How I stopped worrying and learned to function in suburbia

Thus far this weekend, Bisou has had one long woods-walk and one all-out woods-and-boulders hike. And her usual walks, because - permit a poodle-parent overshare - the canine digestive tract stops for no man. I also drove alone for the first time ever to the supermarket and back, and then to town and back. The most difficult aspect of solo driving is solo getting out of a parking spot when there's another car waiting to get in (I still think of them as cars, albeit cars with emotions, but not people driving) and a bunch more lined up behind, without someone else explaining when to go straight back, back, now start turning the wheel. So far so good, which I think means I can no longer claim I don't know how to drive.

Which is for the best, because I want to go back to Cranbury, NJ, to go back to the fabulous used-book store, and to check out the closed-on-Mondays consignment shop next to it, and the closed-on-Mondays coffee shop across the street. (None of this was MLK Day-specific. The town really is just closed on Mondays, except for the bookstore, which is instead closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays.) The car-and-ability-to-use-it really seems to be the difference between my being happy living here and baffled-urbanite-dom. It really wasn't New York snobbery, I promise, even though I wondered myself at first. I just couldn't go anywhere - not to the supermarket, not to anything beyond town, and even town was a production. While I could, in the pre-car phase, speak to the particularities of life as a trailing, dissertating spouse, and the effect that being in a "housewife" role, however superficially, can have on one's productivity, at least at first (ahem), I couldn't say much about what it's actually like to live in Princeton.

And it turns out, disappointingly, that I'm not one of those New Yorkers who could only ever possibly survive within X yards of Zabars. Or perhaps not disappointingly, given the bankers' playground I've left behind. Not sure what it says about the place I last lived that the Princeton Whole Foods strikes me as a relaxed, down-to-earth environment.