Word: minivans
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...last weekend in August, my two young daughters and I will pack our suburban minivan with 2 1/2 gal. of water per person per day and head off to northern Nevada. There, in thousands of square miles of pure desert nothingness, 20,000 cheering, dancing celebrants will circle a towering, two-legged wooden sculpture and burn it to the ground...
...build it, they will come--and they have. The population of Burning Man doubles every year. Last year it was just shy of 10,000. Its cheery inventiveness pulls in mid-40-year-olds like me, who load up the family minivan and find a spot--any spot!--in the vastness to camp and cavort...
Andrew Ferguson's musings, in "Me Tarzan, You Minivan," that men like sport-utility vehicles while women prefer minivans are full of sound and fury, signifying nothing [ESSAY, Aug. 4]. What Ferguson did get right is that very few SUVs ever perform any task more rugged than driving to the grocery store or picking up kindergartners. But to set up minivans vs. SUVs as a female-male battleground is an exercise in blowing hot air. Ferguson needs to look at the SUV in the lane next to him. The driver is probably not Tarzan at all--it's Jane! MARY...
...know what kind of Stepford time warp Ferguson lives in, but here in Vermont, the guy who services our office computer network drives a minivan; so does the gentleman who maintains the brochure racks in my office, and my caterer and contract furniture supplier. Not a housewife among them. Minivans are practical vehicles that can haul other things besides runny-nosed kids, flea-bitten dogs and henpecked husbands. Sport-utes can't match them for practicality and cargo or passenger space, the price is right and, frankly, a minivan will never be mistaken for the extension of macho man that...
...meant to defend the minivan, but I see I've only maligned the sport-ute. It's hard to avoid. A car, says the cliche, is indelibly an extension of self. With minivans the extension is straightforward and uncomplicated--a means of transportation for housewives and family men (family persons?). For the upper-middle-class American man circa 1997, the cliche is undone. The sport-utility vehicle is not an expression but a denial--a carapace, a hard shell concealing the soft center within...