Ever wake up to find something you love trapped in the past? Part 2

When I turned 17 and started driving, I preferred my New York friends to come to me in New Jersey because it was easier than driving to their neighborhoods.

In my teenage years, I might have called this the insidiousness of the suburbs. (Although I’ve grown to treasure New Jersey since those days, at that time I railed against the kind of comfort provided by the buffer of well-manicured lawns.)

I was taking the easy path and didn’t notice the problem it would create until I started my own family. One day, I was thinking about how I wanted to offer my son all of the magic that filled my childhood. That’s when I realized it had slowly slipped away.

I worried about how it might affect him as he climbed into our Land Rover to go to school. Will his world-view be big enough?

Will he have any kind of street smarts? Will he have access to the life from which we came?