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The Car Line

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Clarissa

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People are so weird. I love my school car line. Life isn’t supposed to be “efficient”. You are sitting there, either chatting with your kid or waiting to see your kid. It’s bloody paradise, in my book.

“Agony”! “Crazy-making”! So much drama over something there’s a million reasons to enjoy.

I wonder what the efficient Angie would rather do. The crazy, deeply, agonizing vocabulary does give some idea.

By the way, the best measure of real psychological health is the capacity to enjoy the different components of one’s daily life.

23 responses to “The Car Line”

  1. paranoid Avatar
    paranoid

    Before I quit Twitter, I followed this writer on social media. She walks or rides a bike with her kids to school and relishes it

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  2. kharking Avatar
    kharking

    I wonder if this is another nudge away from car use aimed at suburban women who typically do a lot of driving and feel like they can’t spend the time on other forms of transportation, which unquestionably are less time efficient than driving overall (the scenario described here notwithstanding) at least in the suburbs.
    I hated school pickup because the rules were unclear but harshly enforced and I resented having to send my kid to a place where she was deeply unhappy. It’s great that you are making a pleasant experience out of it.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      I suspect that this sudden glorification of school buses is aimed at reducing the time that parents and children spend together.

      I’m very sorry your kid had a bad experience at school! Mine loved it and I credit it to the fact that it’s a very small, cozy religious school with very traditional teaching practices.

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      1. kharking Avatar
        kharking

        That makes sense too.

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  3. methylethyl Avatar
    methylethyl

    I, for one, am against the car line.

    It’s completely selfish. My kids are homeschooled. We never wait in the car line or take the bus.

    But we live on a dead-end street that butts up to the back of an elementary school. Until late August, it was very quiet. Over the summer, some dump trucks and equipment came and went, and we didn’t think much of it. But lo and behold, first day of school our whole street was bumper-to-bumper cars at 7:30AM. The heck?

    They had installed a gate at the end of our road, and a new driveway entrance, and now the cars line up right in front of our house twice a day, where they have never lined up before. The county never so much as mentioned it to us, and they did not install any speed limit signs or speed bumps to make it an official enforceable school zone, so the late parents come zooming down our residential 25mph street going 45. Some of the parents get frustrated with the wait, park on my and my neighbors’ front yards, and walk the kids down the last three house-lengths.

    Coincidentally, I’ve been checking on the legality of liberating air from tires, if the vehicle is in my yard, and contemplating the ethics of caltrops.

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    1. kharking Avatar
      kharking

      The houses across the street from our local neighborhood school have large rocks lining the edges of their lawns. Probably cheaper than lawsuits or fences?

      Municipal carelessness is legendary. Is it likely that it will turn into a marked school zone at some point with enough pressure?

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      1. methylethyl Avatar
        methylethyl

        I am trying to work out which governing body/bodies I need to contact, to get the appropriate signage installed.

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  4. Demotrash Avatar
    Demotrash

    I’m glad you can enjoy it, the whole setup always seemed hellish to me. I almost always took the bus though, so it didn’t affect me.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      You’ve never been in the car with me, though. I’m lots of fun. :-))))

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  5. Post Alley Crackpot Avatar
    Post Alley Crackpot

    “It’s crazy-making and deeply inefficient.”

    Canada in 2003 called, they want their misplaced Canadian writer of smug treatises on the cult of inefficiency back. 🙂

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  6. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    “Car line”????

    I’m trying to figure out why this is a name and what the problem is… is this a general symptom of the stranger-danger panic in American culture in the 1980s?
    Something related to covid policies?
    General rising crime?
    General School Marm culture?
    I remember going to school (elementary and then jr and sr high school buildings were next to each other) was a kind of free-for-all both arriving and departing.
    My mother, was working on a newspaper when I was in elementary school and she was alarmed enough to write articles about how dangerous it was for kids (from 6 to 16) to be walking on the same narrow two-lane road as cars were using and eventually a sidewalk got put in…
    But I dont’ remember any issue about cars waiting in line (I especially don’t remember any protocols about being picked up, school ended you went to get on a bus or walked or biked and that was that).

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      At pickup, you park in the school parking lot. You hang a sign with your kid’s last name and grade in the front window of the car. The school principal walks among the cars. He goes to the first row and reads out the name of the first student into his walkie-talkie. Then somebody inside the school says it on the loudspeaker. The kid is located and delivered to the door of the school. The parent in the meantime is motioned to drive up to the entrance.

      That’s the procedure. Klara went to school during COVID, so I don’t know how it was before.

      If she went to the public school, she could walk. But this one is not a walkable distance.

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      1. Clarissa Avatar
        Clarissa

        I forgot to say that the whole process takes about 30 minutes from the time you get to the lot and when the kid gets deposited into the car.

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      2. cliff arroyo Avatar
        cliff arroyo

        ” reads out the name of the first student into his walkie-talkie”

        Sounds… insane…..

        I remember when in-person classes began again in 2021 and the university announced a bunch of unworkable and certifiably bonkers protocols for getting in the building…
        My first class was the second day of classes and it all but completely broken down because students were missing class while going through the previously announced system…..
        By the second week it was completely gone….

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    2. methylethyl Avatar
      methylethyl

      We come from a simpler time.

