Handbook

I've added something new to my stack of reading material:

It's the official Ontario government Driver's Handbook, the text I'll be studying in preparation for the written test to get my G1 learner's permit.The plan is to take the written sometime this summer and take driving lessons this fall and winter to prepare for my driving test in the spring. The timeline is actually pretty loose, and may stretch out till next summer. I am, to be frank, more nervous about this than almost anything I've ever done in life, including marriage and fatherhood.

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)

Buick

My dad's 1964 Buick LeSabre sat in the garage gathering dust for at least three years after he died. To a child's eyes it was a big car, but I know for certain that it was a small garage, which required you to edge carefully around it as soon as you walked through the door, collecting smudges of dirt on your clothes as you tried to retrieve a garden rake or whatever else managed to share the space with my father's car.

It was brown - that dull, coppery earth tone that was the era's car colour signifier of solid, stable and mature. He bought it the year I was born, but since his health deteriorated every year until his final heart attack, I doubt he got to drive it as much as he might have liked. You don't see a lot of LeSabres around these days, but I'd love to find one again, just to get a sense of how big it really was, and to see if it would trigger some palpable sense memory of my father, a man I truly loved and who I knew for such a short time.

It would be a bonus if it was brown.

I have a few carefully hoarded memories of my father, including a cherished one of watching Looney Tunes with him on the old black and white set in the living room, but I have none of driving in that car. My earliest car memories involve sliding around on the bench seat of my Uncle John Barnes' late-'50s hunk of classic four-door Detroit, on one of the many visits we made to Hamilton with my widowed mother to visit her sister, John's wife. He was always my favorite uncle, patient and unusually kind, for reasons that would become clear to me later. (He was, in fact, my grandfather, but that's a whole other story.)

I had that memory vividly revived years later in Havana, driving around the city with musician Guillermo Barreto in his beautifully preserved '56 Chevy, which actually smelled like Uncle John's car, the tobacco smoke curing the leather upholstery in the humid Cuban air just as it had in my uncle/grandfather's car many miles north in the heart of Canada's rust belt.

It's a stretch to imagine that I might have learned to drive in my dad's LeSabre. Even if he had lived, I doubt that he'd have kept the same car for more than a decade and a half, if Canadian winters had let it survive that long. He'd have hit retirement age by the time I'd have gotten my learner's permit, and I imagine him trading in the LeSabre for something new as a treat. Given the brand loyalty peculiar to Ontarian men of my father's generation, it would probably have been another Buick.

They were still making the LeSabre in 1974, but I imagine my father going for a bit of a change, something just the slimmest fraction sportier - a Riviera, perhaps, or an Electra. A coupe. In brown. It would have been this car - along with my brother-in-law's Audi Fox, maybe - where I would have learned to drive.

I doubt if Dad would have gone for the high performance Stage 1 dual exhaust engine, so I would have had to tentatively take to the road piloting a 5,000 lb. sled with a 455 V8 with 3-speed automatic transmission and Max Trac traction control, if Dad had gone for that option. It would have been a beast of a car to learn in; an old man's car, which I probably would have driven like an old man, on the rare occasions that he might have let me take it out.

But that's another world. He never bought that car, so I never learned to drive in it, and the LeSabre was long gone by the time I was sixteen, our garage empty and our driveway untenanted by any car. We sold it to George Parker down the street, who only had the LeSabre for a few years before he sold that on for a new car, make and model unremembered by me, though I do know that it was the car where his son, my friend Shawn, found him in, dead of a heart attack while waiting for him after school. Dads didn't last long where I grew up.

And so I miss that LeSabre, though I can't blame its absence - or the lack of any car at all - for my unwillingness to learn to drive back at the dawn of the '80s. For that I blame a golf cart. But that's another story. Shawn Parker has a role in that one, too.