Christmas

I wish I could share a really big car memory with you for Christmas, but the fact is that, then as now, I was part of a car-less family, and usually spent the holiday close to home, without the ritual drive in a present-laden auto over roads slippery with new snow to friends and relatives and their fridges full of beer and rec room bars laden with bottles of Canadian Club. I'm part of that last generation of kids whose parents and older siblings didn't see the connection between reckless driving and boozing, and would have likely ignored the connection since how the hell were you expected to get through the '70s without dulling the nerves a bit, anyway?

My lingering car memories from childhood Christmases past come bubbling to the surface, not when I think of a Chevy Caprice station wagon piloted by a dad blowing smoke out the window from the Kool he's just bummed off mom but whenever I see one of these:

I don't remember the year, but I definitely got the Hot Wheels rally case, and it was definitely a favorite gift, which I filled with a collection of little cars that included at least one first-gen Mustang and a Can-Am race car. Squinting at the photo above, I'm also getting a familiar vibe from the purple cab-over with the surfboards in the back. Years after Endless Summer came out, surfing was still the leisure activity of the young and truly free, even (or especially) if you were working class and landlocked. A friend's teenage older brother, after a vicious argument with his dad, would run away from home, hitching his way to the beaches of California but only making it as far as Wyoming or Utah before being forced to head back, humiliated.

I'm also getting a Proustian rush from the little tin badges that came with the Hot Wheels, one of which I'm sporting proudly here, on the carpet at my cousin Terry's fab '50s bungalow in Weston:

I'm digging the poly blend shirt in a dusty shade of avocado with the matching tie. Somewhere this holiday an assless hipster will try to rock this look at a New Year's party. The resolution on my scan of this slide is a bit kludgy, but it's definitely a muscle car on the tin badge, and since the presents under Terry's tree haven't been opened yet (I'm pegging this as the evening of Christmas day, well after the big present opening at home) I've clearly chosen to wear this Hot Wheels badge all day long, probably the last time I'd let myself wear my car obsession so openly.

The Hot Wheels - Can-Am race car and all - are long gone, as is the rally case and the tin badge. I'd convince my family to buy me the odd copy of Hot Rod magazine to read on the long car rides to whatever rented cottage or campsite we called home for summer vacations, but by my teens the car jones would be driven deep underground, submerged mostly by the weight of the certain knowledge that I neither had a car to learn on nor the money to buy one. Or at least that was my excuse. Somewhere between that Hot Wheels badge and today there's a long stretch of shame and poor choices that closeted my inner gearhead and reduced my love of cars to furtive glances in parking lots and a little shiver when I'd hear the rev of a tuned-out V8.

I'm hoping this is my last car-less Christmas, and with that I'll wish everyone a Merry one, with an admonishment that, should you know someone hiding their car jones deep under a bushel of rationalizations, you'll make their holiday brighter by coaxing their inner gearhead back into the sun and light. One of these would be a good place to start:

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Transit Dad

Last May, New York City dad Greg Wetzel jumped on the subway tracks in Manhattan's 72nd Street subway station to save a woman who had fainted and fallen onto the tracks. He was, justifiably, treated like a hero for his actions, lifting the woman back on the platform just before a train rumbled into the station. "I had to make a decision and I quickly assessed the risks,” said Wetzel, a lawyer.

Most people probably assume that Wetzel acted on his convictions, and that he was, as he told ABC News later, trying to show his children that "that human life is valuable. There are rules, of course, but they’re circumstance-specific." (I mentioned that he was a lawyer, didn't I?) That might be true, but I have a suspicion that when Wetzel asked two women standing on the platform to look after his kids before he jumped down onto the tracks, he was trying to show them and the world that he wasn't just some pervert.

I've talked before about how public transit has been given the virtuous pole position in a trumped-up urban living contest, with car use as the moustache-twirling villain. After a lifetime of transit use, I'm still unconvinced by the argument, but the persistence of this idea inferred that transit use was the choice of decent, forward-thinking people, and that a family on transit - as opposed to a big, ugly minivan or a sinister, earth-hating SUV - were the urban equivalent of white-gowned missionaries handing out healthy snacks and new fingers and noses in a leper colony.

