Driving

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I was born to this world for exactly one task. All my upbringing has been geared towards polishing the finely grained genetic material that generations of parentage have labored to produce in preparation for my one task. I have sacrificed many things in laser-focused pursuit of my one goal; house cleaning, fashion sense, rhythm, any ability to dance, maturity, ironing my shirts, eating vegetables, and starring in my own made-for-TV miniseries. None of it could intrude on my unflagging dedication to perfecting an unflappable cool in order to make me the best driving instructor possible.

I realized the truth of my destiny when I was fifteen and a half and got my driving permit. My parents were good instructors, but not great. I could feel in the sinews of my soul that driving instructor greatness lay within me.

Ever since then, I've been waiting for the next member of my family to come into that golden fifteenth year so they could lap at the nectar of my beneficence. The great tragedy of my life to date was that I was too young to help my brother learn to drive.

When I heard that cousin A~ would be getting her permit this month, I knew my time had finally arrived. A~ is an angel. She's smart, she's slight and beautiful, she plays chess, she's social, she's polite, helpful and thoughtful. If she capitalized sentences in her emails, she might just be perfect. Here, at last, was a blade worthy of my edge!

And I was ready. With no effort whatsoever I can expand the world of things I don't care about to include smashing my car into lightposts, driving on the wrong side of the street into incoming traffic, hitting trucks as we back out of parking spaces, drifting into the next lane on the freeway, or off of the freeway entirely, popping over curbs and driving in flowerbeds. As long as we didn't take another life in the sacrifice of our own for driving skills, I was ready to be blasé about anything.

Then comes this last Sunday, and I am playing Chicago bridge at my grandparent's house. Bridge, in case anyone hasn't mentioned it to you lately, is the best card game on Earth. If you don't know how to play bridge, you should learn, and then I will marry you. Bridge is this insanely gratifying combination of strategy and communication and inference. If there's a card game more fun than Bridge, I want it taken out and shot, for I doubt whether our human frames can handle anything which is more fun than bridge. You think perhaps I exaggerate, or perhaps that I am mentally unbalanced, but it's true. It's all true.

After bridge, we're having dinner, and J~'s two daughters, the lovely and vivacious H~ and the angelic A~ join us. Eat chew masticate swallow repeat. You know the drill. Food and wine.

After dinner, as the adults settle into that slow post-dinner, not quite leaving the table yet conversation that may go on for who knows how long, I look over at A~ and H~ and say, "Driving?"

And we three are up like a shot! H~ races to fetch A~ her coat (they're cute that way. I would sooner eat chocolate covered grasshoppers than fetch my brother his coat. I understand it's done, just not by me), and we're headed for the car. A~ spends five minutes moving the driver's seat to where it is situated mere microns from the front windshield in order to accommodate her small self.

The key turns in the ignition, drive, parking brake released, and we're OFF! Racing down the road towards freedom and Canada! Of course, by racing, I mean idling along, really. A~ turns out to have a morbid fear of the gas pedal. She's not sure what might happen if she puts her foot on it, but she's sure it's bad and that some secrets are best left veiled.

The wind and gravity finally pulled the car down to a major road where I force her to turn right, into a real road with marked lanes and everything, and with constant coaching ("Faster! Faster! Faster still! Use the pedal on the right!"), we soon find ourselves truly flying at 30 miles per hour.

We find a parking lot where I play with shocking her. Go as fast as you can and then slam on the brakes as hard as you can. She looks at me like I'm a geek offering to teach her the art of biting the heads off chickens. But she does it and it's fun. And heck, if my car needed brakes, God wouldn't have invented gravelly embankments to slow me down on.

We drive around. We drift out of the lane into the next, back again, onto the shoulder, back again, faster, slower, sometimes even approaching the speed limit. We stop at a grocery store and I get ice cream. We drive to check my mailbox.

I'm loving this. It's like having a remote control girl and car, only they're real-life sized. I issue commands, and the car and girl do their best to execute them. If you have a better vision of Heaven, I'd like to hear it.

