The Walk of Life

A driving factor (...that wording will become ironic in just one second) in our new home search is walking distance to the train station. Jason takes the train south to the Loop; lucky bastard works right near the Sears Tower. I take it ridiculously far north. I think that after I've already been on the train for 30 minutes, when Jason's train passes mine, still in the suburbs, on its way to pick him up. At that point in the morning he's probably just stepping into the shower, while I am adjusting my puffy coat to make a better pillow for napping on the train bench.

At first, when defining our housing search parameters, I guessed that a mile's distance would be reasonably walkable to the train station. Then I started to map out exactly how far a mile is. For us it's like a walk to India: Devon Street, Chicago's "Little India."

Since my uninformed conjecture was so far off, I began to wonder if putting the 'new home' distance in perspective with my all lifetime walks would help. (Google Maps allowing me to do something that I never could 15 years ago.)

How far did I walk to grade school when I was in fourth grade? (0.53 miles, annoyed that even though I was the Big Sister, I was not given official authority to be in charge of Juliet. If she'd run off certainly I'd be accountable, so how was I not in charge??!)

In 7th and 8th grade I walked four tenths of a mile to the El stop, on the way home sometimes stopping to buy a donut at Dunkin Donuts and eating it on the way home.

When we lived in England, Juliet and I walked seven tenths of a mile, including one wickedly steep hill to get on a train and then walk another 0.15 miles to the car park to meet the school bus. This went on for a year until our mother took pity on us and started driving us to meet the bus, and picking us up in the afternoon too. I think this has been by far my lifetime worst on-foot commute.

Being drawn further and further into the challenge, I tried to figure out how far my little second grade feet commuted in Tokyo. It was a lot harder to figure out where our apartment building had been on the Google map, even when I found our grade school. (I had to suppress my automatic surprise when the Google map came up with only Japanese characters; I had selfishly assumed it would be in English!) For assistance I googled my grade school name and I was stopped in my search, pulled onto another internet distraction which made me realize how blithely oblivious a seven-year old can be of their surroundings.
Residing beside our little grade school and the park where we used to play there are: the German embassy, the Iranian embassy, the Argentinian embassy, the Korean embassy. This is when I very vaguely remember that the Argentinian embassy might have been the white building that my mom used as a landmark to have taxi drivers drop us off, so we could walk the rest of the way down our dead-end street. "Please stop at the white building" becoming a phrase that even I could say in Japanese.
This is when I wish my parents were still around, so I could ask them more about what our Azabu neighborhood was like. (No one else I know anymore was there with us, and Juliet was just five.) What an international, diplomatic community!
I guess I could just go visit. Better get Jason to get his passport in order. And plane tickets, since that will definitely be too far to walk.