I should probably have transportation figured out by now.
It’s been a part of my life, in one way or the other, since my parents brought newborn me home from the hospital. And yet.
I could fill a memoir with my tales of tows, tickets and other travails — all a result of my poor planning or magical thinking. (“They won’t tow me if I just duck in here for a few …oh wow there goes my car.”) It would be a sad memoir, and it would quickly pile up in the clearance bin next to Snooki’s “A Shore Thing,” but at least it would be long.
Which brings me, believe it or not, to Los Angeles.
My son and I squeezed in a two-day trip to see a Dodgers game and do touristy things before school starts and the pace of life goes back to breakneck. I did not rent a car because Los Angeles is, last I checked, a real city, and everyone knows you don’t need a car in a real city.
We were on the ground for all of 45 seconds when it became obvious that, actually, LA is nearly impossible without a car. I quickly arranged a rental from my phone and we hopped on a shuttle to the rental car lot.
Except it was the wrong rental car lot. And when we walked to the other rental car lot, it was no longer located there. And when we threw up our hands and canceled the rental and walked back to the original rental car lot, all the rental companies there had a four-day rental minimum. And when we threw up our hands and decided to rent a car there anyway and eat the cost of two unused days, I realized I didn’t have my driver's license.
It was at O’Hare. Sitting in a bin at security. Where I tossed it in a rush to empty my pockets before being full-body scanned.
I briefly panicked, after briefly (and unsuccessfully) begging the gentleman to accept a photo of my driver's license I store on my phone. And then I hailed an Uber. And when we got in the Uber and headed toward our first destination, the driver suddenly pulled over and informed us that whoops, sorry, she doesn’t actually drive that far, and we’d need to hop out and grab a different ride.
Did I mention the trip was my son’s 13th birthday gift?
“Literally everything’s going wrong,” he said, as we stood in gazillion-degree heat on scenic Airport Boulevard, waiting for a second Uber.
(Feel free to pause and calculate all the ways I could have easily avoided this entire debacle. Trust me, I have.)
But if there’s one thing I have plenty of practice in, it’s looking on the bright side — and trying to talk my kids into joining me there — after I’ve screwed something up, usually involving transportation.
There was the time I took my son and his friend to a Northwestern/Michigan football game and decided to take the “L” because who wants to park at a Northwestern/Michigan football game, only to realize after 30 minutes of waiting on the Diversey platform that the train we were waiting for doesn’t run on Saturdays.
There was the time I got my car towed outside my son’s winter holiday concert.
There was the time I decided we didn’t need to rent a car in Dallas when we were traveling there for my daughter’s gymnastics competition, only to learn once we landed that the competition was in “Dallas” the same way Allstate Arena or Sears Centre or Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre are in “Chicago.” Which is to say, not actually. Which is to say, you need a car.
Sadly, this is but a small sampling of my missteps. But before you track down my children and introduce them to the emancipation process, hear me out.
Every single one of the stories (colossal fails?) has a happy ending. OK, happy-ish. OK, funny. Fine, memorable.
The Northwestern/Michigan game? Two other poor souls were on the same platform that day, also waiting for the train that was never coming. They were from Michigan and had a much better excuse than I do for not knowing the train schedule, but that’s not the point. The point is we all split an Uber to Evanston, and one of them was a college basketball player. My son and his friend and I ended up having the best time talking to them about college sports.
The hunt for a last-minute rental in Dallas brought us on an adventure that included an impromptu visit to the Dallas Stars hockey stadium, and I distinctly remember my son ending the day singing in the hotel shower, which I took as a sign that I had not sapped all the joy from his life.
The winter holiday concert tow is still too painful to unpack here. Maybe in the memoir.
“Not everything,” I said to my son, on the Airport Boulevard sidewalk, sweating and fuming and frantically transferring money out of my savings account to cover the next 48 hours of Ubers. “Like three things. Maybe four. Everything else has gone right.”
And that’s when I decided I had stumbled upon our motto for the school year, which will undoubtedly include missteps and moments of poor planning and the occasional colossal fail (mine and my children’s).
All of them will be eminently more tolerable and bounce-back-from-able if we approach them with a little bit of grace. And remember to stack them next to all the things that didn’t go wrong. And know they might even take us someplace interesting. And they’ll very likely make for a good story.
And we can still choose, at the end of the day, no matter how lousy it was, to sing in the shower.
