'It's a yellow magnolia." There are two of them, twin flowering trees on a manicured lawn.
"I thought magnolias were pink."
"They have yellow ones now," my friend informs me.
It figures. We are power walking through Rosedale. In this moneyed Toronto neighbourhood, everything can be what you want it to be. Trees are art. Addresses are pedigree. Cars are sex.
We don't break our stride. We are breathing deeply, and not from annoyance. The arms pump. The feet step quickly. What we encounter and observe is all part of the enjoyment and bemusement of walking through the city, through its ravines and the deep divides of cultural and socioeconomic preoccupations.
You may have mastered walking as a one-year-old, but suddenly it seems new. Doctors are prescribing it. The government is encouraging it through its Canada in motion program. Kellogg's promoted it on Special K cereal boxes. Free pedometers inside! It's as if we have rediscovered the locomotion that helps define our species.
The health benefits are incentive enough. Regular walking is an effective cardiovascular exercise that's easy to do.
It helps manage several health issues, including obesity, high cholesterol, arthritis and diabetes.
Recently, research published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute showed that women (12 to 35 years old) who ran 3.25 hours or walked 13 hours a week reduced their risk of breast cancer by 23 per cent.
Not that we do it just for our breasts, arteries (and derrieres). There's a nostalgia to walking as exercise - a return to life observed in real time without the filter of some technological device or media outlet. It's like being on a train, watching fields, mountains and streams slide by, only you're seated in the engine of your body and the landscape in motion is diverse social anthropology. No fancy equipment is necessary - it's you, your feet and the pavement; a pedestrian activity in every sense of the word.
But the new ambulatory trend - or pedestrianism, the name of a sport that caught the public's imagination in the 19th century (all about how far how fast) - can best be attributed to health-conscious boomers.
"No one is running any more. It happened about five years ago," says Barb Gormley, a fitness trainer in Toronto. "Everybody is power walking." Walking is easier on the joints and can be done well into one's dotage. "I have clients who want to be exercising until they're 100," she says.
The boomers, groomed for competition in every aspect of their lives, have attacked it with their usual zeal. What is a pedometer if not a way to compare your accomplishment with others or, better yet, with yourself?
But walking can be seen as so much more than just exercise. A midlife woman striding through the streets purposefully? That may look like ordinary exercise, but it reminds me of modern womanhood itself - a state of always being in between destinations: home and office; your girlfriend's birthday party, your husband's business function, little Bobby's Grade 4 play and the yoga class that will save your sanity.
