When I lived in Southern California, I resembled most residents in that I spent way too much time on the freeways, to the point where numbers (eg, 405 and 101) became not indicators of specific routes but destinations in and of themselves. The 10 was my endpoint, and the 134 to Pasadena was a state of being.
One evening, I was a passenger in a car driven by an Anglo friend, and we were doing the LA crawl on the bumper-to-bumper freeway. He mentioned that, because there was more than one person in the car, we could work our way over to the carpool lane and zip past the traffic.
As he maneuvered toward this nirvana of speedy access, I smirked and said, “That’s the great thing about being Hispanic in California. I mean, the carpool lane only requires two or more people? Most of us have three times that many just in the front seats.”
He didn’t laugh. And we drove on in silence.
