 This just might be the group. So, oh my gosh. This is so fun. Oh, your map. Thank you, thank you, thank you for coming out. And it's so great to see familiar faces. So I think I know now everyone here. I'm Paula Francis. I used to live here. Can you hear her? Several years ago, and for the last couple of years, I've been living with my sister, Christine, down in Massachusetts. We drove up here today, believe it or not, I missed the exit. We're just talking. We were just talking. We didn't make it to Canada, that's the good news. So, what we're gonna do today, let me know, just let me know if you can't hear me. I tend to speak softly. But we thought it'd be fun to do this sister thing since we've been writing the two of us, her much more than me. So what we're gonna do is, after some brief introductions, we're gonna read snippets of our book and then we're gonna talk a little bit about them in between. And we do have quite a bit to share, but what the end would love to do is just have a conversation, okay? So we will leave time for that. And we really want you to get out of this, what you came here for. So, you know me, I'm Paula Francis and I did a little walk around the country and I ended up writing a story about it. 18 pair of shoes, because that was the question that was most frequently asked, how many shoes have you run through? So, that's my final answer. So, I'll let Chris introduce herself. Paula's sister, younger sister. Christine Noyes, call me Chris. I wrote my memoir about, it's centered around the day my husband passed away four and a half years ago. And the story skips around a bit and it includes some of our childhood. My childhood is I saw it and a little bit after he passed away as well. So it does skip around a little bit and I'm probably gonna skip around a little when we read. I've been a chef, a sales representative, entrepreneur, and now I'm a writer and illustrator and my job seemed to find me, I don't go looking for them. So, I'm gonna just start with, I'm gonna start at the beginning, the introduction of my book, which is called Close Enough to Perfect. This is my husband, Al. And, there we go. A satisfying cocktail. I just wanna say publicly thank you at the Muzzles New Activity Center. Thank you so much for having us. No, we just wanna publicly say thank you. Thank you. This is really wonderful. It's great to come back two months earlier to do this. Yeah, yeah. And we're very excited that people are here. It's so nice to see people. Yes, good, enjoy. Thank you. So, a satisfying cocktail, an introduction by Christine Noyes. As a preemptive strike, I realized that Al is holding a bottle of Scotch in this book's photo cover. After reading the book, any bourbon purist will feel the need to point that out. When I began to write my memoir, I did not intend to see it published. I wrote to deal with my grief and to keep my husband close. As time passed, I received encouragement from unexpected sources, including one dead for nine years, so I changed my mind. I learned a lot about myself as I wrote the memoir, mostly that my memory fails me as I edge toward the age of 60. You're there now. I'm after that now. I search a thesaurus to trigger the word on the tip of my tongue, but in some experiences, I find insight that had eluded me these many years. Some insights came from within. Some came from my sister, as we talked about our childhood. I am blessed. I have loved and I have been loved. And even though the anguish is almost unbearable at times, memories urge their way through the markiness to make me laugh or smile. I recall a line from the wonderful movie, Steel Magnolias. One of the characters says, laughter through tears is my favorite emotion. I concur that when those two emotional results mix, they create a satisfying cocktail. Drink up. Thank you. So I found myself not long after my husband passed away lying in bed awake, couldn't sleep, two o'clock in the morning. And all these emotions going through me and all these words were, almost like the words were circling my head to describe how I was feeling. And I had to do something about that because if I didn't, I wouldn't have fallen asleep. So I wanted to write them down and I didn't have a piece of paper. So I picked up my cell phone and I started typing into my cell phone and putting these words together. And before you know it, before I knew it, I had written a poem. And the poem is actually in the book. I finished it, I put my phone down and I fell asleep. And when I woke up the next morning, I read what I had written and I really liked it. And I said, you know, this is pretty good. And I started writing some more and some more and some more. I began with the children's books. I have a series of children's books as well. But the memoir is what I really focused on. And it was a way to get my feelings out on paper and it was very therapeutic for me. And I enjoyed it so much that I've been writing ever since. Yeah, she doesn't stop, believe me. It's kind of fun that we ended up together. It was totally unexpected. But life happens that way sometimes. Chris said she didn't expect to write a memoir. I