Gas prices

We have two cars. One of them, the one we just bought, takes regular gas. The other one takes premium because it is an older, high performance car that we really only use as a spare. My husband bought it as a collectible, intending to drive it only a few miles a month to car shows. So it sits in the driveway, snuggled under a huge cover, for most of the month.

Unfortunately, we don't always have the option to leave it there. Sometimes, he can't commute by train, or we need to go two different places, or we just need to transport things that won't fit into the newer, smaller car, but will fit into the massive trunk of the other, a 1996 Impala SS.

Two weeks ago, the new car had to go in for a three month checkup. It was a weekend, so I needed to go places, run errands, and I had no choice but to take the Impala. Granted, it's big. It's fast. It corners like a bus, and I could put all three dogs and the kids in the truck and have room left over for groceries. Park it somewhere in all its gleaming mean black glory, and there is always some guy, hands in pockets, checking it out when we come back to it in the parking lot. They never expect to see it driven by a woman, or comment when I say that it is my husband's car. Well, maybe to tell me that they wanted one but their wife refused to let them buy it. I tell them that my husband bought it and snuck it into the driveway without consulting me, and they sort of nod and you know exactly what they are thinking. That they would be dead if they did that. And I tell them that I was so pissed that I refused to drive it for more than a year. And now he and I have to flip over who gets to use it - until the past year or so.

Not since I was a teenager have I ever found myself in a gas station with no choice but to use a credit card to buy enough gas to get home. There have been times when I have had to scrounge for the change in the ashtray, or borrow a buck or two from a passenger. But $3.53 a gallon for gas? Or, rather, more than forty bucks just to top off the tank in the big car? Yikes. Get gas and suddenly I am seventeen and driving Dad's Pontiac Bonneville to the Merit station, and fumbling through my purse to find that last dollar in change while some kid who barely speaks English is glaring at me for holding things up.

I'm lucky because I live where I can walk to the post office and the bank and the grocery store. When I was working, I could have even walked to work, or taken the free minibus with all the little old ladies who have nothing to do but go shopping at eight in the morning. I think about all those people who live in West Podunk and have to drive an hour or two to work, and have no other choice like a train or a bus. And all those maids and cleaning ladies and porters and janitors and guys that make minimum wage who have to find a way to divide a quarter of their take-home pay to the car instead of other things - like food and rent.

We all drive too much. I think part of the obesity problem in this country comes from that. No one walks. Not if they have a car. My neighbors tease me because my kids walk to school year-round. They offer me rides from the grocery store (all of two blocks away) as if I were strange for not wanting to take a car to pick up a couple of things that fit in one or two bags. When I run into then at the post office, they are utterly amazed that I'd walk ten blocks to get there. And back. But it's no big deal - by the time I park, it's a block and a half less. I walked before the price of gas went up. I walked when it was a little over a dollar a gallon. And when I stop walking, I miss it. I probably know more about the little stores and the people that own them and hang out there than most of my neighbors will ever know because all they have time to notice is the parking spaces and the lines they wait in at the post office and the bank. I get to see that geese nested under the pine tree in the front of the grocery store's lawn. And that there is a falcon stooping to pick off pigeons from the ledge of the post office. And that there is a guy with an old Jaguar that parks at the bagel shop for coffee every day. Now we nod as we pass each other.

You can't buy that stuff. And it's better not to drive past it, anyway.

Maybe the guy that kept yelling "Get a horse!" to the first Model T on the block had the right idea...and maybe I ought to get those three lazy dogs a harness and cart!