Living without a car

So, it has been a while since we stopped owning a car. I really don't miss it, except on Fridays, when I am accustomed to doing all my errands. I also have an evening commitment on that day. What I have been doing is renting a car. There is a service called Zip Car here in town where I could rent a car by the hour. They are parked all over the city and if you are a member, you can just reserve one, pick it up, then return it where you found it. The only problem is that if you use a Zip Car for more than about five hours, renting a car from somewhere like Budget for the whole day is actually cheaper.

But what we have discovered since dropping our auto insurance is that coverage when one rents a car is actually very tricky (insurance is included with Zip Car, though there is a deductible). Most credit cards provide some coverage, but when we looked a little more deeply into this, it turns out that most of them, including ours, cover only the rental car itself, not the other car or any persons in it and not the persons or property in the rental car. The rental company offers supplemental insurance, but this only covers the other car and its property and costs $11 a day. Though this doesn't sound like all that much, it really adds up over time. It was beginning to look like car payments and maintenance and such might actually be cheaper.

Yesterday I came to something of a crisis about all this. I don't want to own another car. I don't want to spend all this money. I don't want to add to the carbon emissions in our atmosphere. But if I am spending money and using gas and all of that as if I still own a car; which is to say, if I don't actually change any of my behaviors to match up with the idea of being a person who doesn't own one, what has actually changed? Not my carbon footprint. Not the financial obligation.

Another wrinkle: a good friend has offered me the use of her car as needed. She doesn't use it much and would rather it be driven. This is, I am convinced, a genuine offer from her heart. So why have I been so reluctant to take her up on it? I know, of course, what it is. I want to be in control of the situation, of my own life. I don't want to be dependent on anyone else to get me where I want to go to do what I want to do when I want to do it. Which begs a couple of questions, actually.

First of all, what part of interdependence and dependent origination do I not understand? The Buddha was very clear that all these assumptions of my clearly demarcated and entirely separate self are poppycock and a major source of my suffering. Second, a wise teacher of mine once pointed out that one of the primary attributes of a generous person is allowing others to be generous to him. Am I robbing my friend of the opportunity to be generous through the selfishness of my inability to tolerate feeling obligated?

So...I have a new plan. I will borrow my friend's car, when it works for me to do so, about every other Friday. When I cannot borrow hers, I will get a Zip Car for just a couple of hours to do essential stuff. On the alternate Friday I will do any shopping I need to do on foot. If I have a special need for a car on those alternate weeks, I will ask to borrow hers or get a Zip Car. I will take a bus to my evening commitment and ask for a ride or take the bus home (another opportunity to ask for help, something at which I suck). It will take some organizing to do a major shopping trip every two weeks rather than a less major trip every week, but these are merely logistics and can be worked out. Not only does this give my friend the chance to be generous, it decreases by half the number of trips I will make in any car. Not to mention the fact that it saves me lots of money in rental fees and keep me healthier. I am writing about it here not only because it is part of my spiritual development (that's how it feels, anyway), but because putting it out there gives me a sense of accountability for these choices. I will keep you posted, whether you like it or not.

A disconcerting weekend

I have felt a bit off-kilter this whole weekend (I include Friday) but for very good reasons, or so it seems to me:

Polly's Last Ride

¶ Our dear Polly, the car I have written about before, was hauled away on Friday. She had stopped running altogether and we finally decided to donate her to our local classical radio station for whatever they could get . It was jarring to see her up on the bed of a tow truck and being driven away. She has been a part of our lives for so many years (16, to be exact) that it was like putting down a beloved pet. Kathy said that Polly is now an organ donor, allowing other cars to go on living with the parts she supplies; I like that idea, though I keep having images of the crusher reducing her to a mere wafer....If you have never had a car you truly loved, this may seem mawkish and silly, but the feelings are very real.

¶ Kathy is out of town this weekend and that is always disorienting. We have been married a long time and have become part of one another's rhythms. Not that time alone is not welcomed; I think anyone who has been in a long-term relationship recognizes that no matter how much we might love the other, a bit of entirely self-determined time is a wonderful thing. Still, I don't quite know what to do with myself sometimes when she is gone.

