"Carpooling"

I'm trying to set up a carpool for school. The family we carpooled with last year moved, which is probably for the best, but it left me carpool-less for this year. So earlier this week, I did what any enterprising wannabe carpooler would do--I went through the school directory and wrote down the name and address of every kid who lives in our neighborhood. There's not a ton of them, since most of our neighbors are retired university professors, their children long grown and gone. But there are some. I went to the school's online parent directory and found e-mail addresses, and then I e-mailed the neighborhood parents of Our Fine School.

The only parent I actually knew, a sane and funny woman, replied that she didn't want to carpool, as mornings are a good bonding time for her and her daughter. Rats! One woman replied that she would love to carpool, but she could only drive in the afternoons. Two other women replied that they were interested in carpooling, but since their kids are in aftercare, they only wanted to drive in the morning.

Sigh. Within twenty-four hours, the logistics were already strangling me.

There are two families I haven't heard back from. Maybe they're out of town, or maybe they're too smart to get tangled up in carpool dynamics. Because last night I got an e-mail from one of the "Morning Only" drivers saying, oh, by the by, she's going to have surgery in the fall and won't be able to drive for three weeks, but hopefully someone else wouldn't mind driving and she'll make it up to us later.

Then I got an e-mail from the other MO driver. She's not actually committed to the idea of carpooling (she keeps writing carpooling in quotes, as if what we trying to organize isn't actually a carpool, but a fascimile of a carpool or a so-called carpool), and even if she does commit, sometimes she travels for work and leaves her car at the airport, and her husband drives a two-seater ...

And suddenly it strikes me: They're the family on Forrest Street with the invisible fence in the front yard and an obnoxious Irish Setter, the family that never smiles when they pass you on the street. I should have known.

Last night, when I tell the Man about my carpool planning woes, he starts going on in a manlike way about how it would really be simpler not to carpool, and I get really mad at him, but later it occurs to me that he might be right.

So I've just e-mailed the carpool group. It was a "let's make sure we're on the same page" e-mail, with a veiled agenda of getting the Obnoxious Irish Setter neighbor to drop out of the negotiations. I can deal with Afternoon Only Lady and I can deal with Can't Drive for Three Weeks Lady, but I have a feeling "carpooling" with Obnoxious Irish Setter Lady may be more than I can handle.

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An update on my mom: She had bone marrow extracted on Tuesday, a process made if not pleasant, then bearable, by the presences of morphine in her bloodstream. She also hat a CAT scan, which came out clear. Her doctor still thinks her cancer is at stage zero, but she'll know more on Tuesday. Thanks for all your prayers and good wishes. Keep 'em coming!