Parallel driving

I took a drive with my parents recently. At some point during the ride, it dawned on me that there were a couple parallels between my current experience of mundane car travel and the vehicular experience presented in the film "The Last Clean Shirt". For one, I noticed that my father didn't seem too interested in what my mother had to say. Although he didn't turn on the radio as a way to shut her prattling out, he did revert to his automatic, semi-nonverbal response system of head-nodding and the occasional affirmative grunt. That's not to say, however, that my father didn't value my mother's company. He just wasn't captivated the way she so often is by certain scenic items, such as falling leaves, cloud shapes, and color schemes. The second parallel between mine and the film's car ride was the number of quick stops that were made during the drive. I've always found my mother's insistence at being driven - indeed chauffered - from store to store, and often when the locations are within brief walking distance of one another, somewhat nonsensical. Yet it's become an unspoken rule of automotive errand-running in my family. Sometimes I wonder if all that petty mobility is an effort, on her part, to rev up - if you'll excuse the pun - the fleeting immediacy of life outside the home. My mother is, after all, a product of the homemaker era. I don't think she even learned how to drive until after she became a mother herself.