WHITE RIVER JUNCTION, Vt. — “Car Talk” isn’t just a public radio show starring the Tappet Brothers, Click and Clack that aired on Saturday mornings from 1977-2012.
Car Talk is my 2023 strategy for safely socializing without sitting inside restaurants, parties, church pews, or gym bleachers, all of which make me nervous.
I’m a high risk person for COVID — over 65 with underlying conditions — and smart enough to admit it. I just don’t want to breathe indoor air with people without a mask if I don’t have to.
My solution? Invite people to a “drop-in moment” (also a public radio title).
My go-to moment is not staying in the car until the irresistible radio show as defined by NPR is over. The My Driveway moment is about inviting a friend or friends to say “Hello” to my driveway through a rolled-up window rain or shine.
This works especially well in the winter when guests can stay in the warmth of their car while I’m outside, huddled but safely breathing fresh air as I greet them.
It also satisfies the human need to see faces and hear voices and react to smiles, in person not digitally. In the summer, guests can get out of the car and linger a while enjoying a lawn chair.
My lawn chairs are in my gazebo, so I should call these encounters in the fresh air “gazebo moments,” except they last longer than driveway moments.
They really amount to “lookout breaks”, like coffee breaks. BYOC (Bring Your Own Coffee) please.
Driveway moments remind me of my teenage self when I spent Saturday mornings washing the dirt off my dad’s 1961 Dodge Lancer and scrubbing the chrome bumpers, hubcaps, and whitewall tires shiny with Ajax and shine
Then I’d drive the car to the local mall and cruise up and down, showing off, hoping to impress friends.
If I was lucky, a friend or friends would drive near me and we’d pull over and park, chatting to each other through rolled-down windows looking very grown-up with our arm resting maturely on the wheel.
If other cars joined it would become a party, maybe with soda and chips.
They weren’t drive-in moments, but parking moments, also a variation of “car talk,” though I didn’t know that title at the time, just the activity of partying in a parking lot behind a wheel.
Parking lot moments could also be added to driveway moments as the start of a repertoire of safe socialization for us high-risks in COVID 2023.
Today we wouldn’t have layers and bright white walls to show and compare. They have long since gone the way of chrome bumpers. But we would have some fantastically crafted rims decorating our black walls.
And besides, at our age, we don’t need to impress others with our cars. Cars are just conversation starters, actually talking about cars.
Some say that socializing outdoors instead of in restaurants, living rooms, pews, or bleachers is awkward and artificial.
This criticism reminds me of the 1980s when the idea of ”safe sex” was coined to deal with the fear of AIDS.
People derided safe sex as “second best sex” just as some will no doubt deride safe socializing as “second best socialization.”
Better to talk about the “second best” with the car outside, than the “first best” to socialize inside with people whose breath you deign not to share.
Not out of snobbery, but out of survival.
Paul Keane, who attended graduate school at Kent State University, is a retired English teacher from Vermont. This was written for The Plain Dealer and cleveland.com.
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