Think Outside the Glove(box)

I enlisted in the War on Cars in the first grade, when a speeding driver killed my beloved tortoiseshell cat outside our house. Well through high school, I hotly insisted that I was never going to become the kind of person who drives a car, sneering at the vehicular aspirations of my comrades.

Unfortunately, I live(d) in a car-dependent community, so when I turned 17, just like everyone else, I picked up a driver’s license and an old beater that I drove for several years until it died and I replaced it with another old beater, and so on down the line until I achieved that brief middle class aspiration of a car note (since paid off) and a Prius that I drive (resentfully, thinking longingly of trains) on my peregrinations through Northern California. I treat the car as a necessary evil, grudgingly providing it with basic husbandry such as “oil changes” and “tires” and purchasing increasingly expensive “car insurance.”