The Amenities of the Neighborhood

Living in a city neighborhood like mine there are certain amenities.

When the car's brakes began to make a curious rubbing noise a day or two ago, it was time to bring it into the shop. Mrs. Spacetropic was busy at the estate, so I decided to drop off the car after work yesterday, and walk the few blocks home. Since we'd be needing the baby stroller, I removed that from the vehicle at the repair shop and pushed it along with my laptop bag where the baby would otherwise be.

It did occur to me that I looked kinda nuts, to passing cars or fellow pedestrians. But nature has a way of signaling "stay away from the insane creature", and I'm at the age where I care less and less what others think. (Likewise, I may choose to wear lime green pants in my advanced years. That's my prerogative.)

But the amenities are twofold. First, the repair shop is one of those rarest of blessings on Earth, a bunch of honest auto mechanics who charge a fair price. Repairs are regularly about half to one-third of what I would expect at a franchise garage, and conversely, if they ever told me it would take $1200 to fix the neutron discombobulator on the family sedan - I would trust explicitly that every dollar for parts and labor was correct and fair.

(I'm deliberately not giving out their name. And they hardly need more business.)

Second, I walked the kids to school, pushing the baby in the aforementioned stroller along on this late-May morning, seeing a few neighbors. It's a small thing really, and there are plenty of ways to live, but I'm not sure how the past 24 hours would have been managed if I lived in a subdevelopment in the exurban tundra, where a vehicle and cheap gasoline is required for every transaction and contingency.