Rubin: 80 years old, numb legs, and six miles a day

Eighty years old and 90 degrees outside, but he’s walking.

Can’t feel his legs, but he’s walking.

Needs to lean against something to stay upright when he stops, but he’s walking.

Bent at the waist. Trouble with curbs. Toppled over often enough to know he doesn’t care for the experience.

No matter: Simon Cook is walking, rain or shine. Six miles a day, yesterday and today and next week.

White hair, neatly trimmed white beard. No shirt, at least not this time of year. If you live anywhere close to his neighborhood in Farmington Hills, chances are you’ve seen him. If you’ve seen him, chances are you’ve wondered about him.

Angled forward, arms wide. Walking.

Why?

“I truly enjoy it,” he says.

But there’s more to it than that.

Some people are inspired by him. Some people call the police on him, thinking he must be unhinged. One man drove into him intentionally not long ago because Cook had found something to prop himself against while he dialed his wife on his flip phone and the driver wanted to occupy the space.

Cook keeps walking, every morning.

Recently, he found himself befuddled in an unfamiliar neighborhood. The man who gave him directions followed him to make sure he stayed on track.

“Most people are so kind,” he says. Most sidewalks are smooth. When he needs to pause, he always finds a tree.

There are jeers once in awhile, or curious looks, or that fellow who bashed him with a fender. No sense dwelling on that, though.

“I look at the blessings in life,” he says, with his eyes straight ahead. If you look behind you, you could stumble.

Lifetime partner on the trip

Cook’s father fled the czar’s cossacks and their flashing swords.

Russia was no place to be Jewish, but Detroit made the family welcome. Simon (Si) Cook went to Central High and Wayne State, then the University of Detroit for dental school.

At Central, there was a girl named Sandy Berkley in homeroom who made him swoon, though he was too shy to talk to her.

One Friday he fell asleep on the bus going home from his job at a pawn shop and missed a party. He went to a party the next night instead, and there she was.

Their 63rd anniversary is next week, meaning he was 18 when they said their vows. Yes, she was pregnant, but every road has rough spots.

He wasn’t ashamed then and he certainly isn’t now. They just had to work a little harder to get him through college and into a dental practice in Plymouth they kept up for 41 years.

It’s Sandy who goes to the mall with him when it’s too icy to walk outside, and who comes to fetch him in their red Pontiac Aztek when he runs out of steam on a stroll.

“I keep telling him to take a cup with him and ask for change,” she says. That’s a wifely poke at the ragged khaki shorts he won’t throw away.

He just smiles and shrugs and keeps walking.

Wounds of a road warrior

The movement started when he was 35 years old and weighed 250 pounds.

He lost more than 100 of them and ran seven marathons before he hurt his right foot, which still isn’t right. Since then he had a spinal fusion that cost him the feeling in his legs, and a tumble over rocks that his left knee hasn’t quite rebounded from.

A former agoraphobic didn’t know any of that when he called out to the Cooks in a Home Depot parking lot. The man was 300 pounds and miserable, he said, but he saw Cook walking past every day and began stepping out himself.

Another man, Cook said, a cancer survivor with a voice box, croaked out, “You saved my life.” Same story: depression, followed by inspiration from a tanned, hunched-over walker with an awkward stride and a purpose.

It’s nice to hear, Cook says, but he didn’t set out to be noticed.

“I just go with the flow,” he says — one foot in front of the other, step by step.

nrubin@detroitnews.com

@nealrubin_dn