did not expect to write a memoir. I didn't expect to walk around the country either. But I started walking from here down to D.C., interviewing people about happiness and what matters in life. Because I believe what matters in life is what we ought to focus on. Those are the things we ought to measure. In a gross national happiness kind of measure. So that really directs up policy and the practices that we are a part of. That's another whole story. I'll talk about that at some other time. But as I was reviewing all the data, I was gonna write a book about that. What did all of that mean? And I started doing that but was encouraged by a few people who know better than me to expand my book into a memoir. That is totally uncomfortable for me. She went kicking in screaming to that. I absolutely did. Because I'm typically a much more private person. And some of the things in the book are not that, are very, very private. And it took me a while to get used to that. But again, life takes you down a road sometimes that you just never know and I went with it. So what I'm going to do is start at the end. I'm gonna start at the end of my walk when I finished in Boston. The Happiness Walker, an introduction by me. People like the thought of me, the Happiness Walker, traveling around the country on foot. With the glimpse at my costume, they see what they want to see. And since this undertaking is less about me and much more about them, I reveal little. They paint in the details to their liking and the technical character they fashion projects much larger than the one inside me. My anonymity somehow invites their favor. Hearts are bared, secrets made visible. I, however, remain unexposed in their spotlight, a comfortable way of being. But the curtain is closing and there's only one curtain call. November 2nd, 2019. I stroll past Fenway Park down Commonwealth Ave Mall and on to Boston Common, America's oldest public park, clocking in at 9,861 miles, the completion of my listening project. As with many milestones around the country, this one, too, is anti-climatic. I have a small parade of friends and family who travel far and wide to celebrate the long-awaited moment with me. But the day is awash with gray. I'm not exactly sure what I'm feeling, but I brace against it and I posture, smiling and toasting and cajoling, never revealing my tears a knot of joy. I've worn this costume so long, walking shoes, safety vest, reporter in my pocket. I'm not sure what I'll find when I peel it off. I will no longer be the walker, I'll simply be Paula, indistinguishable from every other person navigating the planet, a mother of grown daughters, a divorcee without a home or a job or a car, a woman without her next plan. For someone who's comfortable with the unknown, these details now weigh on me. After all, it's time to digest the enormity of what I've just done. And on this afternoon in November, I've just outgrown my tent, which is exactly how I felt. I think anybody that has done a long-term project that they feel is significant and meaningful, when it comes to a completion, it's not exactly exciting. It's a little sad, and that's what I was feeling at that time. But the emotion, I think the emotions that I carried throughout the walk were like, they ran the gamut. Ebb and tide. Yeah, as it is, yeah. But then it was 2020. When I finished the walk in, I'm sorry, I finished in 2019, I still had a few miles to make up to make it 10,000 miles. So what I did is I walked from Massachusetts all the way back up to Vermont. Yes, ending at the Capitol with Joe and Christie, actually. Thank you for joining me. Oh, I would say too. In the rain, Chris was my sag wagon from Massachusetts to Vermont at that time as I was walking in silence. And the reason I walked in silence is because mostly in silence. Mostly. I failed a few times when I needed a bathroom and whatnot, but I found that in interviewing people, and I did try to interview as many diverse people from all different walks of life as possible. But still there are people whose voices are unheard, people whose voices are silenced. And I really, I wanted to acknowledge that in some way. So I felt this walk in silence was one way of doing that. And luckily Chris was ready to be my sag wagon along the way with 17 degrees that week. She picked the call this week absolutely to do this. But you managed somehow. So two memoirs, two sisters, different memories of childhood, both of us touched upon our childhood in our writing. Some of the things we agree happens, some of the things we don't agree happens. Anybody who has siblings knows that you can grow up in the same house with the same events and remember them totally differently, right? Yeah, that's happened a few times, quite a few times. So why don't you start by reading from? All right, I said I touched upon events before my husband's death and after. This particular one is about our childhood, my childhood. My parents got divorced for the second time when I was 13, at least I understood it that way at the time. Technically they got divorced only once, but when I was about 10 on the original day the divorce