Whom Do the School Car Pool Rules Benefit

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So who are those school car pool rules made for anyhow? When my children attended elementary school, I dutifully read through the list of guidelines for ‘parent pickup’—that snaking line of idling cars lining up each afternoon before dismissal to gather their offspring. Arriving occasionally to pick up one child or the other, I was appreciative of the teacher monitors keeping an eye on the kids and opening and closing the car doors. Naively, I thought that all of those guidelines and the monitors were meant to control the exuberance of the students after dismissal and keep them well behaved and waiting patiently before hopping into the minivans, suburbans and the occasional sedan. Well once I was introduced to the middle school car pool line I found out the truth. Those rules had nothing to do with keeping the kids in line; they had everything to do with keeping the parents in line.

The middle school car pool line is a regular free for all approach to dropping of and picking up students. You would think that most drivers, having come up through the ranks of elementary school parent pick-up lines, would be conditioned to follow some basic guidelines. But apparently this new found freedom is too much of an enticement to create one’s own plan. Like the pioneers establishing their own governance, middle school parents create their own rules in the pick-up line. Our line has the added benefit of being a closed loop with exiting cars frequently choosing to cross over entering traffic. This novel system frequently produces gridlock with all of the cars held up from exiting the loop.

Here are several commonly followed practices you can try that are sure to invoke gridlock each afternoon in the carpool line (while of course simultaneously raising my blood pressure as I watch in disbelief at the absurdity of some of the drivers).

• Do not move forward to fill all available space. Instead stop directly next to your child who certainly wouldn’t want to walk 40 feet to the car.
• After loading passengers, be sure to rearrange the entire contents of your car before moving forward out of the line.
• Talk on your cell phone in line becoming completely distracted and don’t even bother moving forward with the line of cars.
• Simply avoid going in the line in the first place. Your child is clearly more important than any other student and your time is more valuable than all of the other parents’ in line. Pull around all of the other cars, and proceed to impede all traffic flow while your child saunters over to the car.

And these are only a few of the myriad of the approaches to creating gridlock that have indeed been attempted, often successfully, by middle school car pool drivers. Perhaps we need an extra year or two in the elementary car pool lane.

Trunk Day

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Apart from the dull green of the unbending evergreens, the whole world appears monochromatic. Shades of grey along the hills are sandwiched between the dull white of the snow and the grey-white of the low hanging clouds. Wisps of clouds like melted cheese ooze through the hills obscuring where the hills end and the sky begins.

Yet despite the dim day, the smiles couldn’t be bigger in my hallway. For today is the day the trunks come out! One of the wonders of camp is the connection to place that is quickly brought to life when the latch of the trunk is opened and the lid is lifted to reveal the memories of a summer past and the possibilities of a summer future.

As my daughters pore through the contents of their trunks, packed away since last August, there is a constant patter of “I’d forgotten about this,.” or “okay, does this still work?” and “let’s see, I have my can of pencils, some need sharpening.”

As a parent, I was most concerned with whether last year’s uniform would still fit and whether we’d need to purchase any new shirts or shorts. Apparently that was not even on their check list. For when I asked how their shirts fit, I heard quizzically, “I’m not trying anything on.” Somehow my daughters’ goals for getting their trunks ready for camp are not in the same plane as my goals. Truly, does it really matter if their sweatshirt sleeves no longer come down to their wrists or if their shirts have a few holes and paint stains—hey shirts are even better that way!

Then eventually, “So now do I need to put everything back in?” I always wonder at queries like this. Are they meant to be rhetorical or does a 10 year old truly believe that having the contents of her trunk strewn across the hallway is the optimal way to leave things before heading on to her next activity?

It's The Feeling Not the Food

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While the Israelites may have fled with unleavened bread to hasten their departure, finding Matzos these days requires significant preplanning. I would have thought that by now I’d know how much Matzo our household would consume during Passover and be prepared by buying it all in advance. But no, I remain a just-in-time shopper, and consequently we are down to our last morsel of Matzo with Passover not even half over. Scouring the shelves of two different supermarket chains brought no signs of unleavened bread beyond the bagger at the check out commenting that ‘the stock was looking pretty low yesterday so we’re probably all out by now.”

Oh well, if our menu doesn’t provide sufficient reminders of the Exodus, then perhaps I can recreate the feeling of the Exodus with my last minute preparations. While my mother-in-law is the consummate prepared hostess, my food planning is consistently last minute. So when I still hadn’t made the brisket the morning of Passover, even though my mother-in-law's recipe clearly recommends making it the night before in order to simplify dinner preparations, my walking partner suggested instead that I could recreate the mood of the Israelites grabbing what provisions they could as they headed out in haste. I mean really, were any of them writing up their shopping lists days in advance in order to allow their meat to rest overnight for optimum taste? This sounded like just the plan I needed to make my Passover dinner work.

You see, I have only hosted a handful of Passover dinners, and just as the first three Christmas trees my husband set up in the early years of our marriage crashed to the floor in the middle of the night, my Passover meals have been somewhat less than traditional. For instance, the first Passover I hosted, I drew upon the traditional Thanksgiving dinners I had grown up with, for in essence, Passover is both a remembrance and a giving of thanks. So I dutifully made every recipe listed in my Passover book, set the seder plate, and then, before calling everyone to the table, set the table with the steaming how dishes of brisket and kugel and beans—thankfully I at least knew enough to not make biscuits. Not only did the food all grow cold while we read through the Haggadah, but we could hardly hear one another over the growling of our stomachs as the aromas curled around our empty plates and our eyes drank in the feast set before us.

Several years later as I was shopping for Matzos, I found the end cap at the grocery stocked full with Manischewitz Matzos. Upon closer review, I noticed that every box had a large orange ‘unsalted’ banner plastered across the front. Was this what I was supposed to buy? Would everyone notice and wonder why I hadn’t tailed a Jewish shopper around the store to find the regular Matzos for those in the know? Confused, but not heading home without Matzos, I put a box in my cart. My husband found my confusion amusing, “They never have salt,” he told me, “must just be a new marketing tactic for health conscious consumers.”

So next year I’ll know not to put the serving dishes on the table when we sit down, that all matzos are unsalted and that I need to purchase all the matzos I’ll need well before Passover. I wonder what new lesson will come my way.