East Meadow guest columnist Lauren Lev shares 'The short commute'

It is 5:45 a.m. on a weekday with nothing much to see but extra early sunlight from March to November. It’s dark, it’s cold and the cell phone alarm ringtone sounds like the an ice cream truck in August. 

Most days it feels as if the only people who are up beside me and my adult son are parents reminding children it’s a school day and the 7 AM school bus is always on time. It’s a whole different spin on the promise that “no child (is) left behind,” because sometimes, they can be.

Inside a “slowly warming up” car in December or the “lower the windows” balmy morning in June, my son and I spend a few precious moments trying to understand/hash out/explain our small part of the world as he commutes to and from his hybrid job in lower Manhattan.

If the mood is right, we talk about anything. It’s the baby boomer optimist and millennial realist with varying views about culture trends, the quality of social media, latest politics or the rapidly deteriorating quality of morning radio. We share this mini “road trip” like we shared the peanut butter knife and sandwich bags that completed our lunches earlier today. And when we compare notes on marketing, our common profession, I’m the dinosaur needing definitions for hashtags and identifications of latest influencers in digital media while he remains the avid student of historical advertisements.

Carpooling to the LIRR is as natural as breathing in suburban Long Island, but it wasn’t always like that for us.

So one of the first things our family inquired about, nearly 29 years ago upon arrival in our Nassau County community, was the access to public transportation to New York City. Our single car household worked until NICE bus transit schedules changed. Then it was up to any driver in the household to be the designated Uber.

Sometimes on these rides, my “passenger” will spontaneously break into song lyrics that put Long Island’s only country radio station to shame. Words that mostly center around “drivin’ that Chevy truck down the highway with my girl at my side and my dog in the flatbed”. And I will nod and laugh, knowing that if we ever prompted ChatGPT to give us sample lyrics for a new cowboy’s tune, artificial intelligence couldn’t even come close.

And that’s the point.  You can rely on technology for wake up calls that sound like ice cream trucks and remote work that makes “zoom” a verb. You can rely on the transportation to get you to home and back from the office. But the content of short conversations – two people reporting on/recording their days in snatches and bursts in the chill of winter or the summer’s heat on Merrick Avenue – that’s the common experience Long Islanders know all too well. 

A contributing writer to the Herald since 2012, Lauren Lev is a direct marketing/advertising executive who teaches marketing fundamentals as well as advertising and marketing communications courses at the Fashion Institute of Technology and SUNY Old Westbury.