(I just realized that Kathy and I have been married for 32 years and had Polly for 16. Half our married life! Is there any significance to that? Probably not...).

¶ The weather is absolutely perfect this weekend. Though I wouldn't even think about complaining, weather like this triggers thoughts of needing to do something active and outside every single minute that it's so nice, just in case I never see weather like this ever again! In my whole life! This might be it! Ah, but I have wash on the line, there are butterflies in the garden, the cherry trees, daffodils and hyacinths are blooming, the fuschsias are sitting outside soaking up the sun, the pumpkin seeds in our basement seed-starting operation (well, it might be a bit pretentious to call 32 little planting cells an operation, but I like to think big) are growing bigger practically by the minute, and I am sitting out under our big holly tree writing my blog post. What could be better?

¶ I woke up this morning to realize that my fears from last night were justified: somehow or another, the entire contents of the SD card on my cell phone had disappeared—Poof! After I got over it, though, it made me realize that there was a bunch of unnecessary crap on there that is just as well gone. It was surprisingly freeing to start all over, especially with my music downloads (or is it uploads? acrossloads? what do you call it when you transfer from one storage area (my computer) to another (my phone)? And don't tell me it's called "transferring". I can't stand a damn literalist). Still, just when you think the world is a fairly safe place, your SD card gets erased. Jeez.

Tarek Mehanna

¶ I have been watching the first season of "Game of Thrones" on DVD and reading quite a bit of the New York Times as well as some news blogs. It's disconcerting to see how we are not so different from the "red in tooth and claw" medieval world portrayed in GOT. Don't we ever learn? I have also been reading more about the abrogation of civil rights we are putting up with these days and it really makes me wonder how we ever went so far astray. For the record (lest we forget), the Constitution says that I can say, write, think, or watch anything that does not lead to actual harm to others, OK? Look up the case of Tarek Mehanna if you are not yet concerned about this; you ought to be. It's not that I admire the guy or support most (or perhaps any) of what he believes. But he has the right to write about it, think his thoughts, to translate works that support Islamist jihad, and all that. He just does.

¶ After several weeks of research and thought, I put together a lecture about burnout and "compassion fatigue" in nurses that I am giving soon. I will be speaking to nursing students who are just months away from graduation and (according to their professor) all nervous and uptight about the possibility of burnout. (He says that the top two fears among young nurses are killing someone and burnout; that seems about right. People are pretty hard to kill, though, in my experience. Well, not my personal experience...I mean...oh, never mind). In any case, writing this lecture got me to thinking quite a bit about all this, about how malleable our minds are, how subject to the influence of both negative and positive input, yet how there are limits to this. We seem to have a predisposition that is beyond ready change, though I also know (from my own experience) that having a spiritual epiphany can shift the landscape considerably. In any case, I am 22 years into my career as a nurse and not burned out. I have worked in a burn ICU, a heart and lung transplant ICU and an HIV clinic. Not exactly cheery places, so it's not that I have chosen fields that would guarantee a lack of burnout. I really do think that how one orients one's thoughts makes a huge difference.

 I think it would be easy to be pessimistic in our current world. I used to be a cynic, but finally realized that, far from being sophisticated, cynicism is actually, ultimately intellectually lazy. Put another way, where is the benefit in thinking the world a deeply flawed place and humans a plague visited upon it? Where does that get us? Yes, we are environmentally in trouble but, God, today sure is beautiful, isn't it?

The week that was

There is a clerk at my favorite grocery store who, when I see her each Friday, asks me, "So, how was the week that was?" I like this question for some reason, perhaps because I like her, and I usually give her an answer that is both honest and not excessively revealing.

Today, in thinking about "the week that was" I am amazed that it has been so tumultuous. What amazes me even more is the fact that I seemed to have fallen into that old complacency of believing I have figured something out about the world and therefore should somehow be free of confusion or chaos. What I know to be true is precisely the opposite, that confusion and chaos, the unexpected and the unpleasant, the challenges to my assumptions and the evidence of my failures are an integral part of being alive as a human being. What is of value (and what the Buddha taught) is to accept all of these and their positive counterparts as the eddies of a stream, of no more real consequence than a passing cloud.