      Lots more parents drive their own kids to school, and pick them up from school, than when we were kids. Part of it’s stranger-danger paranoia, part of it is interminable bus routes (I have seen buses in my neighborhood dropping kids off just before 5pm. They must’ve been over an hour on the bus!), and part of it is a school choice thing, I think? Like, I believe parents here, if they are not happy with the nearest school, can choose to take their kids to a different one further away, as long as they can be responsible for transport. This of course contributes mightily to the car line. For pickup at least, most schools now have some kind of security to make sure kids are being picked up by authorized adults (I’ve heard that often what this amounts to is more adults supervising the pickup, and everybody having to wait their turn, no melees).

      This is sort of justified. Stranger kidnappings are still exceedingly rare (and apparently less common now than they were in the 70s and 80s), but non-custodial parent kidnappings are, I think, on the rise and there’s hardly a school out there that hasn’t had to face down at least an attempt at it.

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    3. paranoid Avatar
      paranoid

      Clarissa describes one version of it below, which sounds downright civilised, compared to the versions I’ve seen. In some versions, it’s like a fast food drive through. The cars pull up a semicircle driveway and, one by one, kids are allowed to enter the car when a kid’s parent or authorized adult pulls up to the spot by the door. None of the parents are allowed to park in the school lot. If someone slows the line by pulling out a phone and getting distracted, there can be honking or yelling for the slowdown.
      The slow process is partly because of stranger danger worries and partly because of the danger from cars in the car line making parents nervous about letting kids walk to school.

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      1. Clarissa Avatar
        Clarissa

        Where I live, people wouldn’t honk to save their lives. Everybody constantly wriggles in extreme politeness.

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  7. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    “more parents drive their own kids to school, and pick them up from school, than when we were kids”

    My mother drove us to school more often than not. Technically we were too close to school to qualify but there was the Tamiami Trail between us. But the house wasn’t organized well enough to get us both out the door in time to walk to the stop (between a 5 and 10 minute walk) so she’d throw on a bathrobe and drove us with a cup of coffee on the dashboard…
    Getting home was another story. Sometime around 5th grade I decided I didn’t like the bus and stopped taking it either walking home (crossing the dreaded highway 41 on my own) or sometimes walking the other direction to hang out at the shopping center or loiter around until a parent working close by would be going homeward.

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    1. methylethyl Avatar
      methylethyl

      Yeah, my one token year in public school, I did not go to the school that was conveniently 1 block from our house. I went to the one my mom taught at– across town, but I rode to work with her. In addition, though, I did summer-school voluntarily in HS (I was trying to graduate in 3yrs– almost made it), and due to some church politics I spent a partial year at the public middle school– for those I rode the bus. It was fairly efficient for middle, but the summer term had a reduced number of drivers, it took an eternity to get home because I was the last stop (the driver would actually drop me off at my house), and by then I was dreadfully carsick. I finally figured out who else I knew in summerschool, and started giving him gas money in exchange for a ride home. When that didn’t work out, I’d walk from the school about six blocks to my Dad’s shop instead. The bus was too horrible– even worse than walking six blocks downtown in August in Florida.

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    2. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Klara greeted the idea of a school bus with such a scandalized look that I immediately figured out it’s a no-go. 🙂

      This is a kid who doesn’t do group anything. She’s shocked at the idea of team sports, too.

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      1. methylethyl Avatar
        methylethyl

        “She’s shocked at the idea of team sports, too.”

        My kind of kid. I suffered through three disastrous ballet recitals and a whole year of soccer where we lost every single game. Even my mother was so demoralized after that, that we never tried it again.

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  8. Post Alley Crackpot Avatar
    Post Alley Crackpot

    “You hang a sign with your kid’s last name and grade in the front window of the car. The school principal walks among the cars. He goes to the first row and reads out the name of the first student into his walkie-talkie. Then somebody inside the school says it on the loudspeaker. The kid is located and delivered to the door of the school. The parent in the meantime is motioned to drive up to the entrance.”

    How bizarre!

    As kids we had the highly efficient method of swarming the parking lot, each of us knowing what our parents would drive to the school.

    For me early on it was a certain off-colour Ford Cortina and then in America a similar Mercury Comet until it died because of mechanical neglect and rust.

    But what if I’d picked the wrong one?

    Oh, there were plenty of adults who simply wanted to pick up their own children without being inconvenienced by someone else’s.

    “Have you seen the young Crackpot? How did he get so tall at such a young age? It’s like he eats a ton of food per day!”

    Nobody wanted that kind of inconvenience to the wallet other than my own family. 🙂

    This kind of security theatre you’ve described is absolutely bizarre.

    But then again, I was making my own way without needing an escort on international flights by the time I was eight.

    Navigating a parking lot? Well, that was just building good survival instincts.

    Every kid where I lived had managed to avoid a few potential kidnapping attempts by the time they were teenagers anyway.

    And, of course, there were those infamous stories about the sketchy ice cream truck people.

    Those guys were fine, even if a lot of them were former criminals, and they at least told good jokes for kids. Often they’d gone through some crap as kids and were looking out for the kinds of bad people you wanted to stay away from.

    It was the pervy police that you had to look out for.

    BTW, to car collectors: no, just no, you cannot appreciate the rust and horrible systems work you’ll need to do just to get one into top shape, and no matter how much you value Jeremy Clarkson’s wistful thoughts on these, that doesn’t excuse reality.

    Especially the 1970s models, those are largely not loveable because of the cheapness that had been extruded into them.

    V8s with automatic transmissions though, so there’s that. 🙂

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    1. methylethyl Avatar
      methylethyl

      My mom drove a 70s-model slant-6 Dodge station wagon. It was the most uncool thing in the parking lot. 10mpg but would probably win a demolition derby.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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