The second worry comes with breakfast daily. Who is to use the car during the day? The day being balmy, I had thought of going to town in it, especially as I wanted to make a call on the way home. My wife, it seems, had planned to go to the dressmaker. I should have guessed it. Billy, who has just arrived at the legal age which foolishly permits youth to endanger the lives and liberty of American citizens, had planned to take a number of his cronies to St. Mark’s School to see a ball game. Billy, as can be readily imagined, wins out.
This daily observance takes the entire breakfast period and often leads to slight feeling. I say slight because I rarely ever secure the car myself unless it needs repairing.
The last worry may perhaps be more likened to fear. “What next?” I generally remark—for this third division concerns our friends. In that happy decade, now but a dream, we used to live in a delightful community, surrounded by friends who dropped in and then dropped out again, both happy incidents in our daily life. But now, who has time to see his neighbors when every one is frantically motoring to some distant acquaintance miles away? What can you do when some friend at the end of nowhere invites you to dinner because she knows you have a motor? You go because your wife explains that this sort of thing is what a motor is for.
Is this not a matter for worry?—to work in an office until five; to journey home with the knowledge that in exactly thirty minutes you start out, in a car which needs oiling and when one of the tires should have more air, for a distant suburb, where you are to meet a number of people you do not know and never care to see again. That this sort of thing is going to increase just as long as you have a pesky car is more than a cause for worry. It is a calamity.
In a trice all this vanished, for I sold my car. I remember hearing the story of a Southerner whose property was taken from him during the Civil War and who later was robbed of all the money on his person. He confessed to a feeling of intense joy and relief, for with his loss of property went his feeling of responsibility, and care-free he entered the army and fought a gallant fight.
And so upon that day I walked with elastic tread, head up, chest out, delighting in the discovery of freedom. I care not that my friends all possess cars. I’ve had one—several in fact—and I can afford to buy others, but I am not going to. That is, not yet (and here I remember my family, somewhat dubiously). I plan to renew the pleasures of daily rambles over the beautiful hills of my own town. I plan to renew old friendships with my neighbors near by. I look forward to an occasional Sunday at home. In short, I picture the joy of being without a motor.
As a matter of fact, however, this vision was short-lived. In the first place, the ramble over the old familiar hills made me so beastly lame that my Sunday at home was a painful one, and the day was punctuated by the complaints of each and every member of the family over the loss of the car. I ventured out, still painfully, to call upon one or two of my old neighbors, just for a run in and out again, but they, it seemed, were out in their motors, and so I returned dejectedly to the sad-faced group in my own living-room, where we managed to exist until bedtime, conversing upon our prospective move to the Cape, and what it meant to the various members of the family to be—as my daughter puts it—a million miles away from every one with no means of ever leaving the house. And so it was the Cape and its appeal which broke my defenses, for I must confess our seasonal trips there were a delightful part of our existence, to say nothing of the joys of our summer life.
The next day I took an early train to town, and I came home that evening somewhat sheepish, but reasonably happy, for I came in a new car, which bids fair to be the best one yet; it is certainly the most expensive.
