
Sunday, March 31, 2013
Out for a walk to the supermarket
The other night a friend exclaimed that her one great worry in the aging process was the moment when she could no longer drive her car. It doesn't seem to worry too many people here in Sarasota. The high speed roads are dotted with cars conspicuously moving at low speeds, gearing down to impossibly slow forward motion at intersections, hesitating at making left turns long after any obstacle to the maneuver is still apparent. The town, often called "God's waiting room," is said to have the highest concentration of eighty and older in the United States. When we became snow birds we made the conscious choice to live where walking would produce some other result than circling the lagoon in a park. It's a gritty area, a condo stuck between the backside of Sarasota's big concrete middle school and the giant parking lot for the high end Southgate Mall. But we live within a few blocks walking distance to an excellent supermarket, a CVS, the Sarasota Bath and Racquet Club, Trader Joe's, and four first rate restaurants, one Japanese, one French, one Italian, and one a high end steak house. There is also the transfer station for the city bus system (provocatively known by its acronym SCAT!) which will get us to whatever one wants to define as "downtown" or "the center" of Sarasota in a very few minutes. Having spent so many years in New York, Boston, Rome, and Athens, we wanted to depend upon our feet for locomotion. But almost no one walks here. From the trainers at the gym to the baggers at the supermarket when we announce that "we are walking," there is the stare of disbelief. I find it a relief not to have to drive. The town is laid out in a grid of what are often called avenues. But it is really a miniature Los Angeles with really broad high speed highways on which the through traffic is funneled, where almost none of the smaller streets are more than a few blocks in length, roads leading to nowhere. Many of these big boulevards are bordered by strip malls so that riding them means not only the tension of high speed driving in packs like a speed car race, but having to gaze at serious ugliness. I manage to avoid the car except when I want to go on the relatively long ride to the north where the Ringling Museum, the Asolo Theater, and the University of South Florida are located--my "culture" destinations. It took me awhile but I have mapped out a tortuous route of twists and turns on small side streets. I can go slow, I can look at small houses, trees, kids coming home from school, people out walking baby carriages. It is such a blessed relief. The other factor that takes getting used to is that drivers take "Turn Right on Red" seriously, meaning they fling their car at the intersection and around the corner at high speeds, often on cellphones or texting, with nary a thought of a potential pedestrian in the legitimate cross walk, even sometimes when discovering said obstacle, honking furiously. You must never let your guard down, be ready to gesture in the magisterial fashion of someone very old, and keep smiling. And I guess in that effort of keeping your wits about you the mental exercise parallels the muscular as you walk.
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