would have been final, they decided to give it another try. I don't remember any of us siblings being happy, excited or even mildly hopeful about the decision. Many reasons contributed to the collapse of their marriage, not the least of them my mother's mental state. Consequently, I spent most of my days outside away from the turmoil that filled our little house on Jackson Street. I also started to rebel around that time, pushed the envelope of discipline and apparently formed my views on marriage. My life growing up was like tiptoeing through a densely populated cow pasture trying to avoid steaming mounds of shit. No matter my diligence, how carefully I chose my path, nor how much I weighed every step, a shrouded slippery slope always propelled me into a hot, fresh pile of excrement. From the outside, our family looked normal, whatever normal constituted, whatever constituted normal in those days or today. Two parents and four children living in a small three-bedroom house on a private street, a large yard perfect for playing kick the can, army or hide and seek. One of our neighbors owned a pony, macaroni, a small Shetland housed in a corral adjacent to our front lawn and we sometimes fed them apples from another neighbor's tree. Those neighbors had a huge field behind their house where we played baseball, football, or just hoist around, normal. It was a much simpler time, some would say, than the 1960s and early 1970s. We had stay-at-home moms, dinner at six, and had to go home when the street lights turned on. We went from owning a black and white television to a color TV. Records turned into eight-track tapes and telephones still had cords. When not in school, we spent the entire day outside playing with the other kids from the neighborhood until it was time for dinner and we were not allowed to be late. We had lunch at the closest house when we got hungry or sometimes we skipped it all together. Wonderful childhood memories fill my head, proving that the human spirit is indomitable, protective and to some extent, deceiving. Deceiving is the optimum word there. I remember, even now I think back on my childhood as being wonderful, it was great. I had a blast, but I seem to have blocked out a lot of the bad stuff, and I don't know if that's normal. Some things I had completely forgotten about, but as we talk through this book and Paul as we've brought up a lot of this stuff, which is good. I mean, that's why I chose to write about it. It's, again, writing about the death of my husband, writing about a tumultuous childhood. It gets things out on paper. It gets them out of very therapeutic to do. And Paula also. Yeah, memories are not precise. They're not, absolutely not. And we could remember the same instance in totally different ways or at times, exactly the same way, which is quite interesting. Yeah, in fact, I too look fondly on my childhood and what I'm going to read won't reflect that, probably, but it's all fodder for what we will grow into as adults and how we choose to live our lives, how I look at it. So I'm going to read a passage that talks about our childhood as well. Everybody's journey has a beginning. Mine commences decades before the start of the happiness walk. I hit the ground running in the backseat of a 1957 Ford station wagon, wandering around Massachusetts, looking for UFOs. My mother's preferred family pastime. There were a lot of reported sightings in the early 60s and my mother wasn't going to miss out. She'd one want to beam her up. Mom was a vibrant, still the show, let's play a game kind of person. She was not only the life of the party, Joyce was the party and she was the most generous and kind-hearted person I've ever known. Mom suffered from chronic depression. The kind of bankrupted anima that causes one to believe that death is better option than a life. I remember my father waking me and my siblings to take us on a scouting trip, to look for my wandering mom one moonless winter evening. Someone found her, luckily not us. I wouldn't want that haunting memory. There were plenty of others, believe me. She had plunged into the icy waters of Lake Quinsigamon and Worcester, Massachusetts, not far from where we lived. Though an excellent swimmer, she did not swim. That night led to yet another lengthy hospitalization, a time when therapy equals fistfuls of valium, incessant electric shock treatments, and bars on institutional windows. My mom had her own army of saboteurs and they weren't as playful as mine. Tumultuous. You're tearing me. I am. Yeah. I just love the way you write. That was a background to our upbringing, but as we said, that's not necessarily the whole story. Right? My mom was very, she filled up. If she was here, she'd be up here. And we'd be playing charades or something. And singing. And singing. Or dancing. Which we did at her funeral. So the reason I, one of the reasons I write about her in the book, she was a big part of my life, obviously, but at her funeral, we had our ashes down on the grave in our immediate family, made a circle, and we're telling stories about mom, and boom, along comes a dragonfly. Sat right down on