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A Sunday drive with the whole family packed together in the old station wagon staring out the back window at the yachts plying the inter-coastal waterway and pointing out to each other the palatial homes that sat on the beach shore as we drove north on AIA; stopping at McDonald’s for hamburgers and fries on the drive home and sitting outside on the tiled cement tables enjoying food as different from mom’s tallateli, melongene, or pasta e fagioli as the places we just drove through were from our own neighborhood, and thinking how it would feel to be sailing under a raised bridge out to an open sea as the cars waited for us to pass.
The leisurely Sunday drive seems like an historical moment gone by. With the price of fuel, congested traffic, and the desire to spend as little time in a car as possible there is little appetite for a leisurely drive. And even in those few moments when the family is all together driving to some destination or vacation, the kids are plugged into an exterior “iWorld” far from the interior private world of family (which may be a good thing if the family is dysfunctional - but that’s another story).
From the perspective of global warming and resource depletion and all the other untoward effects of oil the death of the leisurely Sunday drive may be a good thing, but from a social perspective I can’t help but think something has been lost.
To those familiar with the works of Richard Wolff and his economic analysis of the shift in prosperity from those at the bottom to those on the top beginning in the early 70’s and Chris Hedges on the weakening of democratic institutions, it’s old hat that there has been a deterioration in the quality of life for which the political and power elites have yet to be held to account. With Vietnam, urban blight, crime, and disco, the 70’s weren’t exactly idyllic and I certainly wouldn’t want to go back to them. But it’s more than just nostalgia that makes me think that homo economicus is bringing homo sapien to his knees, that brute force will decide the outcome and that it is futile to raise a voice in protest to those who have no ears to hear.
Photo by Alex V under Creative Commons license
13 Comments
Sometimes I think my family was solely responsible for global warming by our car use habits! I remember calculating when I was 10 years old that I had traveled 100,000 miles by car by that point, and I had been to 47 of the lower 48 states by car. My middle class parents thought nothing of driving 350 miles round trip to have Sunday dinner at a restaurant they liked. Foolishness, I know, and ultimately destructive of our atmosphere, but the gas cost 19.9 cents a gallon and the ads encouraged us to see the USA in our Chevrolet, so we did.
Your family had a car? We could only dream.
Also a big loss is the experience of getting an education whose expense doesn’t exhaust you and your family in the present and mortgage your future. I attended a Big Ten university for $150/year tuition in the 50′s. What’s that in todays dollars $1000/year? It’s an ongoing tragedy.
We are making kids today foot the bill for years of empire building by university bureaucrats.
We would often go on the leisurely Sunday drives when I was growing up but I think my father would usually have a destination in mind. Of course, since I suffered badly from motion sickness, there was a bit of a production required before we actually went on the drive.
My dad, a tailor from Italy, managed to save enough to buy a used 72 Toyota Corona Mark II Station and take his family of six children on Sunday drives, and to the doctor, school and all the other places that you had to go to and for which there was no public transportation for in Florida.
For the first couple of years in this country he rode a bike and we would have to take a taxi to go to appointments. It always made me feel embarrassed around my peers since they all had parents who drove large American cars.
Now, I wish I could do away with my car and ride a bike to work, and that embarrassment felt as a ten year old is admiration.
My Dad used to take us out for leisurely Sunday afternoon drives around southwestern Connecticut in our 1947 Plymouth. In their later years, they drove all over the U.S., Canada and parts of Mexico in their 1969 Buick Riviera, bronze/brown with a white top. I later learned from his sister that he was quite an adventurer………a skier, a ham radio operator a canoeist,camper on the Hudson River…… Though we never shared any of these adventures, we began boating as a family when I was quite young. This evolved into my lifetime in the boating business….and a lot of coastal boating, much of it alone (in receent years), but much of it with my son, who is now a boat captain with wide-ranging experience that eclipses mine by several degrees.
Just finished reading Joe Richards’ PRINCESS (firsst read it in Skipper magazine over 50 years ago)…..any family connection to his friend Lennie Agostino?
My family also had a boat. Instead of Sunday drives was the weekly commute from the Philadelphia suburbs to the marina in Maryland where we kept the boat, every weekend from May until September.
My fondest childhood memories are firmly embedded in that experience.
I do not feel guilty nor apologetic for the our actions in the 50s or 60s. After all there were only 2 billion of us then so the damage curve wasn’t noticeable. Many of us learned our lesson with the first earth day and the oil embargo in the 70s but apparently not enough. The species caught a 2nd wasteful breath with the 80s and we are still inhaling. Problem is there are 8 billion of us now. I suspect we should be very afraid.
By the way our Sunday cruises were in a 1951 Plymouth Cranbrook.
The only new car my family ever bought was a Volkswagon bus, chosen to facilitate those weekly trips to the boat. 25 mpg before anyone ever talked about fuel efficiency.
It was also frequently pressed into service for church outings and boy scout camping trips.
My family made a round trip across the country in a new ’53 Chevy wagon when Dad was given a temp. assignment on the West Coast while we lived on the East Coast. He arranged his vacation as the week before he was due and the week after he was done.
Eisenhower’s National Security Highway, to be able to move war material up and down the coast, was still just a map. There was no interstate highway system. The Penn. Turnpike was just finished, where Dad was like he took a space ship for a while.
We had a pile of maps from Shell Oil that marked off a southern route and a northern route, one for each way of the trip. The whole thing is still to this day the pinnacle of our entire memory of family life.
Lovely diary! Many long drives in my childhood memories, most of them really wonderful. My brother, sister and I would look for interesting license plates and for animals in fields. Our family vacations involved fishing and camping and seeing many California parks. I tried to do the same things with my own kids…. they enjoyed it as much as I had as a kid.
Leisurely Sundays drive with my family is rarely happened because of oil price increased yet we see to it that once in a month my family went out though it is not often as before.