It would be nice if it were true, but it's not. A family on transit is more likely to be regarded as either tourists or unable to aspire to the base middle-class benchmark of car ownership, and unwilling to shield their children from facts of urban life both unsanitary (the thin marinade of germs and bacillus that coat every handhold of the average bus and subway car) and unsavoury (the guy openly reading porn on the packed morning commuter bus; the teenage boys bringing their vast familiarity with bukkake videos to hyperbolic descriptions of their fictional sex lives; the visibly insane.)

More severe, however, is the way a dad alone with his kids on public transit is regarded by his fellow passengers. They might be porn reading, shit-talking, visibly insane teenagers, but as soon as a dad ushers his kids to a few empty seats on a city bus, they'll give him a look that it's hard not to read as "I wonder if I can text the police and family services in time for them to nab this creep by the time we get to the subway?"

"I've got my eye on you, weirdo."

Every dad these days has had the unique experience of hearing the moms and nannies go silent when they show up at the swing sets in the park with their toddler, like the western saloon when the Man with No Name walks through the swinging doors. A full generation of parental hysteria has cleared suburban streets of kids playing unsupervised, but it's also made lone men suspect when they enter what have now become "safe" - i.e. female-dominated - spaces.

When it's not regarded as either tragic or potentially criminal, taking children on transit is actually considered heroic. Even after two years of ferrying my kids to and from school every day, I still hear fellow parents react to our bus journey of a scant twenty minutes (in good traffic) like I've carried my kids, book bags and all, on my back over an Alpine pass to escape the Nazis.

I don't doubt that Greg Wetzel had the best of intentions when he left his three children in the care of strangers on the 72nd Street subway platform before he jumped down to save an unconscious woman, but I'm also certain that, at the back of his mind, he was thinking to himself, "at least now they'll stop looking at me like I'm heading downtown to sell these kids to Mauritian white slave traders."

Part of me hates that, after years of complaining about over-parenting and the wild-eyed scheduling of playdates and t-ball games and dance recitals that's deprived our kids of both solitary moments and the pleasure of learning to live in cities, I'm planning to cram mine into the back seat of a subcompact so I can ferry them around town free from the glaring stink eye of my fellow citizens.

But there it is, nonetheless - years of inadvertent aversion therapy have made me look for an escape, or at least the chance of an alternative, a chance of choice that'll let me be the foursquare, car-driving, school drop-off and parking-space-hunting dad that I was told I didn't have to be. Which means that the next time somebody faints onto the subway tracks, there will be once less dad there to come to the rescue.

Transit

"A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure."

- Margaret Thatcher

I was going to make this quote the motto of this blog, but it's a good thing I didn't, because a cursory bit of research reveals that the Iron Lady, for all of her cutlass-like wit and blithe willingness to offend liberal pieties, apparently never said any such thing. No less than the ultra-liberal Guardian has been forced to conclude that it was, at best, apocryphal, though they make a point of speculating that it was the sort of thing that she "might well have blurted out." So there.

Much like the veracity of the quote's source, I don't think it's necessarily true, though I've long lost track of the days when, trapped at a bus stop or jammed into a crowded streetcar, I've heard Thatcher's voice in my head, reminding me that it didn't have to be like this.

I live in a city with a world-renowned transit system, or at least that's what we like to tell ourselves. It might once have been true, but years of inconsistent maintenance, lack of investment and gutless politics have made it impossible for the city or the transit authority to use its onetime motto - "The Better Way" - without inviting a collective snort of derision that might change weather patterns.

Like anything that once worked well, when the conditions are right and the stars line up properly, it does its job well. About roughly half the time I use public transit - and I use it nearly every day, at least twice a day - it works well. My eyes don't jealously glare at the guy in the tan Civic with the empty car seat in the back and the three-inch dent in the passenger door when the bus arrives on time and I can find seats for myself and my kids.

