AUTO-IMMUNE

I was glad to leave the driving to him.

My name is Lisa, and I don't drive.

There's no 12-step program for it, but I might as well confess myself an alcoholic or a junkie.

It's especially weird for someone born in Southern California, and raised in outer Los Angeles, Freeway Capitol of the Known World. Remember the movie L.A. Story, with Steve Martin? Off to visit a neighbor, Martin's character jumps in his car at the curb in front of his house, and drives 12 feet to park in front of the house next door.

That's what it was like. Angelino babies are born with a silver set of car keys clutched in their tiny fists.

Except for me. Even in the throbbing heart of America's most turbo-charged car culture, I was resolutely auto-immune.

To be absolutely clear, it's not that I can't drive. I am in possession of a valid driver's license. I've aced every written driving exam I've ever taken, and passed my first (and only) test behind the wheel on the first try. (Okay, I only scored a 73, but it was a pass!)

It's just that, like Bartleby the Scrivener, I prefer not to.

Delhi: With and Without cars (Getty Images)

(Random English Lit Alert: Is Literature still taught in schools? Let alone Melville. Google it, kids.)

Well, that was true for most of the last 40 years, anyway, when Art Boy took over the household driving chores in his Art Boymobile. He was not a car guy. (He killed his very first car, a Camaro he bought from his older brother, because he didn't know he had to put oil in it.) He didn't love driving any more than I did, but it was one of the things he did more competently than me, so I was glad to let him.

I got to ride shotgun, and say "Home, James!"

In recent years, however, I've developed a much more compelling, even insurmountable excuse that has nothing to do with preference. One of the many disadvantages to MS, at least in my case, is the declining ability to lift my right foot. Whenever I'm extra tired and have to use a walker to get around, I drag my right foot like Quasimodo.

When people don't understand the connection between MS and driving ability, I say, "Have you seen me walk?"

My MS buddies in yoga class have the same right-side affliction, but they've been driving consistently all their lives, so they've learned to compensate for it behind the wheel. But after my late-inning diagnosis (I was 62), if I tried to drive the way I used to — with the right foot shifting between gas and brake —it was my foot, not the gears, that got stuck in neutral.

In an emergency, I don't want to be that dodderer who can't get her foot on the appropriate pedal in that crucial nanosecond, and ends up rear-ending someone, or plowing through a bunch of pedestrians on the sidewalk. Talk about a weapon of mass destruction.

So, instead, I've been leeching shamelessly off my friends for rides to the movies, or the market. (I'm surprisingly fine grocery shopping, as long as I have a cart to hold on to.) But now that movie theaters are closed and we're sheltering in place, like, forever, I have to depend on my village to do my shopping for me, and deliver the goods to my porch. I pay for my own stuff, of course, and I usually try to bribe, er, I mean tip my designated drivers/shoppers with home-baked cookies and cinnamon apple crumb cake.

Meanwhile, I try to delude myself that my not driving is good for the environment. We've all seen those photos of places like Delhi, before and after the coronavirus lockdown removed a majority of cars from the road. Not only is the sky suddenly visible at all, it's blue! In my old SoCal stomping grounds, you can see the San Gabriel Mountains rising above the L. A. basin from the beach!

That's my contribution to the fight against climate change, I think smugly: one less vehicle on the road. You're welcome.

But then, reality, that old killjoy, reminds me that somebody is burning fossil fuels to get me my groceries, even if it's not me. Until they start shipping my stuff via transporter beam, I can't pretend that my aberrant car-free lifestyle is in any way a virtue.

In the meantime, just call me the Leech Woman.