There is always a solution

Before I gave up my car last year, I had moments of panic thinking about the situations in which I had always used my wheels – OMG, how shall I visit friends in out-of-the-way villages/ transport heavy items/ buy bulky items/ pick visitors up at the train station/ go cross-country skiing/do the grocery shopping? Ah, there is the most important one; one does eat 3 times a day. I had visions of daily trips to the supermarket and being reduced to crackers and packaged soup at times when I was under the weather.

I have missed old Huckleberry, my dark blue Corsa, although less than expected, and I have discovered something valuable; there is always a solution. Let’s make that the watchword for today: There is Always a Solution! Often there are two or three.

It’s clear that in public-transport-networked Zurich the train and bus are often the answer. Then there is my e-bike and the car-sharing organization Mobility. My front-hall bookcase is festooned with train and bus schedules and reminders to top up the bike battery. And hey - let’s not forget friends who kindly transported me to the garden center.

And then there is the quieter brother of transport possibilities: the

Internet. Like most of us I ask myself at least once a week how I ever lived without it, and to the e-mail and research possibilities are now added train schedules, Google maps with their directions printed out and carried with me, research into products that I then order and have delivered – all from my laptop – whee! Best of all is the online grocery store. Once a month I get out my list and peruse this fun site, with its descriptions and pictures of all the products. How about some goat’s cheese this month, and oh! they have butternut squash already and still have corn on the cob. These cookies are especially good and this British cheese is hard to come by in the grocery store and these dried tomatoes are juicy and not leathery.

All this in addition to all the heavy bottles of olive oil and vinegar and cartons of fruit juice and bags of oats and rice that are among the staples ordered every month. A chatty and friendly young man hauls the bags up the stairs and into the apartment, and frankly I enjoy this service no end. Ordering regularly brings the boon of coupons that largely defray the delivery charge. I enthuse about this service to everyone I know.

Now we come to Mac, the cart on two wheels that I drag after me

on trips to the farmer’s market. Mac (his large carrier bag is plaid) has become my constant companion, and not only fresh produce, but also plants for the balcony, items from the free exchange market, heavy trash bags and compost buckets, bundled newspapers for the old paper collection and books to and from the library have trundled satisfactorily therein. Mac combines especially well with the low-entry buses and trains, and joins the strollers, prams and wheelchairs jostling for position in the vestibule.

But then came the period when I used Mac especially heavily and managed, on a trip to the library in the city, to connect with two trains and one tram without low entry. To add insult to injury, the lift in the railway station was out of order, so Mac and I jerked our way up all those stairs. As this library rebinds all its books in what amounts to armor plate, this was not a good day.

Not surprisingly, I ended up with bursitis in my right shoulder.

Painful, inconvenient, and altogether too long lasting. But I remembered seeing an ad for a shopping cart that one pushes, rather than pulls. Surf the Internet, and there was the perfect solution – push or pull, and with swivel wheels. Not too common, those wheels. And then I began musing on these new construction or mechanical solutions: swivel wheels on virtually all prams and strollers nowadays and the aforementioned low-entry transport. What I would like to know is this: why are these only available nowadays? No new research and development was necessary, certainly, to figure out that the entry can be at platform level and people can sit on top of the train and bus wheels rather than the other way around. And haven’t swivel wheels been around for a very long time?

My new cart should arrive soon, and my shoulder will appreciate it. Faithful Mac will go to a friend of mine, and I am musing about a name for his successor. Then I will make another purchase – an electronic reader so as to cut down on those library hauls. I prefer reading an actual printed book, but my apartment would be jam-packed if I bought all the books I read. Not that that would be a problem, actually, as I would be in the poorhouse, having spent all my money on printed matter. I’m looking into online libraries with e-books. I will miss Mac and printed books, but I am looking forward to these new possibilities.

See what I mean? There is always a challenge…and always a solution.