I remember, as a kid, reading a science fiction story about a future in which working adults are forced to buy, use, wear out, and replace enormous amounts of material goods, their lives an exhausting cycle of consumption imposed on them by the government in order to keep the nation’s economic engine going.\u00a0 Older people, at least those who are considered successful and prosperous, live in log cabins in the woods.\u00a0 They lead simple lives, free of the requirement to consume.<\/p>\n
How true it turned out to be.\u00a0 These days, Donna and I dream of downsizing to one car.\u00a0 I’m retired and she works only three days a week outside the home, so do we really still need two?\u00a0 I have two bicycles, and a motorcycle come to that.\u00a0 Isn’t that plenty?<\/p>\n
We just had our skimpiest gift exchange ever, and yet it was one of our best Christmases.\u00a0 We have pretty much everything we need and no longer feel any pressure to buy stuff.\u00a0 Since we’re older, our idea of a good time is curling up with a good book.\u00a0 Life is simpler now, less consumption-driven, certainly cheaper than it used to be.\u00a0 We don’t envy our younger, hard-working, success-striving friends; on the contrary, they envy us . . . so we like to think, anyway.<\/p>\n
That’s how it was with my father once he got older, and thus it is becoming with me.\u00a0 I always resisted becoming my father, because, well, that is what sons do . . . but it’s happening anyway, so I may as well embrace it.<\/p>\n
Now to the point of this post: giving up air travel.<\/p>\n
By now everyone knows the TSA is implementing additional passenger restrictions<\/a> in reaction to the latest incident of attempted terrorism<\/a>.\u00a0 Flying’s been a miserable experience since 9\/11; it’s about to become more so.\u00a0 At what point does one say, “Fuck it, if I can’t get there by car I ain’t going”?\u00a0 Because I think I’m there.<\/p>\n My father gave up flying when the TSA started making everyone take their shoes off.\u00a0 Whenever we flew to Missouri to visit him, he’d make jokes at our expense about bare-footed sheep being herded through gates and fences.\u00a0 We kids would bite our tongues \u2014 after all, he’d have been a much lonelier man if the rest of us hadn’t been willing to jump through TSA hoops in order to come see him \u2014 but at the same time we envied him.<\/p>\n And now here I am, ready to follow my father’s lead.\u00a0 Do I have the courage to do it?\u00a0 Am I really prepared to write off trips to the East Coast, to Hawaii, to Canada, to Europe?\u00a0 Am I prepared to restrict the radius of my travel to an automotive scale?<\/p>\n Well, let’s see . . . our children live in Las Vegas, an easy day trip by car.\u00a0\u00a0 The places we talk about visiting, when we talk about traveling at all, are in neighboring states.\u00a0 We drove to Winter Park in Colorado earlier this year and had a great time on the road.\u00a0 Most of Donna’s relatives are in California, and if I have to go see my surviving relatives in Missouri again, that too is doable by car.<\/p>\n