After picking up my mail (and you had better be nice to me, as I recently discovered that I may shortly be coming into quite a large sum of money just as soon as Ed drives up to my house!), we drove around, and headed towards another parking lot. Turning left towards the community college, I failed to explain clearly that the road to the left of the divider was where oncoming traffic usually drives, and that we should direct the car to the right-hand side of the divider.

No one was coming towards us. A police station was just ten blocks away. A car turned right into the correct lanes after us. I wonder what he was thinking? Were we just incompetent drivers, or a car full of devil-may-care teens and a decrepit old dude thumbing their noses at John Law by driving wherever we felt like it?

Turning right at the next light to get off the wrong half of the road, we almost took out the car which was the only witness. But we decided that mercy was the better part of valor and the angelic A~ let him go.

Then we drove backwards, and let me tell you, maybe that wasn't fun. There's nothing funnier than seeing babies learn how to walk and falling over all the time, jugglers dropping their clubs, and new drivers forgetting that the wheel works backwards when you're in reverse.

And poor darling A~, who I may have mentioned is a tiny young woman, has the hardest time getting around to see out the back of the car. Where for you or me it's just a short look over your shoulder, maybe a slight turn of the shoulders to be looking out the back window, for A~, it's this whole body maneuver to get around the huge seat and look back out and drive.

Go right, I'd say, and the car would promptly swing left. Go straight, I'd say, and the car would do this sharp arc into the nearest curb. It was great for all involved except for the poor plants who probably thought they were safe way over there in the landscaping, only to feel the redemptive pain of dying for a good cause. I salute them!

So far my cool has stood by me with all the sweet acceptance that I'd expected. Pick any lane, drive any speed, miss the telephone pole by inches as we back out of the driveway, back into that parking lot where the cop car is hanging out, whatever. It's all been good by me, so far.

Then we head onto the freeway.

We do it in two stages. A one mile hop and then a longer drive. Getting up to sixty is a major celebration moment when it happens. A~'s good at lane changes when directed to, but I'm doing all the watching to make sure everything's safe and that we're not going to have any surprises or surprise anyone. The lane drifting that was so cute before suddenly starts to make me nervous in a way I'm trying really hard not to show.

It surprised me. I thought freeway driving would be the easiest part. You're driving straight, constant speed, there's so much less to look out for, people aren't doing weird and unpredictable stuff, the momentum of the car smoothes things out, and everything is done in small corrective moves. No big accelerations or turns.

But when you're driving at sixty and start drifting into the next lane over, and people are around you, you all of the sudden realize that the stakes are very high if you do make a mistake.

I'm in my tutoring mode now. Lots of encouragement, "good, excellent, super job." And I am quicker to correct when we start to get into, you know, life threatening situations. "Drift left, please."

Me! Generations of careful breeding, a lifetime of sacrifice to polish my cool skills, and I am starting to feel tense inside just because I may be about to cause a five car collision and kill us all. I am so disappointed in me. I thought I was beyond such trivial concerns.

But we keep driving anyway, and it's all good. We drive way up north, take a quick break to calm all our shaking nerves, and then head back down.

I don't want to make it seem like this was all about me. A~ was pretty tense as well. There was a lot going on for her. She's trying to watch for traffic, signals, lanes, signs, what speed she's going, what's happening with the car, where is the car on the road, who might be behind us, how fast should she be going, and on and on. Throw in me beside her making all sorts of demands and requests that she not run into things or off the road, and that's a pretty stressful time. I'm so happy my body knows how to drive all by itself now. I hated having to think about driving.

So we got back safely, everyone was happy, great fun was had freaking out A~'s mom about the crazy things we had done in the dark of night, and I drove home, a wiser and edgier man-child.

The funny thing about driving home was that I totally felt like I was in A~'s position. All the sudden, I was a really skittish driver, overthinking everything I was doing, staying in the middle of the road, driving just plain weird. It took till the next day for my automatic driving skills to come back.

Can't wait to do it again. Wish I could find some safe snow and teach her the joys of sliding around in your car. Ah well, the fullness of my destiny will be realized in time. I will cultivate patience as a fine rose in my garden of driving instructor delights.