When I was in elementary school, for years my parents had a car where anytime the temperature was under 50 degrees in the morning (which was pretty much all winter long), my mother would have to open up the hood and tell me to get out of the car and stand next to the hood holding down a little button while she tried to start the ignition, and there would be five minutes of suspenseful pleading with the car every single morning, never quite knowing whether or not it would actually get around to being willing to drive me to school that day. Now I can't imagine living that way. (Actually, I can imagine living without a car as an adult, because I did so for several years after graduating from college; but I can't so much imagine living with a car that I continually feared being stranded by.) Did my social class really increase so significantly, or are cars in general just better made or more cheaply priced these days? It seems to me like there's a significantly higher ratio of shiny new cars to ancient fragile-looking cars on the streets these days than there used to be, and it can't be the neighborhood because I definitely live in a poorer neighborhood now than the one I grew up in.
Exploding Cars, or the Fear Thereof
When I was in elementary school, for years my parents had a car where anytime the temperature was under 50 degrees in the morning (which was pretty much all winter long), my mother would have to open up the hood and tell me to get out of the car and stand next to the hood holding down a little button while she tried to start the ignition, and there would be five minutes of suspenseful pleading with the car every single morning, never quite knowing whether or not it would actually get around to being willing to drive me to school that day. Now I can't imagine living that way. (Actually, I can imagine living without a car as an adult, because I did so for several years after graduating from college; but I can't so much imagine living with a car that I continually feared being stranded by.) Did my social class really increase so significantly, or are cars in general just better made or more cheaply priced these days? It seems to me like there's a significantly higher ratio of shiny new cars to ancient fragile-looking cars on the streets these days than there used to be, and it can't be the neighborhood because I definitely live in a poorer neighborhood now than the one I grew up in.
- Post a new comment
- 2 comments
- Post a new comment
- 2 comments