Maybe it’s a good thing to take a different way home once in a while.
Last week, major construction began on my road. We’re not talking about repaving or some utility work on the side. We’re talking about big machinery chopping up every bit of the road to the point it’s not a road anymore. On Monday when I tried to turn down my street, the excavator parked in front of my house literally looked like it was preparing to demolish my home.
Most importantly to me, it means I cannot get home the way I usually drive. I can’t get into my driveway either. I have to enter my street from the other end and park my car about a five-minute walk from my home.
These are truly first-world problems, but you don’t realize how much you drive until you have to walk five minutes each way to your car.
Between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Wednesdays, two of my daughters combine for four events too far from our house to walk. That means four drop-offs and four pick-ups. That may seem like a walk in the park for a taxicab driver, but it’s a handful for a suburban dad who has trouble getting the kids places on time in normal situations without that added 40 minutes of walking.
That having been said, I wouldn’t trade those five-minute walks with the kids for anything.
There’s something about walking that opens people up to talk more than driving. We’ll have delightful conversations about their days, their friends and their dreams, only to see the conversation evaporate the moment we get to the car.
Every time my youngest says, “Dad, can I tell you something?” I emphatically say yes.
I’ve tried to economize my time a little more, hanging out in the car during some of the half-hour windows of free time. On the longer stretches, I’ll return home, and I’ve gotten to know some of my neighbors on the other side of our house a little better, the stretch I don’t usually pass when driving home on my short route.
Apparently one side effect of this road project is the construction it’s doing on my relationships with people nearby.
The road changed the way my wife and I grocery shopped on Friday. Our goal was to only buy what we could carry back from the car in one trip. We succeeded, mostly by carrying more than we generally would try. It was a good exercise in balancing your needs with your physical balance, making sure you didn’t overload one side.
I know before long the crews will get our road back into some sort of shape where we can drive our cars back into our driveways. Even once that happens, I may have to try the other route too, just to remind myself how much more is out there than the regular routine.
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