I'm not overcome with car envy when my connections arrive within minutes of each other, or when the driver has taken his meds and not only greets us with an amiable, non-creepy smile and doesn't sigh deeply and glare into the distance when we ask for transfers. And I don't grimly do the mental math on getting financing to buy a "like new" Yaris when the streetcar has working air conditioning in the middle of a heat wave or the seats haven't all been tagged with a variety of colourful residue ranging from chewing gum flattened into the upholstery pile and worn a waxy black to stains erupting across the discoloured fabric like blood spatter from an explosive hemorrhoid.

No, it's at times like this that this 48-year-old man doesn't think he's a failure. Not really.

As with most failing systems, public transit in this city has built itself a cult following that celebrates the things that don't work and imagines that it would work better if only it was bigger. My long years of public carlessness were largely enabled by a widely celebrated local tradition that the lack of a car was a vote for transit, and as long as many of the people I knew were as young and poor as I was, we could imagine that we were some kind of silent majority. But as years passed and economic conditions changed, many of my urban transit cultists revived their dormant driving licenses or found a spouse with wheels.

I almost never meet anyone I know on transit anymore.

Group

OK, so the connection here is pretty tangential but here goes anyway: Adam Carolla is a car guy, he has "car" in his name, and here he is, ranting about identity politics, which is probably the single most catastrophic thing tearing otherwise prosperous and enlightened societies apart today:

So what's this got to do with me, cars, learning to drive, whatever you've got? Let me rant for a minute or two.

I live in the biggest city in Canada, and since I was in college I've lived in or near its core, which means that car ownership is nowhere near as crucial as it would be if I was in the suburbs, exurbs or bedroom communities, or in the sprawling apron of small towns and struggling farms currently gestating our future subdivisions beneath their overvalued and half-fallow fields. Which means that I've lived with a lot of people who've mistaken not driving or owning a car with civic virtue, in that curious way where not doing something - like eating meat or owning a pedigreed dog or planting a lawn - is the equivalent of actually doing some concrete, measurable action that actually helps other human beings.

I don't drive for a whole bunch or reasons, beginning with the lack of a car in our garage when I was a teenager and my teen priorities favouring buying punk rock records to scraping up the money to get my hands on a cheap junker. Then there's the whole thing with the golf cart, but like I said, more about that later. Working in the media and living amidst the low-wage underbelly of Richard fucking Florida's "creative class" means that whenever I admitted to not having my license I was congratulated more often than not. As if taking public transit, cadging rides and enduring the olfactory crap shoot of a taxi ride enhanced my artistic credibility, or somehow put me on a purer moral level than people who weren't wasting uncountable hours of their lives merely trying to get somewhere.

Living through the auto design wasteland that was the '80s and '90s probably made it easier to endure carlessness, but it helped to live among all these enablers. Granted, these would be the same people who, once they scaled a few rungs up the creative class ladder and/or popped out a kid or two, expressed something like shock and horror when the wife and I would tell them that we were raising our kids without a car. Once the honest reaction ("But, how do you shop for food?" "What if you want to leave the city?") was out of the way and we'd tried to explain how such an apparently freakish decision was made, they'd catch themselves and go back to congratulating us for giving our kids a "real city childhood" or helping save the environment or something similarly fatuous. Then they'd drive off in their SUV or Volvo with the Greenpeace bumper sticker to their parents' cottage in the Muskokas.

For the longest time we all pretended that we were members of a group; people who cared, people who made moral choices without effort, people who identified ourselves not by what we did but what we didn't do - drive a car. Until that point when personal and economic circumstances made owning a car desirable, even if it was done with the usual packet of qualifiers. ("It's really just for the weekends." "My parents gave it to us." "It's not like I'm some kind of gearhead - I honestly wouldn't even know how to change the oil on the thing.") And once again, the illusion of a group dissolved in the reality of being just a gang of people who made decisions, for themselves, based on their own priorities and not those of the group that they never really belonged to in the first place.

The illusion of group membership - and it's almost always an illusion - can provide you with a lifetime's worth of rationalizations for why your own personal choice, or laziness, or unexamined prejudices, are a moral virtue and not just the way you fucking roll, at least for now. Until a better option comes along. So stop wasting your time, get off the bus, and don't assume you have anything in common with anyone else. Trust me - we'll all get along a whole lot better this way.

(HT: 5FoF)