Your Next Marital Update in Six Minutes . . .

One Friday evening we were headed across town in the loosest sense--from Glendale to Los Feliz. Not exactly a perilous journey, and yet there was my husband, switching on the radio and blurring through the stations in a frantic search for a traffic report.

“Why are we listening to this?” I asked over the rapid-fire recitation of overturned vehicles and two-car collisions, of slowdowns and gridlocks, of looky-loos and exit closings and SigAlerts in Pomona and Claremont and West Hollywood. The lullaby of L.A.

“I want to hear how the 5 is moving.”

“But we’re not taking the 5.”

“We’re going over it.”

“Yes, but we’re not walking over it.” And so the conversation teetered, interrupted only by the traffic report’s climactic conclusion: “Aaaaand on the 5, stop and go from El Toro to downtown, where it is simply stop and stop.”

“Ha!” said my husband, his eyes gleaming in triumph. “You hear that? A half hour, I’m telling you, a half hour to go three miles. Ha!”

My husband is, by nature, a gentle man. He gives dollar bills to panhandlers. He picks up really disgusting pieces of litter that we didn’t even drop. He does not, as a rule, delight in the misfortune of others. But my husband is also a former commuter. For more than a year, he drove from Glendale to Costa Mesa, which involved four freeways, carpooling, precision use of commuter lanes and unrepressed anger.

The commute became a living entity, its daily tics and twitches discussed every evening as if it were a beloved relative battling some chronic illness. Sure, we celebrated the good days--”40 minutes! Never had to hit the brakes! From now on, I’m only working on holidays”--but overall, it was a terminal case. There were tickets, there was a minor accident, but mostly there was the mind-numbing, relationship-grating, dinner-ruining tedium of routine traffic complaints. The high cost of commuting is not paid at the gas pump, it’s paid in the dining room. And the living room. And the hallway.

When another job was procured, chosen mainly for its proximity to our house, I thought we were free. Never more would the condition of the 5 and all its psychotic offspring--the 605, 105 and 405--eat into our familial peace.

But my husband cannot let go. He needs to hear the plight of the self he once was, mired in miles of brake lights and lane changers, seeking solace in rap or rock or books on tape or good old road rage, all while he darts down unclogged surface streets accomplishing in minutes what once took hours.

Like a woman narrating her hours in labor, or a real estate speculator recounting the black days of the mid-’90s, he needs to remember that time when he was a warrior, when he met the opponent he could not conquer, when he was happy just to survive.

So he could watch the other poor saps give it their best shot.