My mother was fond of a story about the little boy, miffed at his parents, who informs them he is planning to run away from home. His mother tells him she won’t stop him from doing so and packs a small suitcase for him. “Run away if you like,” she says, “but remember you’re not to leave the block.”
This story came back to me the other day when it occurred to me that I, though no little boy, have no need to leave my block. Sitting in my morning reading chair, tea and toast on a table beside me, H. L. Mencken’s hefty The American Language on my lap, looking down on the thoroughfare that is Chicago Avenue from the windows of our sixth-floor apartment, I felt that if need be I could survive nicely without ever having to leave my block. Within a hundred yards or so of our apartment are a bank, a supermarket, the main branch of the town library, the offices of my dentist and barber, a dry cleaner, two coffee shops, roughly a dozen restaurants of various ethnicities, and (though I hope to avoid inhabiting it) a retirement home.
I bought our apartment nearly 30 years ago, because it was a convenient two blocks away from Northwestern University, in Evanston, where I was then teaching. Evanston, the first suburb north of Chicago, has always been well situated, with houses large enough to be called mansions set out along Lake Michigan, perhaps the only notable topographical feature in all of the flatland of Illinois. But for years, owing to its being the site of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which it still is, Evanston was dry, and remained so until 1972. The first consequence of being dry is to deprive a town of decent restaurants, for the profit from booze makes possible the sale of fancier viands in livelier establishments. Evanston in its dry days was the home of the blue-rinse dowager and the dullish tearoom, hold the peach cobbler, if you please. No, thank goodness, longer.
Soon after we moved into our apartment on the edge of downtown Evanston, Whole Foods—owing to its expensiveness also known as Whole Paycheck—moved in. (If ever you want to begin a Tea Party of the left, it has been said, just troll the parking lot at Whole Foods.) A branch of Peet’s Coffee and Tea took up residence, and just to the north of it an AT&T store selling and servicing smartphones. Beyond that is a good Greek restaurant—a Grecian spoon, as I like to think of it—that was there before I arrived in the neighborhood. At the corner is a women’s dress shop, which always has elegant duds attractively displayed in its windows. At the bank, Whole Foods, the Greek restaurant, the library, I have some fairly long-established acquaintanceships in which pleasing talk about sports, the Chicago weather, and general jokiness abounds.
Peet’s opens at 6:00 a.m. and Whole Foods closes at 10:00 p.m., so there is foot traffic on the street 16 hours a day. During the late spring, all through the summer, and in early autumn three of the seven restaurants on the block, along with Peet’s, set out outdoor tables for diners and, in the case of Peet’s, schmoozers. During the day, a 23-story apartment building between Whole Foods and Peet’s debouches a small but steady stream of backpack-bearing, mostly Asian students off to Northwestern to collect yet more As. A high percentage of the pedestrians on the street are bent over: the people from the retirement home over their walkers, the university students thumb-pumping away over their smartphones. If there has ever been a mugging or robbery on the tree-lined block during all the years I’ve lived here, I’ve not heard about it. Paradise, you might say, found.
If I sound smugly satisfied about landing on this block, this is only because I am. So satisfied, in fact, that if you were to offer me a month-long use of an apartment in Paris, in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés, at no charge, my first-class round-trip airfare paid, I would tell you I have to think about it, though I would finally refuse. Why, after all, would I want to leave a routine I enjoy in surroundings that comfort in an atmosphere that pleases? Such is my contentment I no longer even indulge in real-estate porn, gazing, longingly, at pictorial ads in the New York Times and elsewhere for Upper East Side Manhattan brownstones, rolling Virginia farms, Montana ranches, waterfront property in La Jolla.
“Let your last thinks all be thanks,” wrote W. H. Auden in his 1973 poem “Lullaby.” High on the list of my own thanks is that for my great good luck in living where I do.
