I’m dating myself here, but when I was a kid, parents said crazy things like, “Go outside and play.” And we were crazy enough to do it. We’d run next door to see if the kids there were out. If they weren’t, we’d stand at the back door and yell, “Ma-A-A-arrrk!” Unless the kid who lived there had a different name, of course. Then he’d come running out, we’d hop on our bikes and go do something unspeakably dangerous, this being ten years before the invention of the bicycle helmet.

Today, kids pester their parents to set up a play date for them and then drive them there. Or take an extra kid or two home with them after school. And this is where the problem arises.

We have two kids, which means we have two booster seats in the back of our car. But it’s a mid-sized sedan, which means that we’re maxed out for legal child transport. We’ve been known to smuggle a child in the space between the boosters, but we felt more like human traffickers than car poolers and slunk through back alleys for fear of being busted.

So we need a new car. Our children’s social life depends on it. We want something that can carry our two kids plus one friend each. It may not look like a big problem on the face of it, but surprisingly it is.

Sedans max out at three backseat passengers, and precious few truly hold three booster seats. So what about an SUV? Oddly enough, most SUVs also max out at three, which makes you wonder why the heck you’d want to deplete the education fund for the extra gas. Our family is not long in the inseam either, so climbing in and out of an SUV is pretty much a deal breaker. Nor can you avoid the inseam problem by wearing a skirt. My wife has ripped too many skirts trying to high-step into other people’s SUVs; and I look like hell in a kilt. Meanwhile, we still wouldn’t be able to pack four kids into it. Unless we got the humungo-sized land-crushing Planet Killer variety. And built a jetway onto our house so we could get into the damned thing.

Which leaves us the minivan. Clearly I am out of the closet as a domestic dad, so the concept shouldn’t, and doesn’t, bother me. Fuddy duddy, thy name is Captain Dad. But someone at the car companies is not so sanguine with his Dockers-dowdiness and has tried to make the contemporary minivan a skosh more macho (skosh being one of those words wannabe macho guys use). Consequently minivans now have the same height issue. Arguably this is not an insurmountable problem, but it does not appreciably improve one’s quality of life to curse the stupidity of one’s culture each time one stumbles in and out of one’s vehicle.

So what do we do to get that one extra kid in the car and preserve our sangfroid ? “Aha!” you say. “A station wagon!”

Of course. A station wagon. Why didn’t we think of that? Station wagons were invented to carry buckets of kids.

Why, when I was a kid, you’d run out of kids before you’d run out of room in a station wagon. The whole baseball team and a relief pitcher could fit in there. I’m not kidding. Four kids in the back seat, two in the front, and four more in the rear. If you folded down the seats in the way back, you could stack kids like cord wood and take the opposing team out for ice cream as well.

So we went shopping for a station wagon. And guess what. Station wagons these days carry… you can see this one coming a mile away, can’t you… three kids. Three! “Station wagon” is apparently the new term for “boxy hatchback.” Which itself is a term for a “sedan with a window in the trunk so people can peek to see if there’s a good enough reason to break in.”

But wait, there’s more. Rather, less. Most of those modern station wagons hold three only when the back seat is not cannibalized by booster seats. With booster seats, it only holds two.

Oh, come on, I can hear you say. Surely there is a station wagon that fits more than two. Or even three.

Fine. You got me. There is a station wagon like that. A station wagon. One — count ‘em — one wagon on the market today has what they call “third row seating.” So it holds a whopping four kids. And it only sells for around $55,000.

And you wonder why more people don’t have more than three kids! I could build a time machine for less than that. And I’d have four thousand dollars left over to buy a brand spanking new 1967 Ford LTD station wagon, complete with spiffy imitation wood paneling, to bring back with me.

And we call this progress? Are the car companies simply trying to sell more cars by making them carry fewer people? And what do modern station wagons offer us in return for the inability to actually carry 1960s-sized families in them, other than an iPod dock and cup holders?

So I’m building my time machine. I’m going back for my woody wagon. I’ll listen to the AM radio. Except when I’m driving under a bridge. Then I’ll suffer through my kids and their many friends singing “B-I-N-G-O” as they spill their drinks all over the seats. Oh, but that’s another thing the old station wagon has over its modern descendent. The seats are vinyl. They’ll clean right up.