Back home right at 7:30 a.m. from a dog-and-human walk around the neighborhood: circumnavigating the park, roaming through the ritzy-titzy part of the ‘Hood, trotting past a major grocery store, past a 24-hour clinic, past the Sprouts, past the Walgreen’s…and…
..And WHY, again, have I been driving my car from the smallest pillar to the tallest post — with its pricey licenses and its expensive regular maintenance and its $3.48/gallon gasoline???
When my parents and I came back from our ten-year stint in Saudi Arabia, we took up residence in San Francisco, in a Fancy-Dan apartment development called Parkmerced. I dearly loved that place, and if I had the money (hah!!) would go back in an instant. It was a handsome place, and it was designed for residents to get around on foot. I rode the bus to school(!!!), and my mother and I rode busses and streetcars into downtown SF for our (altogether too frequent!) shopping trips.
Later, my father changed jobs and we moved to Southern California — to dowdy Long Beach, where I had been born and not far from where my father’s ships came in to dock. Unlike the Bay Area, southern California was not designed for pedestrians. My Northern California relatives didn’t even own a car. In Long Beach, you couldn’t begin to get by without one.
Remembering our walks around Parkmerced; and that walking was not practical in SoCal…probably because the place was not designed for pedestrians, as San Francisco was. Neither Gree nor Gertrude — my great-grandmother and great-aunt in Berkeley ever owned a car.
Just imagine having access to your job, to one of the world’s most magnificent cities, and to all the shopping you liked (and then some) without a car!
Well. I wonder if one could engineer something long those lines here in (un)lovely uptown Phoenix. Seriously…with a guy driving for Uber across the street, a light-rail train and a fleet of busses running up and down the main drags…why do I need to own a car at all?
Could I get rid of the Tank? That seems all the more feasible with a car rental place some three blocks up the road from my house. If something comes up that I really need a car for some episode, all I’d need to do is walk up the road and rent one.
I may give the Tank to Ian…let him pay the insurance and taxes and maintenance on the damn thing!
It is a nice enough vehicle, and it came in handy when one of its riders was a German shepherd. But a 35-pound corgi does not need a gasoline-powered covered wagon!
And to pay for an occasional taxicab surely isn’t going to cost what a van with its attendant taxes, maintenance and repair bills and gasoline bills costs.
How would I get the dog to the vet? M’hijito would have to drive us.
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Arrrgha! I’m gunna have to crash out of this post. Can’t get it to do anything and do not know if it will survive. My apologies for the weirdness!!!!!
Five-thirty in the freakin’ morning, and the dawg just rousted me out of the sack, barfing.