Commute

February 1990.

This was the point in our lives where everything went crazy, at the time I was writing in my diary how there was never any time to do anything. It was still winter and the roads in Southern Ontario were absolutely awful at times and for the pair of us, we both had massive commutes to work.

The routine of a "normal" day saw me dragging myself out of bed at around 5.15am, of course it was pitch black and usually the car had to be scraped of ice or snow. While I was doing that the mustang would be running to warm it up slightly, I would maybe boil a kettle and have a quick drink, but most of the time I would clear the car off, jump in and fly off down to Highway 401.

If you had lived in Ontario in the last quarter of a century and mentioned the "four-oh-one" people would roll their eyes and recount horror stories of terrible commutes, well, in our infinite combined wisdom we elected to both commute to far off places, and both those commutes involved a significant stretch of Highway 401.

I was driving to Oakville, a hundred kilometers one way journey, Karen was driving to Don Mills near Toronto, about sixty-five kilometers, however, her commute was probably worse than mine as she had to contend with highway 404, the infamous Don Valley Parkway.

A two car family now, I with my (un)trusty Ford Mustang, usually loaded with a couple of bags of play sand in the trunk to retain some sort of stability in the ice and snow, and Karen was the owner of a new yet slightly unstable Ford Festiva, a little red biscuit-tin of a car that was about as safe on the road as a moped.

So, everything was crazy, long days working and on the road, terrible commutes compounded by "other people" causing accidents on the highways, impressive snowfalls and just plain old volume of traffic.

The one silver lining in all of this was that I was regaining my interest in music, for an hour in the morning, an hour or more at night, I was able to enjoy "sitting down" and listening to music. Even though I was driving at the time, the music sessions in the car became an oasis of sanity in the craziness of it all.