A man limping is a man moving.

From Alfred’s journal

There is a man who comes through the park on Thursdays with a cane and a bad left hip, and for two years I watched him and thought: there is a man who used to walk. That was the whole of my thinking on him, and it was wrong. Today it rained early and the path was slick, and he came through anyway, slower, the cane going down twice for every step, and he got from the gate to the far bench, which is further than I fly most mornings without resting. A man limping is a man moving. I had been grading him against the version of himself I invented, a younger one I never met, who may not have liked walking at all. Switch, who falls out of trees roughly once a week and has never once mentioned it, held the page down and said nothing, which I took as agreement.