The Minivan Diaries

An eight-hour drive and a meditation on daughters, aging, podcasts, and California traffic.

TL;DR: Curmudg hits the road with podcasts, parental nostalgia, and a few grudges.

I’m officially a Soccer Mom! Got my Chrysler Pacifica Minivan, loaded to the gills. Except it’s not loaded with kids, per se, it’s loaded with kid, as in one kid’s stuff. I’m driving back from Claremont, California, to the Bay Area with much—but not all—of Jensen’s belongings. She and her Mom are driving Jensen’s car–also loaded to the gills with more stuff.

Reminds me of George Carlin’s famous routine explaining that life is basically just finding bigger places to store your stuff. (If you want to see it, here you go.)

A few days after the other commencement, here goes another!

Here goes:

11:02 a.m. Not quite on the road—a Starbucks pit stop first. Venti iced coffee, a bottle of water, and a bag of “Protein Popcorn.” Never tried it, but how bad could cheesy popcorn be?

Got myself buckled in, checked the mirrors—like I could actually see out of the rearview–this minivan is stuffed like a sausage. Just a quick spritz of the windshield washers…and…uh, do all car rental companies buy “gently used” windshield wipers just to annoy customers? The few dirt marks and bugs are now a bug gut menagerie, obliterating my view.

Back to Starbucks for some paper towels, and the windshield gets the first-class treatment with bottled water.

11:17 a.m. Ready to roll. As I’m repositioning the bag, box, and plants on the passenger side and footwell, I remember leaving Rutgers after my graduation. I think all my stuff fit in the trunk of my car. Nothing in the backseat. Of course, a fair amount of Jensen’s stuff hadn’t been invented back then, but still…

12:26 p.m. Podcasts. They’ve completely supplanted terrestrial radio. When I was gainfully employed back in the previous millennium, they hadn’t yet been invented. My commute to work was, at best, 45 minutes, at worst, a decade. Had podcasts been around, I never would have retired. (Just kidding, I think.) My favorites are The Ezra Klein Show, Smartless, and Pivot. The latter drops episodes on Tuesday, so I’m out of luck today.

I’m listening to Ezra Klein interview Pema Chödrön. If you’ve never heard of her, she wrote When Things Fall Apart, which feels pretty on-the-nose right now. She said something about meditation, which very much resonated with me: it teaches you to leave a little more space before acting, especially when it comes to something someone else says. I noticed myself doing this several months ago and had named it “taking a breath.” It’s especially worthwhile on social media.

And the answer to the 11:02 a.m. question about popcorn is—real bad. As in disgusting. Hope this doesn’t sully my taste for popcorn forever.

12.54 p.m. Entering the famous “Grapevine” on Hwy 5. It’s a beautiful stretch of road that climbs over 4000 feet through the Tejon Pass. The speed limit is 65; for trucks, 55. And I’m spending about an hour lounging in the passing lane going 37 because a truck going 46 is passing another truck going 45, forcing every car behind it to slam on the brakes and wait for this idiocy to end.

Lovely.

1:51 p.m. Listening to the Smartless podcast, and their guest is Sting. Wonderful. What an amazing and talented human being. Several years ago, I was taking the Chunnel train from London to Paris, and I sat across from his wife, Trudy Styler. We chatted on and off during the trip. At some point, she asked what I did, and I asked what she did. She mentioned her husband was “a musician,” and that was that. Disembarking the train, my fellow travelers ran up to me excitedly saying, “Do you know who you were sitting next to? That was Trudy Styler! She’s married to Sting!”

And I was like “Uh, who?”

Sting had an interesting perspective on AI. He noted that in the 19th century, visual artists were threatened by the invention of photography. They sidestepped this “new new” thing by creating the Impressionist movement. Interesting POV. And a more positive spin on this freight train called artificial intelligence.

Thanks, buddy.

2:02 p.m. To my right is the California Aqueduct. What an engineering marvel. 400 plus miles of water flowing from the Sierras and Northern California through tens of millions of acres of Central California farmland.

And then it all gets dumped into the Pacific, if you believe certain people. But since Curmudg is a “politics-free” zone, I won’t mention whom.

Music for now. Why is it that I have 427 “favorite” songs, and I keep hearing the same seven all of the time? Can you explain that, Mr. Apple Music, whom I’ve been paying through the nose for since Clinton was president?

