Driving is fun—when you live in the city and don’t get ample opportunity to hit the open road. Driving is not fun when you have to drive your eight-year-old son to school and back (through Manhattan traffic) three times a week. If it was just in one direction, it would be tolerable. But on Mondays and Tuesdays, I have to drive up to Riverdale from downtown Manhattan and back again, and then do the trip again about five hours later to pick him up. On Wednesdays I drive him to school, but don’t have to pick him up, since he goes straight to his father’s house.
People seem shocked that I do it. Why does he have to go to school so far away? (Because he’s lucky enough to be going to one of the country’s best schools while his father is struggling to pay for it.) Truthfully it’s only a fifteen-mile drive that in most places in the country would take less than a half-hour. But with Manhattan’s rush hour, it’s a two-hour ride round-trip.
I use Zipcar to get myself there and back. In theory, the prices aren’t so bad. About $8/hour for the small car I usually take. But four hours a day plus the $4 toll each way means my daily cost is about $50 to drive my son to school. The school bus for his private school is $6,000 a year. A cab would be over $50 each way. These are crazy numbers for most people, aren’t they?
I could take the train with him, but it would take over an hour and a half each way and then walk up a steep hill. For the rides where the eight-year-old is in the car with me, the traffic is usually going in the opposite direction and he only has to sit in the car for forty minutes. On his dad’s days, they take the train because they live further uptown and it only takes them an hour.
I would think about the drive all the time. When I’m about to drive, during the drive, and then dreading the drive the next day. This is the second winter I’m doing this. Last winter, we moved downtown and found out the school bus didn’t pick up all the way down here. I was six to nine months pregnant doing the drive, barely able to hold my pee on the way home. My back was always killing me with the belly perched just under the wheel—but I made it. I drove him up until the very last day of school—and only then did I let myself get induced into a late labor.
When I started the drive this September, I felt lighter (no belly), but still tired in the mornings. Most of my frustration comes from the pedestrians of downtown Manhattan. Wall Street pedestrians rival those of Chinatown with their complete disregard for motor vehicles. Rambling around with a sense of entitlement, both finance junkies and tourists alike trot around with their heads on their destination or in the clouds.
While I wake up optimistic each morning, there is indubitably going to be some asshole to piss me off. I try to resist this nastiness that I know will have me pay it forward and focus on breathing and distraction exercises. I listen to the ridiculous radio shows that target the twenty to twenty-five-year-old crowd, and hope my son is too into his book or video game to notice the talk of penises.
Most of the two hours I spending thinking. My brain, in the white noise, spins—I write in my head. I create scenarios and dialogue and theories and come to all sorts of realizations—all of which I can’t write down! I tried getting a transcription app for my iPod and attempted to talk into it, but the words spoken sound so differently from the words written. It just didn’t work. The good stuff would stick, I tell myself. The same characters will come to life when I sit down to type, I tell myself. The good ideas can’t be unborn.
