Memorable moments from the carpool lane

Illustrations by Esti Saposh

Fistfights over door seats. An unexpected kumzitz. If you don’t stop throwing things, I’m pulling this car over! Uncle Moishy becoming Kivi and Tuki becoming Benny Friedman. Sorry you were in front of our house honking for ten minutes, I overslept again. A play-by-play description of the school day. A bitter fight over the superiority of cats or dogs. You mean you didn’t want me to buy your daughter a Slurpee on the way back from school?

Carpool is a convenience. A nightmare. A way of life. A good carpool functions so smoothly you almost forget it’s there; a challenging carpool is a yearlong stressor. My older son’s Sunday carpool is a dream, full of responsible and responsive parents. In the car with their sons, I’ve watched tiny first graders grow into themselves, develop personalities and opinions and rapport, and don black hats and davening jackets one by one. My younger son’s Sunday carpool? Well, we’ve lost three boys, gained one, and its future is bleak — and we’ve only made it through first grade!

It’s a comfortable relationship that we develop with those kids in our car, and it’s rarely free of drama. But whether your carpool experiences are blissful or bonkers, there’s plenty we take away from our hours spent cruising the neighborhood with chattering kids in the backseat.

Devorah Talia Gordon found a chavrusa.

I didn’t want to be in a carpool; I wanted those seven minutes alone with him. But there wasn’t much to schmooze about since we were tired and my son, being of the male persuasion, wasn’t so schmoozy. We both liked to learn, so we began learning Rav Yitzchak’s Berkowitz’s sefer, The Six Constant Mitzvos. He read, I drove, and over the course of that year we finished the entire sefer.

At that time, I didn’t know that it would be my last year driving him — the next year he switched to a yeshivah on the East Coast and has been learning there ever since. But we had that ninth-grade year to learn, to discuss the concepts of the constant mitzvos, and most importantly, to bond through Torah learning. In fact, during tenth grade we maintained a weekly chavrusa (Rav Schwab on Prayer).