HOLLY NADLER

508-274-2329

(hollynadler@gmail.com)

This usually happens when I’m riding the bus: I strike up a conversation with someone who soon gets around to expressing a deep-seated desire, “I’m really hoping to get a car.”

They’re confiding to the wrong person. They might as well say to me, “I’d like to acquire a python to sleep with me and to wrap its length around my torso until my skin turns blue and my eyes bug out.”

I go into my little spiel: Why load yourself up with all those extra expenses — the insurance, the gas, the car payments or, if no car payments, which normally signals you bought yourself a junker, then the repairs, even the slightest hint of which causes you to panic every time the car shudders or rattles or chugs. I then point out how each day becomes an adventure if you’re walking, biking or taking the bus and leaving the driving to someone else while you watch the emerald hills and wildflower meadows roll by. You’ve got your own chauffeur without having to pay him or her a $50,000 retainer.

Frankly, I believe the number of people I’ve convinced is zero. Unhappily in this society, the ownership of a car remains a marker of status. But now that green is more than a color on a paint store’s chips, we have the opportunity to give the carless among us some points of honor, something they may never have expected to receive in this lifetime.

Here’s how this could work, and I’m dead serious about this plan. No joke. No customary Nadler snideness. You know how big companies get credits for environmental purity, credits which they in turn sell to polluters to mitigate their foul effluences? Well, why don’t we allow individuals to score a carbon footprint rating? Everyone could be issued color-coded cards and they would signify the following:

Gold Card: This one is the coin of the land of eco-ratings and it’s issued to anyone who owns no car, regardless of whether he or she does anything else to save the planet, such as recycling or saving polar bear cubs.

Silver Card: This one goes to people who recycle, save polar bear cubs, use those corkscrew bulbs, have solar panels on houses measuring 1,500 square feet or smaller, eat vegetarian, buy locally, and who keep up their dues for the Sierra Club.

Red Card: This one is getting the bearer into less salubrious fields. It’s given to people with houses measuring up to 3,000 square feet, who own more than two vehicles in a single family, regularly grill steaks, and think nothing of buying orchids flown 5,000 miles from Patagonia.

Purple Card: This issue is the ogre of color-coded IDs because it includes anyone with a single house larger than 3,000 square feet, going right up to the errant billionaire with six humongous houses, one of which is a castle in Spain that costs more to heat than the Plaza Hotel. It spans families who have more than two cars all the way up to those same billionaires who pay fuel bills for their Lear jets, maintain limos on both coasts, and who not only grill steaks but invest in cattle ranches that burn up thousands of acres of rain forest annually.

These cards should be carried in wallets and shown with a driver’s license whenever such identity disclosure is warranted. Yes, this has a Big Brother, Big Gov overtone to it, but mostly the flashing of the card would be designed to calibrate how people show up in our changing world. For the first time in their lives, carless people could understand that, in very important ways, they stand at the top of the heap. “Oh!” the woman behind the Stop & Shop counter might gush, “Good for you! I’m thinking of giving up my car — it’s so embarrassing to have it, but I never learned how to ride a bike. They’re giving lessons at the Y for people who are trying to work up from their silver cards.”

On the other side of the spectrum, the purple card would quite simply make people gag. “Jeez, do you need your six jumbo houses including the castle in Spain?” the less diplomatic among us might blurt out, akin to those animal activists who once splashed red paint on fur coats; it was a trifle rude but it worked. Venturing out in a mink these days is a little less gruesome than shotgunning other people’s pets in broad daylight.

Look, at this point in time, that person on the bus with a jones for a car is feeling deprived and downtrodden, and if given a few million dollars in a lottery would probably go out and, in a blink, build a purple-card lifestyle. But what if we found a way to add social value to anyone who leaves a fairy-light footprint on the planet? It would be the first time a whole society found a way to celebrate its poor for their very genuine contribution. These gold-card carriers would flash their IDs gladly and eventually gain the self-confidence and the wisdom of Thoreau and the Dalai Lama and all the teachers and the shamans who’ve told us we’re not our things, not our personalities, not our degrees, we’re not even our season tickets to the Sox games.

But why write about it? Maybe I’ll just start issuing cards on my own. Anyone seen Laurie David lately?

At the Oak Bluffs Public Library this week there’ll be a bilingual storytime — Portuguese and English — on Saturday, Nov. 14 at 11 a.m. Later in the day stay tuned for the national gaming event from 1 to 3 p.m. during which board games and Wii will be played and refreshments served. All ages are welcome, although eight-year-olds and younger must be accompanied by an adult.

Also on Saturday, Nov. 14, there will be a Peace Corps potluck dinner overseen by Jim Newman and Chris Murphy. For info (such as where this fun event will take place; so far it seems to be in an undisclosed location), call 508-693-6610.