Back way back when I was a pre-teen and teen I adored Dr. Pepper. I could not get enough of it and used to guzzle (my mother’s word) the stuff all day long. I have the fillings to prove it, which is why, sometime during high school to save my teeth I swapped my allegiance from Dr. P and other sugary soft drinks to coffee. I say this as if I made the decision all on my own, but my mother and dentist—mostly my mother—made a big deal out of this. Once I stopped guzzling the sugared stuff I mostly stopped having rotten teeth, so I guess it was the right move.

Before I went cold-turkey, I used to plan my trips home from school around my Dr. P addiction. If I caught the bus right outside the school, it left me off on Main Street, about two blocks from my house and not in easy striking distance of a market. But if I walked about 4-5 blocks west from the school to Lincoln Blvd., caught the Lincoln bus to Rose Avenue and walked the 4-5 blocks home from there, I had access to two markets. On the walk up, I’d stop into the little Mom & Pop store on Venice Blvd. for a hit of Dr. P to drink at the bus stop. Then on Rose Avenue, I’d visit Escalera’s market, another Mom & Pop I’d been going to since I was a little girl (when it was still Dumont’s), before completing the one and a half blocks home. I always made sure to buy an extra Dr. P so I could drink it in the evening after dinner.

The thing is, the Dr. Pepper was part of it, maybe the initial motivator, but really I loved those walks. Sometimes I went with another “friend” who lived close to my neighborhood, but mostly I walked alone because I preferred the freedom of my imagination and the luxury to observe, over making inane conversation with a girl I had little in common with and didn’t like that much (and who didn’t care that much for me). So we’d do our best to avoid each other at the end of the school day and go our separate ways. And that was just as it should be. I could take my beloved walk in peace.

*This little guy is not on permanent display in my room—in fact, this little guy has long since gone on to a better life in recycling—but it was there in my room and sparked a memory chain, so I took a picture of it.

This post is really about walking.


I’d seen all the sights a million times, but something always cropped up: new people, new cars, some funny incident along the familiar streets, the wind in my face, the rain in my hair. Okay, so it doesn’t rain all that much in Southern California—but, I’ve always loved walking in the rain. Heavy or gentle, I loved to slosh on through. I loved walking down to the beach (about five blocks from my house) when it rained. The beach is so beautiful in stormy weather when no one much is around and the air is so brisk it pierces right through to your soul. The driftwood that came to shore during storms was marvelous: the sea glass and bare flesh wood, smoothed and rounded by the motion of the sea, stripped bare of pretense, made manifest into something new and wondrous that I could take home, put on a shelf, stare at, remember, dream…

Walking, walking, always a process of discovery in those days, of myself, of the newness in familiar things, of the incredible bridge of imagination I stretched my legs upon. My legs, which even to this day, are strong and muscular from those walks. Later injury left me with a bad knee that makes it harder to chew up the miles, but I have learned something else in recent months. We are only as limited as we allow ourselves to be. The fire inside will die through inattention and limitation. The effort to keep moving, to keep discovering, is worth it. Not just something we like to do, but something we must do in order to live our lives fully.

Recently, I tried making another kind of walk, down memory lane, perhaps to recapture those other kinds of walks, or for the sake of a remembered taste.

You see, some time after I’d gone cold turkey and gone off the Pepper, I started longing for another taste, a taste that had begun to glow golden in my memory. I took another hit of the P-juice. I was bitterly disappointed. It just didn’t taste the same, was rather skanky and ordinary, I thought, and I wondered how I could ever have been so enamored of it. It wasn’t until many (many, many) years later that I discovered the secret: they’d changed the formula. Instead of using “Imperial Pure Cane Sugar,” they’d converted to the cheaper and more easily attainable high fructose corn syrup. Only one plant still made Dr. P the old fashion way, and that was the one in Dublin, Texas. You can still buy a six pack of teeny tiny bottles for $10-$15 a whack, shipped directly from Dublin. You can also buy the stuff at Bristol Farms and other high-end markets. The bottles sold individually at the markets are near $4 a pop, so I never even considered that. I dearly wanted a repeat of that mystical taste, though, that beloved childhood favorite, but that’s a steep damn price for a walk down memory lane. I considered this for a long, long time but in the end the lure of remembered taste won out. I bought a six pack. I chugged a bottle down.

Did it taste the same? Did it bring me back to that place I remembered? It definitely tasted better than the stuff they’re selling now, and it did trigger a number of sense memories, mostly of lolly-gagging, imaginative walks, but that remembered taste? I learned that it had migrated into the place of dreams, where all things are impossibly bright and shining unearthly, where stories are so much-much better than the dross we finally commit to paper and screen, can ever-ever hope to produce in the tatty realm of reality. I doubt any taste on earth could be as rich, compelling, and deep as that remembered taste, flavored as it was with endorphins from long, lovely walks.