Stairmaster

On my way down to the subway, I see a little girl standing with her mother on the steps. The mother is trying to get the little girl to walk down. "C'mon. Everyone's watching," the mother says. The little girl grips the railing, smart enough to know that no one is watching and that the staircase is very, very long. Up the steps come the rumble of trains. I can't imagine how far down it must look to eyes that are, at most, four years old. It must be like a dizzying scene from Hitchcock, a billion steps wanting to get her spinning and then swallow with a floor of cement. "I don't want to," the girl says.

Can't blame her, but imagine what Alex would have done. He would've had those stairs for breakfast.

Alex has been going out of his way to walk the stairs for weeks. Take him to the playground and he flies by the swings, bolting for the steps that lead down to the street. Let him into the corridor of our apartment building, and you'd best plant yourself near the top of the stairs to stop him sailing down. Be prepared to hear some screaming when you take him back into the apartment before he's ready, too. Makes me proud.

He doesn't do stairs alone yet, though. I bend over and grasp his hands (though lately he has shown a predilection for the banister). When he walks down he still sort of hops, with me lifting him off one step and lowering him to the next. He walks up, however, like a big kid. None of this one-foot-on-the-next-stair-then-the-next-foot-up-to-join-it business. He moves up in the world by gobbling steps, one foot climbing in front of the other. I'm not sure he could do this, though, if I didn't hold his hands. Still, makes me proud.

Alex comes from a long line of stair users. My mom was a nurse for many years, and at least one night a week she'd come home and talk about the lazy no-good young nurses who sat at the desk eating potato chips and who took the elevator to go even one flight. My mother's duties took her up and down that seven-story hospital; she unfailingly used the stairs. "Concentrate on lifting your knees, and take the steps one at a time," she advised me once when we were together on a long staircase and I was getting winded. I was 16 at the time. She was 56.

Jill's a good stair walker, too. I told her mum's stair advice recently. Jill is seven months pregnant. "I tried that knee thing," Jill said. "It was bull."

The average stair still comes up to about Alex's kneecap. I remember the oversized steps-20,000 of them, I think-that reached about to my kneecaps on the Mayan pyramids in Chichen Itza, Mexico, eight years ago. The king's pyramid reached to the sky, and the view from the top was stunning, according to the brochure I read while panting on my knees in the 100-degree sun. I pulled the brim of my Redskins cap low to shade my eyes and squinted at the tiny people up there. I never made it to the top. All that money, a whole day on a plane packed with college students, hours on a bumpy dirt road to reach the premier sight to see on the Yucatan. Then I was beaten by a staircase.

Jill asks if I remember when she wondered if Alex would ever walk. Oh, yes. And for a long while the swings were the best thing at the playground in his eyes. Then his therapist began using a stepstool and our couch to teach him to climb. He tried it first on all fours, then as the therapy sessions passed he would lift one knee, plant one foot, and smile at the fresh altitude. Soon at the playground our time was split between the swings and the half-dozen, rubber-coated steps of the giant jungle gym. He took those on all fours at first, too.

Now the rubber play steps are giving way to the real cement ones to the street, or those that lead up to the promise of the big kids' basketball court. The swings he just leaves swinging empty, as if from a strong breeze.