Baby, you can drive my car

Walking back from the movies tonight (Up -see it!), I was thinking about how much I like to walk here. Sure, it's not always ideal - when the weather's bad, I have little choice about how to get to work - I could take a cab, but that seems indulgent, and to take the bus or subway would mean walking almost as far as I have to walk to get to work. So hoofing it there just seems right.

Walking is certainly not the same here as in Seattle. For one, it feels safer to walk here at night. I wouldn't really have set out on foot alone in my neighborhood there after dark - there was no one on the street. Here, however, there's always someone around.

I'm not naive enough to think this makes it perfectly safe - after all, just because people are out and about doesn't mean they have your best interests at heart. But for the most part, they're just making their way home or wherever - just like you are - schlepping their stuff and moving forward.

What's interesting too is the way people here overestimate the distance between point A and point B. I could walk from my house through Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Park Slope, around the edge of Prospect Park and all the way to Kensington, where Sophie and Melissa live, in about an hour. This is the same amount of time it would have taken me to walk from the Pine Street Cottages to the heart of Queen Anne. Yet here, the neighborhoods are thought of as so distinct that it's like you're crossing borders into foreign countries.

Because I'm still getting to know the area, I'm still sometimes startled to turn a corner and realize I'm somewhere I've been before, but that I'd never arrived from quite that angle. So much to see, so much to miss - and really no way to see it properly except on foot.

Oh, sure, you'd see it differently driving or from a penthouse somewhere, but the concrete and slate that make up the sidewalks here have survived the pounding of millions of feet over decades and decades - and yet they still move you forward along a path you may or may not have chosen.

I don't miss my car at all. It gave me a certain freedom, but it was also a burden. With walking, the biggest burdens are that your feet get tired or your shoes don't fit right or you can't buy the extra-colossal container of laundry soap. But you see so much more.