walk five miles a day, every day.  New Year's resolution.  Oh, stop it!  We can see your eyes rolling.  Three miles in the morning, two after dinner.

     And there's where resolution meets obsession.  Because how are we to know when we've walked these miles?  Turns out Larry has an app on his phone in which lives a nice lady (seemingly related to, but less annoying than, the woman who lives in our car nav system) who will announce mileage as it rolls under our feet.

     But we're not sure we can believe her.  "That sure didn't feel like a mile," we might say.  "Let's check her accuracy against that step-counter thing I saw in the junk drawer."

     So we do.  We calibrate it to the length of my stride, and set out the following day on the same route.  And find that our two devices vary wildly.  So which one's telling the truth?     

     Well, the phone also has a step-counting device, which we turn on after tucking Nice Lady away for the time being.

     I should stop here and point out that we do realize we walk however far we walk, and kinda, sorta are perfectly adequate measuring tools for our purpose.

     Except they aren't.

     Out we go again.  Up to 26th, around the school, down Thurman, right on 25.  "It's about here," Larry says, "that I start counting the minutes instead of steps to Starbucks." Our final destination.

     I've been somewhere in my head trying to sort out the relationship of the circle of fifths to the chord progression in Melancholy Baby, so haven't noticed that we're only so far as Pettigrove.  We start to talk and somehow sail right on by Lovejoy, where we're supposed to turn toward the river.

     Oh, no!  Now our careful calibrations will be off.  Insert bad word of your choice here.  Nothing for it but to soldier on. 

     We pass a very tall man with a mustache leading a huge white bulldog.  And there's a post in front of an old early-Portland bungalow.  In a box on the post are sheets of paper, copies of a poem.  "Take one," says a sign, in a rather Alice-in-Wonderland-ish way.

     I take one.  Here is the poem:

          "NO POEM AFTER ALL

     These are the words that found their way

     Into the poem that I wrote

     This is the doubt that pulls out the rug

     from under the words

     that once found their way

     into the poem that I wrote

     This is the third revision I've written

     that likely won't strengthen

     what's left of the vision  

     that prompted the impulse,

     to make the words better

     that once found their way

     into the poem that I wrote.

     This is the Lord only knows when it's done

     that makes it hard to end once I've begun.

     Some poems bear continuing;

     this isn't one.

          Richard Lewis

     I suppose the moral to this story might be that one should freely wander.  Smell the roses.  Look for poetry.

     Yes, I know.  But tomorrow, damn it, we're going out again and we WILL find out how far three miles is.