But I’ve never forgotten her story, and for years I’ve wondered what such a trip would be like. Mom is 75 now, and her memory isn’t great.
“I grew up in Hawthorne,” a working-class town near LAX, she’d remind us, “and when we went to Redlands, we had to go via Imperial Highway and other surface streets.” In her telling, the trip took three hours. She’d respond to our complaints with the Southern California version of “when I was your age, I had to walk six miles through the snow.” “You’re lucky to have freeways-when I was a kid, we didn’t have freeways,” she used to say.īut that didn’t stop my brother and me from whining about congestion on the 10 during long drives to see her relatives in Redlands. Don’t ever complain about freeway traffic, especially around my mother.
