Where's Loki?

I heard this morning that the SMUD vanpools, every one of them, have a waiting list! I considered this an a fifth option to get to work. Only twenty bucks a month to join the pool. Here in the Grove, the vanpool leaves the parking lot at Franklin and Laguna, with only one additional stop before work. It's an excellent option, but I personally don't need it.

I think particularly because Franklin and Laguna is about a mile and a half away. That's a bit too far to be hoofing to catch it. Really, if I'm like everyone else, if I have to get in the car, why not just take it all the way to work? Then I have all the freedoms due me by my American birthright...a private vehicle within one hundred feet at all times. And when gas was two bucks, most did just that.

At four bucks, whoa! A different set of priorities come into view. While carpooling this morning, my neighbor said they gassed up their Yukon Denali earlier this week. She only wanted to fill the tank half-way, but her husband said no, fill it all the way, just to see how much is costs. $103. No wonder I was being driven in their Honda! They can't use the vanpool because of their children.

Because all children, by law, are forbidden to walk or bike to school, and their school shed-jools don't coincide with that of their parents, both of whom have to work to service their multiple vehicles and 3,200 square feets, alternate transportation is not an option for their twenty odd years of child rearing.

As I understand things, if I were an electrical engineer in 1958, I could have comfortably provided for my 2.3 kid family while the wife serviced the home. I could come home to a waiting meal, then the chaise lounge, a seasoned pipe, and the daily Bee. Loki the dog played ball with the kids in the half-acre backyard until supper, then they'd come in and do their schoolwork until Gunsmoke.

So its 2008...fifty years later. Loki the dog is chained up in the zero-lot-line, still unfinished 200 sq ft backyard, barking all damn day for attention. The family left in an awful rush that morning, what with shuttling the kids off to dayca...oh shit, did you remember to pay Doris the Daycare Lady this month? The Dodge was shimmying a bit to the left during Hank's 26 mile commute to the office, better have that checked out. Martha's day at the Christian book store wasn't much better, what with nearly getting wrecked by that errant red light runner and also having learned her hours were going to be cut even further. How much more can I accept, she thinks. But she has to get home to pick up the kids one way or the other. By then it's 5:30 and dinner...well, fuck it...I know Hank likes Chinese take-out, but the kids...a frozen pizza for them, perhaps. But the price of pizza these days, jeez! Hank arrives late and a bit befuddled...traffic was at a standstill and for no reason! As least give me a flaming tanker-truck or some guy being hauled off in handcuffs he says, not this phantom wreck bullshit! Martha doesn't quite know how to approach Hank about his drinking...he sure seems to be more distant, it seems. But perhaps it's the collectors causing all this grief...if only they'd stop the harassment! The kids play their videos and watch their 24-hour cartoon networks, they are heard but not seen. And where's Loki?

I hardly think 1958 was paradise. Adults then lived out their lives in an alcoholic fog just as they do today. To cope. But a decade and a half later, along came political oil shocks and runaway inflation, and to cushion the blow was the wide scale introduction of women into the workforce. Thankfully the North Sea and the North slope also came on stream to help support all the additional vehicles and carriageways needed to get them to their jobs for the next 30 years.

So where do we go from here, if we suppose for a minute, that energy costs and inflation continue their upward arc? Most families, the ones who always seem to have too much month at the end of the money, already have two wage earners -- there cannot be a third. Unless Bucky gets on at the UA theater.