It’s early on Saturday. I’m waiting outside my shoe repair shop. I assume he’s gone to the store, like last time — there’s only him, as far as I can tell from Saturday mornings. 

Shoe repair is one of the things I’m fussy about: I know what I want to happen, and artist-artisans are the ones that deliver. Not chain stores. So standing around is part of getting what I want. I think it’s starting to drizzle. 

**

In Austin, I drive to my preferred artisan — I’ll call him that because I suspect he (another he) regards it as a job of work more than an expression — because I live in the suburbs, in Texas, and I have to drive anywhere that’s not a (neighborhood) house. 

Here in Evanston, I’m told I live in the suburbs. Definitely not “in the Loop,” or even in “the city.” Evanston may be, I think, one of the earliest Chicago suburbs. 

Still, I got to the shop on foot. 

I set out from my apartment around 7am, walking south on Maple. I stopped for breakfast along the way. Sit- down. Eggs sausage pancakes with blueberries, 4 (5?) cups of coffee with cream and sugar. Half in a box for another morning, tucked into my tote with my iPad/newspaper and the scuffed shoes. 

Kept striding along Maple until the T-intersection, took a right under the Metra tracks and then a quick left. 

It’s grey so far today. The wind is in its milder form and the temperature seems like the high 40°s, so the air is crisp and pleasant. (True, I’m wearing jeans and long johns, T and sweatshirt and parka in April, but I’m still pretty Texan in my lack of hardiness.)

Walking. To do my ordinary errands. What??

**

After morning class on Thursday, my friend S and I walked “into town” — 3 blocks? — from our tiny campus, walked into the first restaurant we passed so we could catch up while having lunch. He’s from Detroit — wife, children, day job: all the fixings. 

As we walked to lunch, and walked away from lunch to our lodgings, we marveled. 

“They call it a suburb, but it seems like a little city to me. You can walk everywhere.”

Exactly. I walk more now than I did in Chestnut Hill (Boston), because (to be honest) transit doesn’t go where I’m going,

and I can   just    walk. 

Unlike any — all — the suburbs I’ve been before. 

It’s the best.