I am convinced, though, that the Buddha never meant for us to be indifferent or above it all. Quite the contrary, it was his intent that we be right in the middle of it all, that we feel the joy, the disappointment, the love, the hate, the confusion, the certainty as fully as we can while not attaching our expectations or revulsion to any of them.

So, what the heck happened to me this week, anyway?

• I think my friend Debbi is probably sicker than she was. I don't want to say much more because it's not my story to tell, but it makes me very sad. I had to miss seeing her in January when I was prevented from going to California by the snowstorm here, which bugs me.
• I think my car is sicker, too. I know I more or less wrote an epitaph for our dear Polly here some months ago, but she seemed to have a revival of sorts. Over the last few days, though, she has been much worse and is probably not safe to drive anywhere we do not want to get stuck for a few hours. This also necessitates renting cars and using Zipcars, which while pretty convenient, still is not as simple as walking out the door and taking off.
• I lectured to a health class on Wednesday which, while enjoyable, was also stressful, time-consuming and exhausting for me.
• I lecture again today in a more familiar setting, but it's still time-consuming and moderately stressful.
• My every minute the past few weeks has felt claimed by some necessity.
• Several days over the past week I have not gotten as much sleep as I probably need, due to several different causes.
• I am not eating as well or in as disciplined a fashion as I would like.
• I am experiencing some symptoms that are probably benign but could be otherwise. Nothing to alarm me but enough to keep me on low-level alert.
• I am reading a book that is rocking my world a bit, changing the way I think about my work and my relationship to it. The book is Trauma Stewardship by Lipsky and Burk and is about the fact that those of us who care for the broken of the world (or the broken world) internalize some of the trauma felt by those we care for and that, without proper self-care, serious consequences can result. I will no doubt write more about this book once I finish it.
• I find my work to be more stressful and less rewarding by the day. Much of this is a result of economic strictures that, while they have not decreased the funding for my clinic, have asked us to serve more clients with no increase in resources. I find administrators there to be more clueless and less sympathetic than ever before.
• The world is a mess. At least it sometimes seems that way to me. What are we doing? What are we thinking? As I have said before, if I intend to write on political themes I will start a different blog; I will not do that here. But sometimes I do despair. Where have all the true leaders gone? Where is our Martin? Our Gandhi? (Of course, both of those were shot to death, so that may be one answer to my question).
• Someone I love is depressed and that causes me to feel sad by proxy. I want her to be happy and contented, but what I want does not come to pass because I wish it; more's the pity.
• In a parking lot I backed right up to someone's bumper when I parked. I did not do any damage, but he or she was perturbed enough to leave a note on my car threatening me with the insurance company. Whereas I know myself to be blameless, it is still stressful to anticipate that I may get an unpleasant phone call one of these days.
• Not least of all, though I mention it last, seasonal allergies have kicked in for the year and that always makes me cranky and a little foggy, especially at first. I adapt to it later on, but this early I am still pretty disconcerted.

I hope it's understood that I am not complaining, just explaining, as the saying goes. I am trying to make it clear to myself, too, just why I am feeling a bit down and tense. After reading that list (and reflecting on the ongoing stressors like my parents' needs and other such daily thoughts) I guess it's not so surprising.

I am determined to step into the stream of all this and go where it takes me. I sometimes am afraid that I will not like the destination, but I know that my resistance is what creates the suffering I feel. I will survive and thrive.

I drove a Mustang

Because our old Subaru is not entirely reliable (though we recently upgraded her to assisted living from being on hospice) from time to time I rent a car to do my errands. I always ask Budget for a nice, little compact, but Friday the rental guy asked if I wanted a free upgrade to a Mustang. I said yes. I mean, who wouldn't? (Well, probably lots of people, actually. But not me).

