Walking Distance

Don't worry- sooner or later I will run out of cutesy double entendres for this blog. How many can there be after all? I wonder if in future our speech will be peppered with car- and- driver allusions, causing the average American to sound like one of the guys on Car Talk.

A recurring theme throughout many of my dreams involves an impossible design feature like something taken from a Robert Heinlen (sp?) story. I'll be strolling through a house, a mall, or some other space and instead of coming to a threshold, magically, the walls will shift to make way for a new wing or hallway. Never do I pass under an Exit sign. Nothing is recycled. I rarely double- back. I can only move forward through an exquisitely detailed maze, which might sound overwhelming or surreal at best, but just as often I recall a sense of exhilieration. It's the urban pioneer in me, though I had these dreams growing up in a very small rural community. I walked and rode the same short distances every day of those first eighteen years, and I knew the paths intimately, down to the potholes and lazy transitions from tar to gravel and then dirt. You could plot the growth of the neighborhoods by the attendant layers of earth laid upon them. Logging roads were the most sinister, as they indicated either a new development was in the works or that the shady tree cutters had been in need of some fast cash.

Alabama weather being what it was, I did far more exploring back then. I moved into this apartment in April of last year and only took time to walk the north- and eastern corridors of my new neighborhood before a bitter winter set in. I was elated this week to learn that on top of tons of great Mexican cuisine, my zip code boasts a second Little Italy directly south of here. Insulated from the single digits by the promise of a more diverse diet, my friend and I struck out on Wednesday night to find the place recommended to us, La Fortunelli's on Oakley. The still, cold air, our journey felt just like one of my old familiar dreams with one neighborhood opening directly on to another, except that in this one there was a bottle of Extra Virgin olive oil waiting for me.