Cars

My Dad’s Studebaker. That was the first car I remember. We’d moved to the New Jersey suburbs from Staten Island so Mom had to learn to drive. She did pretty well, too. (We had to go on the lessons when they couldn’t find someone to watch us.) The Studebaker was green and not very big. We were a family of five then.

When my youngest brother showed up we got a Chevy station wagon. Two-tone blue and white. It seems to me it was only a little while before our next door neighbors got a much fancier station wagon with a removable third seat in the back instead of the plain space we had. I was old enough by then to understand our wagon had been eclipsed.

About the same time we moved to a bigger house, because we needed another bedroom (because I was a girl and the other three kids were boys) and a second bathroom, if at all possible, Dad came home with a tan Chevy Impala. Sleek. And then, amazingly, he bought a Kharmen Ghia! Mom and Dad needed two cars by then, because even though Dad car-pooled to the city, Mom had a hard time on Dad’s day to drive because there was a lot going on by then. We were a busy family, although not nearly as busy as families of six tend to be now. Jeez Louise!

The gods were smiling on my next-oldest brother and I, because we each had a senior year in high school when we got to drive the Ghia to school. This gave me many cool points that I’d been sorely lacking because I was a ballet dancer and no one at Ramsey High cared about that. Peter was okay even without the Ghia, but it didn’t hurt. There were other family cars after that, but they weren’t important to me because I was in college and then on my own.

It was six years before I had to have a car. I moved from New York City to Albuquerque, you see, and of course, a car was a necessary part of life.

So, my family was addicted to oil, from the get-go I guess. Well, no guessing about it-we were. I’m sorry, pelicans and turtles and everyone else, but that’s how it was. I live on the Florida panhandle. In this town pretty much everyone has a car. When you see adults walking or riding bikes, it’s a sure shot they’ve lost their license for driving drunk. Not a damn thing to do with saving the environment. It’s a mess, isn’t it?

Rant-What's with these acres of wasted indoor space?

I just caught an IBM commercial. Dad had a football game on. There are four suits, i think four, certainly no more than five, and I think I saw one small red-clothed doing-nothing table, in this HUGE space. A wall of windows climbing stories high, and I'm no good with judging space, but it looked like acres of immaculate, empty, fake marble,"area." I suppose the purpose of it is to walk through to get to the offices where people work in cublicles.

I mean, really. All that space needs to be heated, or cooled, cleaned, lighted. Materials go into building all that indoor emptiness, and it's everywhere-the inside empty space. Maybe out of the photo frame were groups of elevators, (there's a word for that but I forgot it) but they certainly weren't close by. Even here in PCB, the new medical center they built on the beach has wide, wide hallways with maybe a couple of people using them at a time. Every SINGLE elementary school has at least a dozen portable classrooms in this town-taking up grounds that were once used for play.

I remember when they built the new Juilliard at Lincoln Center. The dance department got two (beautiful) dance studios. The rest were leased to New York City Ballet to help pay for the building. They were supposed to be our studios, of course. And guess what? Acres of empty space for no practical reason at all. And guess what else? They built the practice rooms for the musicians WITHOUT SOUNDPROOFING. The pianists could hear the violins who could hear the trumpets, oh it was awful. They had to hang every little practice room with insulating curtains. Unbelievable.

Okay, the outside public space at Lincoln Center is cool. Day and night filled with people, a huge, cooling fountain, performance events all the time. (We even staged an anti-Viet Nam war protest after the students were killed at Kent State.)

No, what infuriates me is all this acreage devoted to what? Ego? Someday we'll run out of space. And fossil fuel. And people who can afford to live close enough to these enormous buildings to work there in little cubby holes.