the ashes. We talked and sang, probably danced. We were quiet. Not for a long time. I mean, it could have been up to an hour, because that was it. And when we were finally done, and we got quiet, off went the dragonfly. That stayed there the whole time. So of course, a dragonfly represents mom for me, right? And dragonflies present themselves a lot to me. And to you. Yeah. But on the walk, there were dragonflies every state, almost every town, not every town. But they just came out of nowhere, and sometimes just went right in front of me, down the road, having me follow her, showing me the way. I know, it was. Because she would have loved to. She really would have loved to be part of the walk. I know she would. I met a lot of wonderful people. I stayed in a lot of homes of people that I met for the first time. Some I had known, most of them not, friends of friends or family of friends. And she would have just enjoyed. Absolutely, absolutely. Okay, so now, I get to the heart apart. Again, I mentioned about the day my husband died. And the next little piece, I'm just gonna keep it short because sometimes it gets a little tough to read it. But we had to get up at two o'clock in the morning to catch a flight, the first flight of the day from Bradley to go to Las Vegas. It was a half business, half vacation. The week before we had been at Indianapolis, I had gotten sick, it was a business trip. I had gotten sick, we came home, Al got sick, he caught my cold, he went to the doctors. Everything was fine, he just had a cold, it wasn't the flu, not a problem. He was having difficulty breathing that morning when we were, because of the cold, he was congested. So anyway, we hopped on the plane and the trip just didn't go as planned. And we're well into the situation at hand. Okay, give me a second. A man appeared in the galley with me and was soon on the floor opening a black case. He clearly wasn't one of the airline employees, so he must have been a passenger, a doctor, I thought. He removed items from the case in the dark galley and I thought he needed some light. He could do this quicker if he had more light, I thought. I looked above me and saw dozens of buttons and switches, but I didn't touch any of them. I kept thinking, if this man could just have some more light, everything would be all right. I tried to explain to the flight attendant, but my words emerged almost silent, as if someone had turned the volume down on my vocal cords. I asked her three times if one of the switches would provide light before she finally heard me. My volume still choked. She flipped one of the switches to illuminate the galley and I felt a sense of relief. Everything will be all right now, I thought. The man retrieved two paddles from his case. I knew what would happen next. So... Wow. Yeah, they were harder than I thought. Um... Obviously a very intense moment there. And it's kind of hard to describe in words how you feel at a time like that. It was almost as very ethereal, very surreal as if I was somebody else just watching this from down above or something, but it was very real because I was shaking and there was a whole, my husband was, you know, they were working on my husband to try and save his life in front of a full airplane full of strangers who were fabulous, by the way. But it was very difficult and... I think you captured that really well in the intense emotion in that passage. But the other thing that I like about what you do in the book is it's not analogical. Right. Right, and actually both of us, right that way. I don't know why, we hop around. I couldn't have put all that in one spot. That would have been too much. Real downer, like what you just... But throughout you get, you do flashbacks where you really get to know out. And I wish you got to know out because he was a man worth knowing. Big, big, big bear hugs, you know. He'd grab you and lift you up off your feet and... Crack your back. His laugh, he had the great barrel-chested laugh. Yeah, yeah. So I think what happens is you really get to love this man and get to know him really well. So you become part of that story. Right, I hope so, I hope so. Which is kind of what I hope to do too is to kind of bring you into the story. And I really wish that instead you could have just joined me on the walk. Christy did. Christy walked, what, 100 miles or so please? We walked together from Savannah and Georgia to Jacksonville for a while. Yeah, yeah. Oh, I love Savannah. And Joe, you did some walking with me too. I walked with you five miles before you even started. Yes, right. No, 15. 