Drive he said

The average commute is 26 minutes, and the range is from 3 minutes to over 3 hours.

My morning commute for the last 9 years was a 12 minute shot up a largely vacant city street, a jog through some run down neighborhoods, and a dash into the parking ramp.

Since the move, I have been on the freeway for 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the afternoon. Other than the freeway encounters with people who think of merging as merging souls with the afterlife, it is pretty uneventful. There are numerous opportunities to sit quietly on the freeway in peaceful reflection, waiting for the traffic to start moving again. I can floss, change the cd, and compose emails in my imagination.

Today was the first time I took Sam to high school on my way to work. I couldn't take the freeway, I decided, since his high school was considerably further east of downtown than the freeway. This has doubled my commute time. But the space time logistics were just a small part of the over all psychic logistics of driving him to school this morning.

The situation was fraught from the beginning. When we told Sam we were moving, his first thought was for his school arrangements and his friends convenience in dropping by and staying for three days, as Ryan in particular is wont to do. We allayed his fears about Ryan's round the clock access by making sure Ryan was heavily involved in the move, and that Ryan had a Ryan-approved futon sofa in our house where he could spend the night as occaision permitted.

The school thing was/is something else.

Because of the joint custody arrangement, Sam still goes to the City high school. He might be interested in transferring to the Bloomington high school this year, but for now he maintains the same schedule from his mom's house for a week, then stays with me and I must get him to school and home again without benefit of school transportation being provided. I must, in short, drive him to school every morning, and arrange for him to come downtown and sit and do homework until I am off work. He just signed up for the cross country team so there will be a few days when he is practicing after school. Other days he might go home with a friend until I get off work, or get a ride to our house with a friend who drives. It will sound complicated for a while.

It took me 50 minutes to get downtown this morning. The 50 minutes in my case were spent driving east about 7 miles on a side street, hooking up to a main thoroughfare north for another 5 miles which entailed several stoplights, then a jog on a semi-freeway section to another main thoroughfare north, which funneled into a city street with streetlights every 4 to 6 blocks, and required infinite alertness and patience dealing with those pick-up truck drivers whose mother and father had purchased long stretches of city streets and thoroughfares for them as birthrights.

But when I got to work I was whistling. I drove around down town for another 15 minutes to get to my parking space, and early in that meander I actually passed my office. But I was happy.

Sam and I didn't have any meaningful conversation on the way in. Sharing the time with him, listening to him complain about the noises in the new house and his stomach distress from getting up too early, put me in a generous frame of mind toward the universe.

Sam is my son, and his minor problems are infinitely more interesting and worthwhile to me than the morning talk show jabber. With any luck, I will get to drive him to school for a couple of more years before he gets wheels of his own or we cave in to rational pressures and find a bus for him.

For now, this morning commute is more of a family communion, and it is good. If you are me.