(25) going to the grocery store at night

Not only do I like shopping when there aren't many other people around -- I'm thinking that's a given for most people, since no one's ever said to me, hey, you know what I really like is when you go to the store and the aisles are so crowded it takes ten minutes to navigate one and twenty minutes in line to check out and by the time you get home your frozen foods aren't frozen any more -- but also, shopping late at night takes me back to a time when I shopped at night as a matter of course, living in New Orleans and working till midnight. I'd go to the store on the way home from work, and it just felt like a different world. New Orleans was such a crowded, dirty city, but it was easy to forget that, wandering in a well-lit, sanitized space in the middle of the night.

And New Orleans being what it was, then, it was also not an especially safe place for a woman to roam alone after midnight. And sometimes there was a friend from work to shop with, and that was comforting and all, but sometimes there wasn't, and there was dog food to be bought, and it had to be done, and I think it was then that I really learned the lesson that there are going to be times in your life when you have to get out of your car alone and walk to the front door alone, with fifty feet of open-air darkness between you and safety, and there is a possibility that things will end badly but also the probability that they won't; and that, friends, is a necessary lesson for an anxious young woman to learn.