15 miles to Waterbury and fell in the middle of it. But you hadn't practiced walking and you were about to go on this good walk and she didn't even practice. No, that was my practice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's how she does everything by the way. I'm just gonna do this. I'm just gonna walk around the country. Jump right in it. But if, so because I couldn't bring everybody with me, because it's just not possible, I didn't know I was gonna do this, but the experiences that I had are really hard to convey. First of all, it's not a typical thing for a person to do. And secondly, the experiences at three miles an hour were just very, every minute of every mile was just intense because I had to be present if there was traffic, but I also knew I wanted to be present because I wanted to experience every single moment of the walk. So I'm gonna just give you a little bit, like I said, I was interviewing people along the way, what matters most in life, trying to collect data, but there's a large swaths of nothing in between towns. So I spent a lot of time by myself not seeing a car or a person this way or that way for miles and miles and miles and that's where I'm gonna take you right now. So the story has more to do with animals than with people. May 16th, 2016, Ramon, New Mexico. In the silent desolate court is connecting cities to hamlets, to farms to forests, my three mile per hour pace, my three mile per hour pace brings me to a lonely desert byway towards the turquoise trail in New Mexico. I'm alone, but for the ant to open the cattle that dot the landscape. An occasional jackrabbit skirts through the walking stick cat-dye and prairie dogs leap to attention to warn their coterie of my approach. Everything out here, pokes, bites, or stings. Road sides fall on a rattlesnake so I flinch with every rustle of the low brown grass. I'm worried of venturing off the quiet road to relieve myself so I mark the pavement along my way as a dog mocks its territory. And because rattles avoid the full heat of the sun, they are less worrisome when I stick to the asphalt during the day, but I'm on high alert during dusk and I am right to do so. Though they are as reserved as I when they do appear, I godly abdicate my ground and bear around them. My quietude eventually invites the companionship of a mountain lion. I catch her movement to my left and I dare not change my stride. I reduce my motion to what is essential. We timidly measure our footing, one with the other. Her tracks parallel my trail. We steal benign glances and notice you. My heartbeat remains as constant as my gait, my feet barely touching the ground. Grace expands each fractal of space. And I softly whisper, hello, beautiful. Ears perk, and I give more. Thank you for walking with me. We respectfully acknowledge the convergence of our travels. My two-legged and her four-legged passage on earth. We saunter in tandem until her curiosity is satisfied. I'm sad to see her shift towards the horizon. She never looks back to say goodbye. I'm overcome with awe, spellbound. Shivered surface on my arms underneath my all-season jacket. It's only after I am left alone that I dare stop and I wrap my arms and hug the moment into my memory, never to forget. That's awesome. I would have loved to have been there for that. I wish you were there, I could have used the ride. And the bathroom. But that's kind of how it was for people along the walk too. The mountain lion came, had this wonderful moment, and then it left. People would come into my life daily, and then I'd leave. But it's been really wonderful, actually, having these connections along the way. And I find that I'm still in communication with many, many people that I've met through email or whatever, and some of them I barely even spoke to. Along the way, that somehow, that intense connection remains, that's wonderful. And she used to wonder why we left at home worried about her on the road. And she's out there walking along with mountain lions. Every time she came home, I would try and give her some mace or something just to make sure she was safe. And she'd, oh, everything's fine. People are so nice. And I get that, and I thank every one of them. But yeah. I still have a whole storage unit of mace. Mace. If ever you all need one, you got it. But imagine, I can just feel that, that being able to walk beside something that, wow. That cool. That would have been neat. It was dogs that were the problem. Domesticated dogs? Anything else. People were wonderful. But I find that if fear became something that I had to quickly let go of, because I found it didn't serve me at all. And once I, it's what I brought to the moment I felt. And I still believe this. It's what you bring to the moment is what you get. And it opens up all kinds of communication even with the animals that you couldn't otherwise hope for. Well, what taught to fear certain things too, right? And I think it does, it certainly says a lot about you that you were able to put that aside and do something this, I almost said crazy. But momentous, how's that? Momentous. That's just, that's just. It's practice, practice, practice, right? That's what it is. In fact, I just wanna point out that I do have a book of, oh my gosh, what a beautiful country. Beautiful country. And I have a book of pictures here that I took from just my phone. But there's also a little book of some of the people that I interviewed along the way just to give you a sense of the diversity of folks that I interviewed. I only have one more to, yeah, I have one more to read. And we promise them we'll just make it a conversation. This is very quick. And it's the aftermath. I'm not even sure how