There’s a meeting at 9:00, and I have a small window before I put on my babysitting hat. So naturally, I ate a bagel, drank two cups of coffee, and chugged the last of a quart of orange juice left over from last month’s wedding shower — because apparently cleaning out a refrigerator is a noble act of self-sacrifice rather than the most basic form of adulting imaginable. Nobody asked me to buy a quart of orange juice for a party. My wife bought the party supplies. My conscience would bother me no matter who did the shopping. I drank it anyway.

Then I scurried outside.

The 4.5-mile walk had to be done before 9:00. I already knew my meeting was starting at 9:05, minimum. Knowing he’ll be five minutes late has never once made me log into Zoom five minutes late. I don’t understand myself either.

The first obstacle was a forklift hauling lumber for one of the new houses going up on the other side of the neighborhood. Our side is the older part — mature trees, individual mailboxes, the kind of street where the mail carrier drives from box to box. The new side has consolidated mailboxes, one big cluster where you can knock out six streets in three minutes. Efficient. I’d be a disaster at it. The numbers would run together, and anything less than five mistakes per day would be a good day. Not my problem, because I don’t have that job, and this is why.

The forklift detour wasn’t much of a detour. What it actually cost me was thirty seconds of my audiobook, paused while a yard crew fired up a leaf blower to redistribute freshly mown clippings to somewhere other than the driveway. Somewhere, presumably, but I didn’t stay to confirm.

The wildlife situation required judgment calls I’m not sure I was qualified to make.

Oklahoma is flat. When it rains, the water has to go somewhere, and at the neighborhood level, that means toads and turtles living in the drainage areas, occasionally making ill-fated decisions about road crossings. I saw a baby turtle sitting dead center in the street. I saw a large turtle just off the curb. I stood there for a moment, fully aware that a decent person would move them.

I did not move them.

I have a thing — a completely reasonable and well-established thing — about touching animals that could carry germs that might somehow, in some freak sequence of events, find their way into my mouth or my granddaughters. I know how that sounds. But I grew up watching a turtle crawl under a sliding wooden door and disappear, and something in me was permanently shaped by that. The turtles were on their own. I am sorry. I walked faster so I didn’t have to see what happened next.

Four rabbits in the park. No squirrels — our trees aren’t mature enough yet for what I can only describe as “tree rats” to fully establish themselves. They have earned my dislike, and I won’t apologize. .

At the park, a young woman was doing sprint intervals on the soccer field within the walking path. I’d seen her the other day running full laps, and today she was going hard, then walking, then going hard again. I admire that kind of self-motivation — the kind where you show up and push yourself with no external pressure, just because. I don’t have that relationship with exercise. I walk because it’s a good time to listen to books and because I’d feel guilty if I didn’t. It’s not suffering, but it’s not ambition either.

The highlight of the entire walk — maybe the entire week — was watching the OKIE811 utility locator do his job.

I assumed these guys walked around spraying paint on the ground and bending over to stick the little flags in. Reasonable assumption. That is not what this man was doing. He was marking a gas line (yellow flags, per the Universal Utility Color Code), and when he finished the spray, he reached into his vest, pulled out a flag, and with one smooth downward flick of his wrist sent it arcing through the air so that it landed perfectly upright in the ground.

I applauded him inside my head as I tried not to stare.

I have no idea if the rest of his flags that day went in on the first try. Maybe he fumbled twenty of them the moment I turned the corner. But what I saw was a man who had mastered something so specific and so useless outside of his exact job that it became a kind of art. I thought about how many thousands of flags you’d have to throw before your wrist just knew the angle. Nobody is going to put that on a highlight reel. And I loved it.

The last stop was my son’s house. He and his bride are finishing up their honeymoon, so I let myself in through the garage, removed my shoes at the door (they have an Asian household — shoes stay outside; I assume the mounted cameras confirm compliance), and found all their houseplants arranged in the kitchen sink with their vines draped across the drying racks in what I can only describe as a botanical hostage situation. I’d like to think my daughter-in-law staged this deliberately before they left. The alternative — that the plants organized themselves — would require a conversation I’m not ready for.

I turned on the spray nozzle and gave them all a drink. They may be sun-deprived, but they weren’t dying of thirst on my watch. Small win.

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The walk takes a little over an hour. I listen to my book, I sweat a little, I make no meaningful impact on local turtle populations. By most measures, it’s an unremarkable way to spend a morning.

But I keep showing up for it. A forklift reroutes me, a utility worker throws a flag like a tiny javelin, a turtle makes a bad decision at an intersection I hope he saw the other side of — and somehow that’s enough. More than enough. I’m not sure when ordinary started feeling like something worth paying attention to, but at some point it did, and I think that might be the whole thing. You live long enough, you stop waiting for remarkable, and you start just noticing what’s actually there.

That’s a pretty good trade.