2:31 p.m. Pit stop for food in the middle of farmland nowhere. Subway is about my only choice. Traci and Jensen called me a few minutes ago as they were leaving Claremont. Both were munching on Jersey Mike’s. Damn, should have thought of it before I left town hours ago.

Just asked Siri to locate the nearest Jersey Mike’s. She laughed at me.

As I’m backing out of the Subway parking lot, my GPS says, “Head southwest” on some street. Hello…if I knew which way southwest was, or which way south OR west was, I wouldn’t be using GPS. So thanks a lot.

3:34 p.m. I’ve been thinking about Scripps College. After all, it was graduation this past weekend. I must say I haven’t been a fan of the institution. Two reasons. One, tuition was out-of-this-world expensive. If that wasn’t enough, there was this little charge on the recent—and final bill—$70 for “graduation fee.” Really? Do you think maybe you could’ve snuck the $70 into the tuition without anyone knowing, or did you just do it to piss me off?

You succeeded, Scripps.

The other thing that always made me uncomfortable about Scripps is very personal, difficult to pin down, but hard for me to ignore. Scripps is an all-women’s college, which is a great, and still a valid alternative. But from day one, as a man, I feel like I was treated as an afterthought. Nothing specific, just a feeling, one that I began to notice four years ago on Jensen’s first day on campus. I never felt addressed at any school event when I was with Traci. As if I were the uninvited “plus-one.”

Maybe part of the raison d'être of Scripps is to let men know what it’s like for the shoe to be on the other foot.

You succeeded, Scripps.

And BTW, Emily (my eldest daughter) also went to an all-women’s college—Mills, in Oakland. And I never felt the tiniest twinge of sexism. And serving on their Board of Trustees after Emily graduated was an honor and my way of giving back to the community.

Maybe if Scripps refunds the $70 graduation fee, I’ll consider giving back. As it stands now, I don’t owe the school guvna.*

4:44 p.m. Fuel stop. Trying to beat Avis at their gas game. I paid the “fuel surcharge,” so now I need to return the car with barely ounces of gas, so I can win. Doing the math while filling up. Feels like the algebra problem I could never solve—you might remember: if a boat is going downstream at 6 mph, and there is a 2 mph headwind, what color are the eyes of the boat captain?

We’ll see.

5:46 p.m. Signs of life! About to pass the windfarm at Altamont Pass. The same place where the Stones and the Bikers got into some row about one hundred years ago. And I know I’m heading east west cause the sun is blazing in my eyes.

And my phone is down to 7%. Reminds me of the time after knee surgery when my phone dying set off a raucous few minutes. Except this time I’m prepared. I reach into my bag, pull out the white cord, plug one end into the phone, the other into that thing on the lower dashboard, and VOILA!

Nothing.

I try the other spot and…nothing.

Good thing I’m close enough to home so I don’t need GPS at this point. I can always play Bay Area Bingo, where you count the number of Teslas on the road. Who needs podcasts and music?

7:06 p.m. I drive the minivan slowly up the steep hill near my house. For the first time on this journey, the vehicle’s weight is apparent. I park, take my bag, and Jensen’s two plants into the house. I do a little dance in the hallway and feel like Dorothy, thinking there’s no place like home.

And for the first time, the weight of the last few days is apparent. Between the emotions of graduation, the whirlwind of packing, and the eight-hour drive, it’s been a long few days. As Jensen resettles at home and games out her plans for graduate school, it will be interesting to watch how this newly minted Cum Laude graduate reenters the world away from the college environment. It’s only been four years, but the person Jensen has become is wiser and more thoughtful of the world around her than the person we dropped off at school nearly four years ago.

I’ll set aside some of my feelings about Scripps to acknowledge that much.

Noon the following day: Returned the car just now. I won the battle but lost the war. I returned the car with a mileage range of 43. But man, do they get you on the taxes. There’s a concession recovery fee, a California tourist tax, a vehicle license recoup fee, regular sales taxes, and an FTP surcharge (whatever that is) of $1.50 a day. Total taxes add over 40% on top of the base rental.

Hope they use some of the revenue to add another lane on the Grapevine.

* Yiddish for “nothing.” Actually, less than nothing, as in fish will fly before it happens.

Looking for more Curmudg during the week?
Notes features Mudge of the Day, WHAT I’M READING every Sunday, random observations, and occasional throwbacks to older columns that still feel a little too relevant.