long after Al had passed away. Probably about a year. Yeah, I think it was about a year, maybe a little less. I never know what sight, sound, or smell will trigger my emotions. Grief mostly hits me without warning, like the pop of a water bottle, as if to remind me that things can change in an instant. Not long after Al died, I drove his Dodge journey along a back road in our hometown when I heard the familiar pop, the sound you get when you stick the tip of your index finger inside your mouth and pluck the cheek. I instantly began to cry and laugh at the same time. Al kept a partially full plastic water bottle in the passenger seat cup holder. In colder months, the bottle collapsed. With the car heat on, the bottle warmed up to expand the plastic, causing it to make that popping sound. After the sound had startled me several times, I asked Al why he didn't throw the plastic bottle away. He explained that he had become accustomed to using it as a time reference when he drove to work, since it popped at almost the same spot in his travel every day. He found it somehow reassuring. And then so did I. The bottle remained a comfort to me, a welcome companion in my routine days, until it's untimely demise, an accidental victim of the Massachusetts recycling laws. Would you care to guess? Who was doing such a nice thing that they cleaned out my car and threw away my water bottle? Oh, yeah, I had no idea. I never would have done that. In her defense, she did not know, but it was a kind of a quirky thing. Oh, gosh, I felt so bad. No, I know, but no, things change. Things have to, nothing stays the same. Any minute, he sends you signs in other ways. Oh yeah, not as much as I'd like, but yeah. I'd like to see, I'd like to hear from him every day, but. All right, and I will too. Like I said, I didn't write in a chronological way, and I guess I'm not gonna be talking about my book in order either, because I'm going back to the beginning. During my calculated 21,504 hours on the road, an estimated 23,569,000 steps it took. People routinely treated me with kindness and generosity. Countless strangers offered meals, housing, rides, and emotional support. I mentioned some 200 representative people in the following pages. Even as I experienced its wonderment, and even as each rising sun brought a new sense of aliveness, I would never suggest that any part of the walk was easy. Each leg took long and careful planning. Each day required pluck and grit, and each hour stretched my body, mind, and spirit to their limits. My feet calloused, my shoulders and back ached, my skin burned, and my insides thirsted much of the time. It was not easy, but it was phenomenal. The hardships are not what linger. In actuality, in an odd and somewhat cleansing way, I welcomed them. They chipped away false reflections of myself to lay bare what I needed to discover in order to live life more honestly and fully. And the chiseling is not complete. Each cut seems to reveal a deeper lesson. I remain a work in progress that shifts with each fresh understanding and every new insight. To paraphrase Yogi Berra, I'm taking it all with a grin of salt because a future ain't what it used to be. And I was talking to Chris about this on the way up. I was thinking how I, yes, the walk was hard. It wasn't easy. But when I reflect on it, it's the beautiful moments that I remember and the really wonderful feelings of unity around this country. I know you don't hear that, but that's what I witness. And that's what kind of remains for me. Pretty much the same thing we've done about our childhood. We choose to remember all those good things that happened and the bad things. Yes, they happen and they're there and we talk about them, but we're not gonna let that, somehow we've managed to just let that be what it is and focus on all the good stuff. And use it. Use it as material for turning ourselves into what we wanna be. Right. To grow and learn from it. Resilience is, I think that's the word. It's actually in my subtitle and it comes up a lot when I talk about my story. And not just for me, but for everybody. I mean, we all, we're all resilient. We've all got things going on and we are resilient people. That's what we do. It's what I found out as well, yeah. So, can you open it up for questions or comments? It's very, very nice. You're struggling with the idea you're gonna be talking to people that are gonna go along and ask you about what. And happy. How do you make decisions when you're gonna act? Talk to first, girl. How do you, as you walk along, when you're gonna stop and see? Yeah. It was a balancing act between needing to make miles and wanting and have the purpose of the walk being to talk to people. So, I always had to kind of make a judgment regarding time. But time also, like a memory, is very malleable too. So, I mostly just would interview people that I met and who were in front of me. So, if I was in a laundromat, I would ask people that were doing the laundry if I was in a restaurant. I'd talk to people there. If I was walking down the road, people would often just stop and say, hey, what are you doing? Do you need a