Anyone driving past my house on any given weekend probably has one of three thoughts about what's going on just in front of my garage.
Thought One: The Smiths have gotten lost in their own driveway again.
Thought Two: Those are the worst door-to-door salesmen in the world.
Thought Three: Bet the song on the radio is just about over and they can go in the house now.
While all of those have both merit and potential to be correct, the actual answer is we are running through the vast, mostly mental pre-trip checklist, much like the ones astronauts use before they blast off. Except, of course, one of the astronauts doesn't look over at the other and say, "Did you lock the back door?" And it's very unlikely the other astronaut climbs down off the rocket and runs back into the house to get his sunglasses, only to realize they're in his pocket.
Once upon a time, before Google Maps and Siri started being so very helpful, we used a computer service that allowed you to print off detailed directions to anywhere. Problem was, the directions were so detailed the first 15 of 20 total steps were telling you how to get out of your neighborhood.
Now we've done ourselves one better: The first 30 minutes of our travel time is us trying to get out of our own driveway.
It's not fair to say we don't move quickly. In fact, we do. It's just that it's often in what amounts to a circle between the car, the garage, the house, any one of the bathrooms downstairs, the closet, the backyard, the mailbox or every drawer , table, desk or any other surface where keys, glasses, cellphones or anything else we might need to navigate the wilds of Northwest Arkansas might have been laid.
What makes it even a little scarier is that whatever it is we don't have was placed with the expressed mental admonition that "I'm going to remember I put that there," an admonition which promptly slipped our respective or collective minds.
If you're looking for a YouTube-worthy example of "confusing activity for progress," you should just turn on the currently non-existent Nanny Cam and record us trying to go to the Farmer's Market on a Saturday morning.
I don't think we're alone in this. I've frequently seen neighbors pull out of driveways, only to return a few minutes later, run back into the house while the car idles, then come out and take off again. Perhaps they determined if they could make it to end of the street, it was safe to drive all the way to store. Or perhaps they, like we on occasion, have realized that if you're going take a kid to soccer practice, it's a lot more effective if he's actually in the car.
When we were younger, of course, going somewhere meant just throwing yourself in the general direction of the driver's seat and taking off. At that stage, we could operate under the very Zen-like reality that if you don't actually own anything, you don't have to worry about leaving it at home.
Then we had kids, and going to the store meant three bags, two strollers, a play pen and a car seat that took about half a day to install. Oh, yeah, and the baby. I mean, it's always something...
Now, the kids are basically grown, so our quality driveway time is dedicated to determining what, exactly we've left in the house, who left it, who needs to go in after it, where it will be if someone were to go in after it and if we actually needed it in the first place.
And then, faced with the reality that it appears every single road in Northwest Arkansas is under construction and that no event or building has parking within its current ZIP code, there's the "Rock, Paper, Scissors" game we have to play to determine if we actually want to leave the house in the first place.
Now, as I've said, I'm looking forward to future, where we have self-driving electric cars ready to whisk us on our way while we play Spades or stare out the window or whatever you do when you're sitting behind the steering wheel but not actually driving.
I just hope the car is smart enough to let us know one of us will need the purse that's hanging on the back of the chair in the breakfast nook, the shopping list is still on the counter, we left the wrong dog in the house and what's with all the lights still on, do you think we're made of money here?
Ah, the future. It gets better looking every day.
Commentary on 05/20/2016