LEARNING TO DRIVE
Three decades and eight years ago, I awoke one morning feeling certain I was ready to learn to drive. Back in those days, driving school was something generally reserved for older people who had no one willing to teach them to drive. Most middle Americans considered it an unnecessary expense. After all, teaching a teenager to drive is why God invented fathers, right? Right?! If you were born after the mid-60's, you may not be aware. What can I say? Juicy tidbits like that are yet another service offered by this blog. :)
Those of you who've been following me for a couple of years know that, by the time I was 14, my father was the custodial parent of my 4 siblings and me. Ahead of his time? You bet. But let's review what he was not, shall we?
He wasn't this:
Or this:
Nor was he this:
If I had to make a comparison between my dad and a TV dad, it would DEFINITELY be this:
In New York State, you had to be 16 years old to take the written test for a 'learner's permit'. This piece of paper, of course, allowed you to drive with a licensed driver over the age of 18 during daylight hours. For me, that meant early weekday evenings and weekends because my father worked until 5 PM, Monday - Friday.
Dad had one BIG rule: we would all learn to drive in cars with standard transmissions, because, 'if you can drive a stick, you can drive anything in an emergency.' I never touched a car with an automatic transmission until I was 20 years old.
See the smile on that father's face as he points out gauges? Yeah, well, that was not exactly how my early days of driving progressed.
I experienced a bit of this:
A dash of this:
And, if I'm being perfectly honest, there may have been some of this:
And plenty of this:
Note to gentle readers: The Dalai Lama is a sweet, loving soul. His laughter would not be malicious in any way.
(Continuing on). There were many things that were easy for me. Three point turns, for instance, were painless. And it didn't hurt that the car I learned to drive in was a compact Toyota Corolla.
Parking on a hill was also easy.
When you drive a stick, you also have to be able to stop on a hill, then proceed on without rolling backwards into the car behind you. There was the occasional time when I would 'slip the clutch'. For those you who don't know what that means, when you push the clutch to the floor, you are disengaging the clutch; as you bring the clutch pedal back to the top with the car in gear, you'll feel it begin to engage and the car will begin to move. If you hold it at this point, the clutch plate is 'slipping' on the flywheel. This prematurely wears the clutch and glazes the fibers of the plate. Not a good thing. Details. Whatever.On more than one occasion, Dad was with me when I did this and each time he said, "That's another 10,000 miles off the life of the clutch. This from the same man who would tell me, "If there were two pot holes in the road, you'd hit three." Interestingly enough, these were times of good-natured teasing. I guess he had clutch wear and pot holes on his list of collateral damage.
Driving on streets this busy came later in the game. I've driven and ridden in many of the big cities across the USA and let me just say, hands down, Boston has the craziest drivers. No one else even comes close. Don't even try to compare your city or state. You may have gridlock, you don't have Boston's crazy drivers.
Stopping at a 4-way intersection never presented a problem for me, either. When in doubt, I'd let everyone else go ahead of me.
What was the most difficult thing to master? Do you really have to ask?!
Many new drivers may be a bit nervous when faced with doing this the first hundred few times. If you're a kid with the 'disease to please' and your dad in the car, it can be a nightmare stressful experience.
My dad could somehow sense this and he did a really nice, extremely patient thing in order to help me master parallel parking and
He would take me to big store parking lots on Sunday mornings (stores didn't used to be open on Sundays...if you can imagine that!), get out of the car and stand there forever, doing his best impression of the rear bumper of a car, while I parallel parked behind him over and over again.
It was a great example of patience and kindness that I'll never forget.
I did not pass my driving test the first time I took it because of some foolish law concerning how one is to make a left-hand turn from a two-way onto a one-way street or visa versa. My nerves got the best of me. They've often done that. Technicalities. Whatever.
I've had 4 speeding tickets in my life....one in CT in 1978 and three in and around Poughkeepsie, NY, in 1987. I've never had an accident. Those are commendable statistics when you consider that I used to drive an outrageous number of miles annually.
That being said, I don't believe that I could pass a road test today without a refresher course. I'm quite convinced they'd snag me on one of those technicalities again. Whatever.
Do you think you could pass a road test without a refresher course? And, if you're under 40, you probably could.....so don't rub it in okay? Whatever.
Always looking forward, PJ