ride? And, yeah, it's a recorder, you know? Very few people that I approached or approached me didn't want to be interviewed, less than this many, probably, that I can remember. The interesting thing is all the stuff she was doing, I knew, cerebrally, I'm sitting back home, and I knew, okay, I should get up, put on her backpack and walk 26 miles or whatever. But until you actually see what she went through, my sister-in-law and I took a ride out to meet Paula in Iowa, and we were gonna stay for a week and help her along, which was great, it was a lot of fun. But it was amazing to actually watch her, she'd get up in the morning, get her pack ready, water, water, get, we went, one typical morning, we went, she did all that, and we went to a cafe for breakfast. While we were, my sister-in-law and I were eating, she was interviewing the owner, right? And then she'd take a few bites of toast or whatever, and then there was a newspaper man that wanted to interview her, so she sat down, there was another customer. She interviewed two or three people before breakfast, then ate a little breakfast, and then did a, talked with the newspaper person, and then, oh by the way, walked 26 miles in the July heat through the cornfields, and we hopped in our car and went and did some fun stuff, and you know, and then- Found the field of dreams. Found the field of dreams, right? We did go back there. But then we picked her up at the end of her walk, and we went to a hotel, and she said that was an easy day, because she didn't have to carry her backpack with her that day, because we had her pack. And I'm thinking, if that's an easy day, you know, you can have it. I'll stay here in the nice air-conditioned car, but until you actually see what she did, and how many interviews did you average per day? I averaged about five per day. That was kind of what I was shooting for. I'm always knowing, like, blue highways, small worlds, never walked around the US changing anything like that. Oh, I didn't say that. Yeah, I mean, every kind of road, and then every once in a while, I'd treat myself to a trail, which was also very nice, because you meet people on trails, too, right? Some places around this country, you can't avoid a highway. I met a lot of nice police officers that way, and interviewed them through the bars. No, no, no, no, no, no. They were really wonderful, telling me how I shouldn't be walking on the highway, and they would gladly bring me down on the road, but I'd always find myself back to the point where I always connected almost always, unless I absolutely cut it. You never let gaps happen. Never. I tell you how insistent I was on that. Remember the mudslide on Route 10, this one, Route 1, in California, the mudslide into Beekstyr? So that had just happened, and I had planned to be walking that road, so I walked all the way up to where the mudslide happened, and then I got it right around, and I started walking on the northern side. I just went back this spring to walk that piece of road that I had to miss. Yeah, that's not always a fun thing to watch me do, is to have to be that insistent. So Paula indicated that you used a recording device when you interviewed people, and then, I mean, you can only do that for so long, and it's still lovely. I mean, did you then transfer the information to... Yes. To a laptop or something? Yes. So sometimes I would stay in people's homes because that would give me more opportunity to have deeper conversations. Yep, I stayed with Sunye's sister down in Virginia. Oh yeah, it was... So sometimes I would take opportunities like that or in libraries and download, and then put it on a thumb drive or something. But I also did this in pieces. I will tell you, I did this over the course of seven years. I didn't just continuously walk like that. So I had opportunities to come home, get my technology in place, and then get ready for the next. And did you have a... I heard you say that you were the sag wagon for her... A couple of times, yeah. ...from Massachusetts into Vermont. What about the rest of the way? Did you have a sag wagon? No. She had a backpack with a tent. With a tent. Yes, so there were points in the walk. When Christy and I were walking, I didn't have a tent at that point. So we would have, we would find hosts. And sometimes I'm thinking, one of the hosts we found, you had a sore something. A sore leg is... And she goes to the clinic, and then the doctor that treats her ends up offering to host us. So that's kind of how things worked. Things were very, very serendipitous along the way. Often I'm a planner, so I plan, plan, plan, plan, and then what happens, right? But then, as I got further in the walk, and I realized there'll be these long stretches, where that's just not gonna be probable, I did carry a tent, and I was able to be more loose with my schedule. Are you looking to use this room? Yeah, this is the next presentation, so you guys have a little too. Okay, all right, we have a few more minutes. Would you characterize yourself as an extrovert or an introvert somewhere in the middle? You tell me. So... I have a guess. I loved being in