In spite of the red traffic light holding back the six lanes of impatient SUV and delivery van traffic, the senior citizen's electric wheelchair passage over the crosswalk, from her conveniently located retirement apartment complex to the strip mall parking lot, is a trip she will never get used to in her feebler years.  Although she herself does own a luxurious suburban vehicle, the uncomfortable and over-exposing wheelchair cross is infinitely less complicated than maneuvering her own massive utility vehicle through the multiple turns, medians, and narrow parking spaces she would rather not negotiate at this stage in her life.  For decades, she had driven the equivalent of a few times around the planet's equator, whether it was chauffeuring her children, shopping, getting to work or to the drive-though window, or just to get about anywhere in her life.  The wheelchair is a mere culmination of a lifetime of little walking, of not knowing what it is to walk to a corner store, to a bakery, or to her workplace and of never having had to wait at a stop to catch a commuter bus or train, or to use her body members the way one does in a habitat built for humans rather than for automobiles.

Beyond the strip mall supermarket, she ventures nowhere else on her own.  Her neighbors are also of her age.  Unlike our ancestors, she is of the generation of the old who seldom encounter the young.  The modern American habitat lacks the park benches where the old enjoy the screams of playful children, the bus stops where they wait together with the school aged, the sidewalks where they encounter people who could help them cross the street, the neighborhood store with familiar faces, and a habitat which demanded more from her body and kept it from degenerating.  To get to church, instead of walking there as older people elsewhere on this planet do, our protagonist hires Esperanza to chauffeur her.  The larger world of huge arteries of vehicles on intimidating freeways horrify her, so she finds refuge in cable television.  Luckily, she is one of the lucky few who is visited by her son, his wife and the three grandchildren, and it is seventh heaven for her, but this is a blessing none of her neighbors enjoy.

Imprisoned in her lonely, isolated, suburban American dream, her atrophied body falls prey to premature degenerative disease and her life is a medical nightmare.  The boredom and the loneliness do not help.  The cable news, reality TV, celebrity gossip, and religious channels atrophy her intellect.  Strangely, she believes that her nightmare is the norm.  She has no idea that whether she lived in a large city or in a small village in many other nations of the world, she would not be a prisoner and victim of the automobile habitat.  Instead, her local farmers market teeming with produce and other goodies and crowded with other members of her community would only be just a few blocks of real-life sidewalk away.  She would not be isolated from children, who themselves are also imprisoned in a habitat created for driving adults in their prime.  When she was in her prime and took to the freeway on a regular basis, she failed to realize the entrapped situation in which her children lived while they depended on her to chauffeur her in a world built at the scale of the automobile.  Now, whether she realizes it or not, she is not free and has never known freedom.

The truth is that for humans, having the option to walk is a freedom.  Having the option not to own a car and all the burden that a car entails is freedom.  When in a bus, train or tram in city X in Europe, Asia or even Latin America, an elder lady sits next to a young mother holding her toddler in her arms, and they both exchange smiles and human warmth, that is quality of life, that is freedom, that is true mobility, for we actually get to meet.