Moments of Truth May Come Between Stoplights

I love people who don’t live in L.A. They always ask the greatest questions, questions that invariably involve celebrity sightings, traffic jams and violent crime. Sometimes I think that people who don’t live in L.A. envision this city as a sort of “Hollywood Squares” on wheels. With guns.

Recently, a very engaging pair of New Zealand documentarians asked me a bunch of questions about driving in Los Angeles for a film they were doing. They wanted to know, one of them explained, “what it’s like to spend most of your life stuck in traffic.”

Now, there have been times when, burning slowly in the glare of a thousand brake lights, I may have sighed melodramatically and thought: “My God, I have spent most of my life stuck in traffic.” On the other hand, just last week, after a story I had been working on disappeared from my computer screen for the third inexplicable time, I actually said aloud: “I have spent most of my life on the phone to Systems.”

But I don’t imagine anyone wants to make a documentary about that.

The point is that even Angelenos, even Angelenos with really nasty, cross-county commutes, do not spend most of their lives in traffic. I rarely spend more than an hour a day on the road. When I lived in New York, I spent much more time stuck on the subway, and that was underground, surrounded by strangers who occasionally tried to grope me. In the small town I was raised in, it took at least 15 minutes to get from my house to a store, an hour to get to a mall.

I told the nice New Zealander this, and I could see, through his winning documentarian smile, that he didn’t believe me.

Furthermore, I said, it’s not like the time you spend in the car is useless time; I often find the time spent in traffic to be relaxing, even spiritually beneficial.

Really, he said. Can you give me an example?

Of course I couldn’t; I was driving at the time, with a camera pointed at me, so I was also holding in my stomach and worrying about my hair and trying to make my cheekbones flare, which turns out to be impossible. With all that going on, I couldn’t remember any details of my life, much less a pertinent, poignant epiphany that occurred while driving.

As soon as the filmmakers were gone, of course, I remembered lots. I remembered driving home once after a happy hour and not even noticing a good-size earthquake, which made me wonder if maybe it was time I stopped drinking (it was, almost). I remember a trip to the emergency room--while trying to will my body to stop miscarrying a pregnancy, I watched the city flash by unchanged by my plight, and I realized the world did not revolve around me, not even a little. I remember driving through a long, end-of-vacation darkness, listening to my husband breathe, and accepting how much of love takes place in silence.

Why, just the other day, I had a dandy one on the way home from getting my children’s hair cut. We had gone to the Yellow Balloon in North Hollywood, and the two of them had been as good as gold, and so each had been presented with a fistful of lollipops and a big yellow balloon. We had just gotten on the 134 when Fiona began howling, desperate, enraged. I turned around, and this is what I saw: A pretty little girl with a yellow balloon in one hand and two lollipops in the other, screaming because she had dropped a third lollipop on the floor and she couldn’t reach it.

It’s not like she had lost that third lollipop, it’s not like her brother had eaten it or thrown it out the window. She just wanted everything she could have right now, and she was not going to be happy until she had it.

I laughed out loud because I cannot count how many times I have felt exactly like that, how many times I have cried for that thing I could not quite reach, even though my hands were full of balloons and candy. Even though I knew I would get it eventually if I just had a little faith, a little patience.

What’s it like spending your entire life stuck in traffic? What’s it like spending your entire life stuck in life?