So for 24 hours I drove a car that goes vroom! and responds to a touch of the accelerator with a surge rather than a faint complaint followed by a reluctant lift, the difference between a go-go teen and a worn down if still game middle aged guy both getting up off a couch. The difference, you understand, is not merely one of style or degree but of perspective. There is potential trouble, the geezer understands, in rising from here where it is comfortable; life is not all adventure, son, and even if it is an adventure some of those can be very, very painful.

In this metaphoric world, my Mustang was about 14. And four cans into the Red Bull.

Not that I'm complaining. I am enough of a Guy that I think it's pretty damn cool to drive around in a sky blue, brand new muscle car for a few hours. I drove 50 on streets I haven't taken over 35 in ten years. I unnecessarily zoomed past people going slower in the other lane. This thing had lights on the lights in the interior. The threshold of each door had a lighted MUSTANG on it that looked pretty damn cool at night when you got in the car. I got admiring looks from pimply teenagers and fellow old guys. I preened.

Then I heard myself. It was me getting admiring looks? This car, not even mine, was garnering this attention and making me feel all powerful and edgy. My whole adult life has been the search for a way to subvert the idea that my external reality represents who I really am and a 'Stang comes along and hijacks my psyche for an afternoon? Fun, but in the grand scheme of things, I am more my sad, brave Subaru station wagon than I am this rod. In the end I felt a little silly, another 55-year-old geriatric with a new toy. I was glad to get it back to the rental lot and walk home.

Nonetheless, I wouldn't mind having some of that vroom back in the old bones, to think that the rumble I feel is raw power rather than the result of digestion. A boy can dream.

This is the day...

This is the day that my mother-in-law goes in for surgery to remove a mass and determine if it is cancerous and if there are metastases.

This is the day before we leave on a week-and-a-half vacation which is actually two separate trips. While they are both wonderful, neither is entirely relaxation.

This is the day before we rent a car for these trips, which for some odd reason still makes me a little anxious. I guess I like the security of having my own car and knowing for certain that she is there and ready to go. Of course, my car is there and not ready to go, so that doesn't help.

This is the day after the night that I didn't sleep very well, probably because of all of these things.

I guess I'm just saying that this is a stressful day, and recognizing that stress is one of my major triggers for overeating. Surely a scone will make me feel much, much better? Telling on myself helps to keep me from going down that road.

Polly's last bath

A silly little video of me and Polly going in for a final car wash....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kX2CL3E7fhE

A few random notes

I will post on the Fourth Noble Truth later today. For the moment, though, just a few notes on several topics to get you up to date on what is happening in my life.

Driving Miss Polly. I am driving our decrepit, old car today to do my errands. The check engine light is only on intermittently, but we are not fooled. We know that she is on her way out, at least for us. We are still convinced that a mechanically-minded person could probably fix her up for a fraction of what it would cost for us to have it done and have a very reliable car to drive for several years. But we can no longer justify the cost for us. So today is somewhat bittersweet. Polly seems to drive just fine, but then she has these moments when she shudders when idling. That can't be good. I am going to take her for a last car wash today (I love car washes, and she does, too!). Kathy calls it a father/daughter outing. We really are quite silly about our car. Kathy also says that how well she is driving is somewhat like the hospice patient who gets up, greets the family, walks around, is cheerful and lucid, then dies the next day. This is, I fear, Polly's last gasp, at least with us. I know I have talked about this before and don't want to overemphasize it, but the use of rental cars and such also adds to the stress. I'm very glad they are available, but it is a transition to have to rely on them, and transitions are stressful. And the fact that she is still marginally drivable only makes the transition less clean.

Cancer. As I mentioned before, a loved one probably has cancer. Actually, she is doing pre-op testing as I write this. I don't have her permission to speak in any detail, though only because I haven't yet asked, so I won't go into it here. But it has been a big strain, of course.

