A neighbour who lives across and down the street approached me the other day. He glanced around and leaned forward and dropped his voice, “Do you guys have a car?”
Slightly surprised, I paused. “Yes.” It was his turn to be stunned.
“We see you guys always go out walking for your groceries. We were concerned. I was going to offer to lend you our van.” He explained that since his family lives opposite the only entrance to our laneway, they generally note the comings and goings of all of the neighbours, and they never see us driving. And they see us walking back with groceries, even with Jon, even in the winter.
It felt kind of weird trying to explain. There are three grocery stores within a kilometre and a half of our house, and one of them is only about three hundred metres away. I’d feel quite odd driving there. We don’t eat a lot of pre-packaged foods, and have learned from experience that you can’t stock up on veggies for two weeks, lest they get fuzzy. So generally every day or two, one of us is whipping to the store for some ingredient or other. Given the working at home thing, it’s a great excuse to get out, take a break. Haul along a backpack and you can bring home 10 kilos of stuff. And Jon loves being outside and going for walks, even in the winter. And many of our within city trips without Jon can be covered by transit. No worry about parking, etc.
I don’t mean to say it isn’t also a product of poor planning and our inabilities to set a menu farther than one day hence. There is that too. 🙂
And it isn’t to say that we don’t need a car. Rest assured, when you’ve got a kid with a wheelchair, needs must. Public transit just doesn’t cover it. But the car’s really for medium-to-long distance trips. I just figure that if you don’t have to use it, don’t.
Are we that weird when it comes to walking in the city?
Yeah, I recently walked 4 blocks from a bus stop to a party, and the hosts looked at me like I was insane for not calling for a ride. I couldn’t have had a better reaction if I had arrived at he door gnawing on roadkill and not wearing pants. It was a nice night for walking, too. It’s the suburbs. It trains people to drive every time they leave the house.
-aiabx
Shouldn’t the title of this post have been “Car-ma”?
Or Auto-mobile? (‘auto’ meaning ‘self’ as in autobiography, referring to your own feet; it’s very funny and deep, believe you me.)
I’ll post a comprehensive list on my own blog, don’t you worry.
I walk (or cycle) to school every day through the lovely suburb of Coquitlam and the reaction is similar. My grade 8 students are confused (“Why don’t you drive?”), and some of my co-workers are either aghast (“You walked? But it’s raining out”) or react like I’ve cured a major disease (“That’s soooo great! I wish I could do that!”).