NewCanaanite.com (https://newcanaanite.com/category/new-canaan-opinion/who-knew/page/5)
Sponsored by Walter Stewart’s Market, “Who Knew?” is a monthly column by New Canaan’s Laura Ault, spotlighting the best of what the town offers.
‘Who Knew?’ is sponsored by Walter Stewart’s Market. Is it too hot for opinions this week? Because I have one. Everyone can openly adopt precisely one form of snobbery. You can be a wine aficionado, an ardent collector of vinyl, or an art-house cinephile, but combine all three into one personality, and you’d best tread lightly.
‘Who Knew?’ is sponsored by Walter Stewart’s Market. “I want to have the kind of summer I had when I was eleven years old,” my husband told me on a recent road trip. “Where you just ride your bike, get ice cream, and hang out with your friends.”
I instantly agreed, although my eleventh summer also included a minor criminal streak. Juiced up on an endless stream of Minute Maid orange sodas purchased with quarters stolen from our dads’ dressers, my friend Becky and I set out daily to arrange the outdoor furniture at our neighborhood tennis club at the bottom of the pool. On balance, though, it was wholesome stuff, a golden time before inflation, Instagram, and Tiger King 2.
‘Who Knew?’ is sponsored by Walter Stewart’s Market. If I’m certain of anything, it’s that the former New Canaan Post Office building at the corner of Park and Pine streets needs to be a bowling alley.
It’s not, of course, because it’s a Merrill Lynch. And, fine, private wealth management is probably a more practical (not to mention more pandemic-proof) endeavor than bowling. But New Canaan Fantasy Commercial Real Estate™ isn’t about rationality. It’s about creating a fictitious downtown utopia from available commercial space, a game in which startup costs and market viability are no object.
‘Who Knew?’ is sponsored by Walter Stewart’s Market. There was always an unbidden niblet.
In my industry, the two-martini lunch disappeared around the time Don Draper collected his first pension check. By the time I was a real-deal creative director at a New York ad agency, lunch was a markedly less glamorous occasion: a salad, hastily retrieved and mindlessly consumed with a side of news headlines and online sample sales, from a plastic bowl in my office. These salads came from the type of place where you’d walk through a roaring, chaotic assembly line and point through the sneeze guard to your desired ingredients. On the other side of the glass, a salad maker chopped and tossed it to your desired consistency.
Who Knew?’ is sponsored by Walter Stewart’s Market. I’ve never been able to understand more than six words of Marcel Proust, but from what I can gather, Remembrance of Things Past is 4,200 pages of inscrutable French about a cookie.
I can relate. I spend an impractical amount of time contemplating my Platonic ideals of food. Ice cream: Arethusa Farm coffee. Tomato: garden-grown, mid-September, still hot from the sun.