The meltdown. One of my favorite scenes in a film is from State and Main. A character played by Alec Baldwin drives a car over a ramp, which flips the car on its side; it slides 50 feet or so along the street before coming to a stop. Baldwin climbs up out of the car, grinning and drunk, laughs and says, "So, that happened!" I often feel that way in the aftermath of an emotional upheaval. Yesterday, I was exhausted, fed up, angry, grieving, and stressed. So, I acted out in several ways, including with food (though, fortunately, not too badly). Today, I look back and can only say, "So, that happened!", shake my head and move on. Whew! That was weird. I feel much better today, though I haven't been sleeping well, and that  no doubt contributes to my malaise.

My son Mitchell is probably getting married soon, and rather precipitously. No, no, his fiancee isn't pregnant (heavens, no one gets married for that reason any more!); it has to do with (what else?) health benefits. All in all, my biggest reaction to this news is happiness that he will have the benefits. We love Jamie (his fiancee, for those keeping score), and are very glad they were going to get married at some point. But there is still the emotional reaction to the fact that my widdle baby boy is actually getting married. And I won't be there. Objectively, this makes all sorts of sense. Subjectively, there is part of me that is all stressed out about it. Not a big contributor, but a part of the whole picture, nonetheless.

This blog. Like the marriage, this blog is a very positive force in my life, and I am very glad I started it. Nonetheless, it is a source of stress, too. I am by nature a very private person, and putting myself out there is not entirely comfortable. But pushing myself to be something other than comfortable is really the point, isn't it? I am accountable to both of the people who actually read this blog (j/k; I know there's more of you than that) and that causes me some stress. But it also forces me (in a very good way) to examine what I am feeling and how I am coping.

And I think that gets you up to speed. Oh, there's a few other things: my job is stressful, and there are money concerns, especially with my parents. I'm not as young as I used to be. There are competing demands for my time. I am concerned that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and more quickly than we think. The political atmosphere in Washington is just revolting. The environment is on a downhill slide. Yet, I am optimistic. Isn't that strange? Life is worth living and I have a good one, all in all. I will survive and, more than that, thrive. I am grateful.

Polly : - {

This is a photo of our beautiful little Polly back in her garage, at least for a little while. She is still marginally drivable, but could conk out at any time (sounds like how I feel sometimes). I just knew you couldn't live without seeing a picture of her.

Weight lost, car lost, sun lost.

As I do every Monday, I weighed myself today, and am down to 214 pounds. Three pounds in one week is pretty good, but I know from experience that weight I gain quickly usually comes off quickly (I began this blog right after vacation). When I get under 200, we'll see what happens. It usually comes off a lot more slowly then.

I promised to say something about what happened yesterday when I wasn't counting calories; I didn't do too badly, actually. I probably could have had just one popsicle and not two and, man, I really like chips! I tend to eat the more healthy kind of chips (pita chips, Pop Chips, rice chips, that sort of thing), but that can be deceptive; if I eat enough of them, they sure aren't healthy any more! But I had only a single helping of the great paella I made, and one of Kathy's potato salad, which was pretty restrained for me. Not bad.

Today we got the news that our Subaru is dead. This is very sad. We bought Polly (yes, we named our car; didn't you?) new in 1996 and she has been a stunningly wonderful car for us. She has about 182,000 miles on her, nearly all of which we put on (she's been driven a few times by friends). She has been through thick and thin with us, and it has been a grand ride.

Another element that adds a special flavor of apprehension to this news is that Kathy and I determined some time ago that when Polly bites the dust, we are going to go without a car altogether. Yikes! Now the reality is here. Of course, we have many options, including Zip Cars quite nearby and a pretty good bus system, as well as light rail coming close to us within five years or so but, still...not to be able to just zip out to the garage and get something I forgot from the store, that sort of thing, not to mention the fact that she has been such a reliable, beautiful presence in our lives is a cause of some actual grief.

I came home today and really wanted to throw caution to the wind and just eat whatever I wanted. It was cloudy and dark after a weekend of sun, I was tired from work, and my car had died, with all the complications that entails. Mostly what restrained me was the knowledge that I would then have to write about it here! This kind of accountability, as I said earlier, is one of the main reasons I started this; thanks, blog (and all of you who read it)!