My Grandma Nelson was the slowest walker anyone swore they had ever seen, her two stick legs tottering down the street in ever uncertain relation to its surface, pure will hardly able to accept confinement to so frail a form. Her diaries, too, had this feeling of fitful propulsion, each day's events recorded with a doggedness that seemed to suggest, in its painstaking sweep, the exertions of a planet that must spin not at once, but degree by degree, as it laboriously traces its orbit.