“You’re going on one of your walks,” she said, from her desk by the office door.

“Yup, just up and down the hill, only exercise I get,” I said, in the doorway. “My legs give me a hard time if I don’t.”

“You just go up to that crosswalk right?”

“Actually, I’ve started to loop through that neighborhood that’s right there,” I said. She nodded and said there were some gorrrrgeous houses up there, but I think she was thinking of a different street, well past where I walk. I waved and didn’t correct her as I went outside, across the lot and around the tall wooden fence, where I texted my wife in the shade.

I have worked here for almost three months. After a week I’d established that I took lunch on foot, that I’d eat at my desk but only after walking alone, a little. For two months I only went up and down the main street, where they keep the lunch places and the drugstore, and the traffic and traffic cop. Lately I’ve felt I could drag it out a bit.

After crossing our hot sunny lot, I stop behind that wooden fence, just because it’s the first spot with a shadow, and where no one I work with can see me, if they’d even felt like looking. Now that spot is more mine than my desk, with its shade and privacy and some little words from my wife.

After that fence ends, it’s not my place at all, again. It’s as hot and public as it was my first day. I walk through another lot and up the big street, wondering if my shirt is tucked wrong or my pants are too short. I don’t feel at home again until I’m up the hill and over the crosswalk, the quieter one that doesn’t rate a cop. I walk back down half a block and turn the corner, a hundred eighty degrees from work or lunch.

My side street is perfectly straight. There is a church on the left and a parochial school on the right. The school is always full and the church always empty, except for a painter who looked at me once, as I took a picture of the dull boxy steeple, with him in it.

My favorite part of my walk is when I get to where I can’t see church or school. I can stand in the middle of my little road, in nobody’s way, and see a Cape and the same Dutch Colonial three times. There is a set of them in the center of the block, behind the school on square lots with old trees, and no more privacy than I get from the middle of the road. The lots don’t keep anyone out. I want in on each one.

Here I sit on the lawn by the driveway, in a wooden folding chair that creaks and gets cobwebby four months out of each of the past fifty-two years. There I look from the bedroom window, out on eight-thirty on a summer night, where the bigger kids play after my bedtime, which isn’t fair though I like the pilly blanket by my cheek. This is my clothesline and under-porch and sheet metal cellar hatch.

How I rush towards those moments in my eyes, here in houses that aren’t mine in some minutes that are. How little I did, and could have done, to save time with my parents and grandparents and children, instead losing my way back into my daydream here, which is of them, of course.

I turn the corner to the right again, and again, around the block with my houses on the inside, facing across at others that aren’t as nice. There’s one from 1790 that looks cold, behind its haughty sign that says “1790,” and other almost new ones that have fake mullions and no porches. My eyes firm up and I walk faster, back towards the main drag. I see all the children come out for lunch recess, and think some sentimental shit about them, but what can I do, stop and stare? I look forward and hear a line from an old song, about watching a girl “drinking milkshakes cold and long,” and then that leering freak Ziggy Stardust sang, sweetly to her not listening, “Don’t think you knew you were in this song.”

The song is called “Five Years,” which is supposed to be all we’ve got left. I haven’t heard it in the twenty since my turntable went on the fritz. I suppose I could listen to it some other way. If I did that, I might as well just walk my street the wrong direction next time, or not at all. I hear the chorus in my head, slowed down by my iffy memory and turntable, and think we’ll move in five years, my kids will be out of the house, one or both of my parents will die, I won’t have to work or walk here but I’ll still be mooning over street corners, a tuneless Ziggy in far duller clothes.

I get my lunch and go back to my desk. Later I leave that computer there so I can rush home to this one, barging my way past my family so I can sigh for them here alone, and then go back upstairs, exhaustedly happy to see them. Tomorrow I’ll text, without explaining: Don’t think you knew you were in this song.