conversation with people. I mean, one-on-one with small groups, having meaningful conversation. I'm not much of a chit-chattered, you know, I just don't like, what's that word I'm looking for? I don't like small talk. I'm not good at that, I feel uncomfortable with that, but talk about something meaningful, and I'm fully there. She definitely doesn't wanna talk about herself. Right, but then, let me just say this, then I have these long stretches to walk after that, and I loved that. So that, I guess that recharged me, so I think that makes me an insider. I would say knowing you with just my own observations and experience with you that you're more private and introverted, in that, like, you don't exhibit extrovert like me, just being out there. So I find it amazing that you could stay present, forget about the walking with people, and engage them, and really enjoy that. That's a lot of energy. The walking is energy, but to me, that would be something that, even as an extrovert, I don't think I could do. Well, I'll tell you why that is so, and I'm going to be doing a presentation, I guess now at the library on the 21st of September, that will talk more about the walk, so less about the book, in the data and what I found. But one of the things we know about happiness is paying attention to the things that are meaningful in your life. And it's very meaningful for me to have these, to kind of tease out from people what is important so that we can really create communities that serve all of us, not just a few, but everybody. That to me has always been my passion in my professional life. It's been what I do in my volunteer work. So I think that made me happy to be engaged in something that I felt was important, whether it goes anywhere. Can you talk a little bit about what you're doing now? Actually, can I just jump in here? I'm just being a housekeeper here. I think if you move your presentation table in there, then we can, and then they can. Okay, we have til two, or are we? We have like five minutes. Okay, we'll do that. And Chris and I will hang around a little bit. Oh yeah, we're not going to hurry. I'm going to have to run right off. So we do have books for sale if you're interested and some things for you to look at. I'm interested in what you've done. What was your question? I was just asking you to talk about what you're doing now. I mean, just, just. Yeah, again, that's kind of like a real plan. Planning, she's planning. It's what she does, she plans. Yeah, fine. Yeah, yeah. So you know, Cindy had an avian, she toured the country that way. I bought a little camper and I really loved the nomadic life. I thought as I was walking around, I would find that one or two places that I would really love to land. I gotta say, coming back to Vermont is very heartwarming. You know, I really love this place. But if I had found that place, I think I would have been there by now. But my hope is to kind of continue that nomadic life for a while now that I've got everything I need to go for it. I certainly will. She has. Oh, I'm sorry, go ahead. No, I was just gonna say, I'm not gonna spend another winter in the snow. I know that. She already has gone across country and back in her, with her little trailer already. So, yeah. And the plans. Are you aware of her safe place that she comes back? That's right. That's, I've got my house there. And that's all I do. I said, if I'm not sitting at my computer, I'm cooking. I do those two things and that's it. Although, I do have a place down in Georgia now. I bought a camper down there. So, Paula comes down and brings her little camper down there. And we winter down there now. So, yeah. I guess we become tied at the hip a little bit. Yeah, a little bit. We go away and let me come back, but yeah. So, one last thing I guess we'll leave you with is that living together, again, was nothing that was planned. It kind of happened. It certainly is very supportive of my needs. But I've really enjoyed getting to know Chris in a much different way as adult sisters. And I think that in our lives, we kind of carry two different, we were not all that much alike in our belief systems when we first came together. No, quite different actually. Quite different. But then I think the idea of listening to one another as I had a lot of practice on the road, of being more curious about why people think the way that they do as opposed to wanting others to understand you, I think we've had some amazing conversations. Some great, some heated conversations too. Definitely heated. But in a good way. Yeah. Because we start here and we do this, but then we always end up back here again, always. And it's kind of amazing. We find our way to the same spot in a different path, I guess. Which is kind of what we're doing with our lives. And we find we're not that different after all. And that's actually what I hope if you read my book, is what you'll walk away with. We really not all that much more alike than we are not. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you for coming and it was so nice to see all of you. And thank you to the Senior Center for having us. Appreciate it.