It being Sunday, Henry and Liz Lorber head down the hill from their Ponce de Leon Manor home and hang a right toward, well, who knows?
For the past 12 years, this has been their singular habit, a kind of obsession born the moment Liz decided she wanted to participate in Atlanta’s first Avon Walk for Breast Cancer.
To prepare, the plan was to walk on Saturday, then bike on Sunday, which meant Henry would do Liz’s sport and vice versa.
And so on that first weekend, the Atlanta couple set out toward Sweet Auburn and back, marking some six rugged miles under a red autumn sun.
“Henry was exhausted, but he liked it,” Liz recalled recently over a hot cup of coffee.
If you’ve lived in Atlanta long enough, there’s a good chance you’ve seen Henry and Liz, most likely strolling somewhere near downtown, Buckhead or Vine City. In all, they figure they’ve walked 5,000 miles over the years, each time discovering a little bit more about this city, its people and, yes, each other.
Walking had long been the couple’s preferred method for seeing any city — New York, San Francisco — so they figured why not here at home and that was that. Henry and Liz never took that bike ride, which was perhaps their first surprise. The second one was how much they had to talk about, that each walk would become a path to a more successful marriage.
“There’s nothing you don’t talk about when you’re hitting the pavement for five to six hours nonstop,” Liz said.
She and Henry, who married 30 years ago in the groom’s mother’s backyard in New York, live with a herd of dogs in a middle-class enclave in the shadow of downtown. Liz is a retired professional chef and Henry is a director of Hays Financial Consulting, a court-appointed receiver for troubled real estate projects.
Most Sunday mornings they start the day with a breakfast of scrambled eggs and, if Henry’s lucky, some of Liz’s homemade bread. They read two newspapers, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The New York Times, then some time around 11 a.m., they head out across the city with the promise of seeing something new, something they’d most likely miss in a car.
“You’re more focused on what’s in front of you [when driving],” Henry said. “But when you walk, you see everything.”
And you talk about everything, too, the couple said, which has become the real point of their weekly jaunts.
Most of the time, their two grown sons are the focus of those conversations — their specific struggles; what, if any, guidance they can offer; who they might tap for job leads. Sometimes it’s politics, and other times it’s the big one: finances.
“You don’t always resolve everything, but you move it closer to resolution or to understanding,” Henry said.
There have been times when they became so angry at each other, they didn’t talk at all. But they always walk, no matter what.
“It’s so ingrained in what we do, we’re lost if we don’t,” Liz said.
Last Sunday, they headed down Fairview Road, Henry in his black Spandex pants topped with several layers of shirts and Liz in khaki hiking pants, an orange T-shirt and her dad’s old windbreaker.
They were barely under way when they ran into an old neighbor, stopped to chat and before they knew it, 30 minutes had passed and now their veterinarian was calling. They needed to pick up their Bichon, Roxy.
By then it was 1:30 p.m., so they did the reasonable thing and stopped at one of their favorite watering holes, the Porter Beer Bar in Little Five Points, for a quick lunch of mussels, Caesar salad and chicken empanadas with glasses of beer and wine.
It was an unusually short walk, comparatively speaking. Once five years ago they walked for 20.1 miles from New York’s Harlem River south across the length of Manhattan island to Battery Park.
By their calculations, that was their longest walk. Their annual Mother’s Day trek — notable for the church music spilling from sanctuaries along the way — is by far the most fun. And the worst? That would be one they took to McNair High School under a 90-degree summer sun. High traffic. No shade. No shelter. “Dreadful” is how Henry described it.
They’ve learned a lot over the miles, they said, including a lesson in gratitude gleaned Sunday while at the Porter.
A man they’d been talking to had lost his job and didn’t know how to find a new one.
“It could’ve been anyone’s story,” Liz said. “It could’ve been our story.”
And so they each “said a silent prayer of thanks for our many blessings,” she said, and once again turned their hearts toward home.
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