Deachman: How my 89-year-old neighbour, Joe, taught me to enjoy going slow

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About a month after my double hip replacement surgery in January, I was encouraged by my physiotherapist to take an outdoor walk each day using a four-wheeled walker. It started with just a five-minute outing, with an additional five minutes tacked on with each passing week.

If that doesn’t seem like much, it’s because it isn’t.

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Those earliest walks, despite the liberation I felt after being cooped up inside for weeks (and the knowledge that, yes, they were important steps towards my recovery), could also be frustrating. After all, I wasn’t getting anywhere. The nearby Quickie convenience store on Bank Street, only a block and a half from my house, remained off the edge of my map until my seventh week post-op. The fresh-squeezed orange juice from Cedars grocery store, meanwhile, lay a further and agonizing two weeks away.

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And, yes, you’re right; I could, and did, get my son to bring me supplies, while friends and neighbours filled my fridge and pantry with all manner of victuals for which I am most grateful. But there’s a lot to be said for being able to do things on your own time and under your own steam, and those five-minute increments initially felt paltry, like watching a mountain being eroded by wind and rain. My map couldn’t unfold fast enough.

Until I met Joe Falsatti.

Joe and his wife, Emilia, live on my block, on the same side that I do, 14 houses away. They’ve lived there since 1964. I am a newcomer to the neighbourhood, by comparison, arriving with my kit bag just 25 years ago. So, naturally, Joe and I had never, until very recently, spoken to one another.

It was Joe who broke the ice.

“Hey!” he called out as I wobbled by his house on a 10-minute excursion. “Did you steal my walker?”

“No!” I earnestly replied. “Why, did someone take your walker?”

“No,” he reassured me. “I was joking.”

We exchanged names and pleasantries, and the following day I encountered him again, this time as he was out for his daily walk, usually about a 30-minute trek. Almost 90, Joe has a couple of degenerative spinal discs and has been using a walker — his “black Cadillac,” he calls it — for six or seven years. It was on Joe’s seasoned advice that I began walking on the road and not the more perilous sidewalk (more on that in some later column, perhaps). He also good-naturedly challenged me to a race; “I’ll give you a head start,” he promised.

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I began looking for Joe when I went on my walks. I discovered he was a baker, learning the trade at Gala Bakery on Rochester Street in Little Italy when he was 17, later taking his talents to Dominion grocery stores. He retired at 58. He and Emilia have three sons and two grandchildren. He drives a Buick. He’s of the vintage that, when he gave me his phone number, he didn’t include the area code; the “730” exchange made it clear enough to anyone who’s lived in Old Ottawa South in the age of landlines.

And, significantly, Joe taught me the value of slowing down.

“If I start at Brewer Park and walk to Bank Street,” he says of the 650-metre trek, “it might take me maybe three-quarters of an hour because I stop and talk to all the people I know and meet. You get to know people, you get a connection.”

The walker certainly helps. Before he started using one, Joe says conversations were much less likely to occur. But the more measured pace dictated by a walker, not to mention the questions that the device itself might prompt, helps encourage neighbourly communication. It’s not unlike how walking a dog can create a friendly opening line of conversation.

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“If you just walked by, we might say, ‘Hi,’ and that’s it,” he says. “But we both had the Cadillacs, so we got to know one another.”

I’ve similarly noticed it with other neighbours. For years, I’ve spoken in passing with Michelle, who lives on the next block, but only learned when I hit the 15-minute mark of my rehab that the Australian Shepherd she routinely exercises is named Luna and that Michelle has been delivering the community paper, The OSCAR, for as long as I’ve lived here. She started doing it, she told me, as a way to connect her children to the neighbourhood.

It’s long been a lament of urban living that neighbours rarely know one another anymore, save for fleeting nods or waves while out shovelling snow or raking leaves. Joe has demonstrated how simply being a little more deliberate can change that.

For better and worse, though, my days with the walker are numbered. It’s time to wean off of it, my physiotherapist has advised, first in favour of a cane, and soon after that nothing.

And then what? I don’t think I’ll get a dog; my cat would kill me if I did. Instead, I’ll try to make a habit of walking slowly, saying hello, and asking neighbours if they stole my walker.

Thanks, Joe.

Born in Fort William, Ont., a city that no longer appears on maps, Bruce Deachman has called Ottawa home for most of his life. As a columnist and reporter with the Citizen, he works at keeping Ottawa on the map. You can reach him at bdeachman@postmedia.com.

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