Driving Lessons

I’ve gone to church all my life with varying degrees of success, and sometimes have struggled with the issue of trusting God, whether He really hears me when I pray or if it’s just me talking to myself, and whether He really does watch over me and mine like the biblical sparrow. I still have not completely resolved all of these questions, but the events of the past three years have brought my faith into sharper focus and have definitely caused me to lean toward the “yes” answer on all counts. You see, I am the the parent, driving instructor, and insurance benefactor of a teenaged male driver in Dallas County.

I don’t think a person can truly know fear until he or she has sat in the passenger seat of a motor vehicle piloted by a fifteen-year-old, fresh from the written test at the DPS office, and had to explain to that child how to simultaneously hold his foot on the brake, put the car in gear, and pull onto a public roadway. In Dallas traffic. One can only grip the dashboard, stomp the imaginary brake on the passenger floorboard, and hope that somewhere in the vehicle is a supercharged medal of St. Christopher.

The primary reason I am scared, besides riding with someone who doesn’t know how to drive, and the maniacal nature of many other Dallas drivers who are not traveling with their mothers and therefore do not have a conscience for a passenger, is that I am not so old that I don’t remember what it was like the first year I drove a car and the outrageous feats of stupidity that I performed while in control (!!!!) of said vehicle. At fifteen, my parents agreed that I could apply for the most coveted possession of any high school student: a Hardship License.

I don’t recall the specific nature of the hardship which served as my early entrance to the freedom of the road, but I think it may have had something to do with my mother's weariness of ferrying me and my brother around town and the fact that my father was the local DPS officer in charge of giving driving tests and distributing driving permits. Having my father as the official license giver was truly a “hardship” if there ever was one and virtually assured me that I would need the entire extra year to pass the dreaded “road test,” complete with the requisite parallel parking maneuver. Side note: teenagers today who have completed a driver education course do not even have to take a “road test” in order to obtain a driver’s license. I rest my case. Even the DPS troopers aren’t brave enough to ride with them.

But back to my own driving adventures. After several months of road-warrior training with Sergeant Dad in the front seat and three attempts to pass the road test, I was finally given the “all clear” and awarded my temporary permit. I am convinced to this day that the only reason I achieved a passing score from my father that third time was because my mother shot him a look that said, “If you want dinner tonight, or any other night in the future, you had better give her that license.” I was off to the races.

My first trip alone was to my high school for sophomore schedule pickup before the fall term began. My parents didn’t buy me a car of my own for this momentous occasion, but instead let me use my father’s 1970 Chevy pickup truck, with its faded blue paint and huge, winglike side mirrors. Dad didn’t need to drive the truck, as the State of Texas thoughtfully provided him with a black-and-white patrol car capable of going up to 120 miles per hour in the event of a driving test emergency. By default, the truck became my “wheels.”

The old pickup had many quirks, one of which was its transmission. Sometimes it would engage right away, but often it was tired and took a while to slip into gear. This meant sitting and waiting for several, or many, minutes until the telltale clunk of the gears indicated that the truck was ready to proceed. While sitting in the school parking lot that day, waiting for the transmission to work its way into driving mode, I fiddled with the radio, fiddled with my hair in the mirror, and looked around to see who else might be in the vicinity and be jealous that I was driving myself to the schedule pickup instead of having my mother schlep me around. What I did not do, while waiting, was check that the driver side door was latched shut.

When I took off, slowly and carefully of course, out of the parking lot and onto the four-lane, 50-mile-per-hour-speed-limit road that bordered the high school, I made a wide arcing turn attributable to both my driving inexperience and the wide turning radius of the big truck, and hit the gas. At this moment the driver side door suddenly flew open and I panicked. Instead of slowing down, pulling over, and securing the door, which is what I would do now if I were so stupid as to leave the door unlatched, I kept my foot firmly pressed to the accelerator while reaching with one hand to grab the errant door. Now I took science in high school, and I learned that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. So what happened next was not really my fault, just simple physics. The opposite reaction to my door-reaching was that my other hand, the one on the steering wheel, went in the complete other direction from the hand reaching for the door, sending the truck careening sharply to the right across both lanes of traffic, jumping the curb and barreling out across the practice football field at full speed.

The unfortunate man mowing the practice field with his tractor, I’m sure, saw his life flash before his eyes before I miraculously found the brake and skidded to a halt at the fifty-yard line, dust flying. Since I hadn’t actually hit anything during the flight, I threw the truck into reverse. The gears, surely sensing the urgency of my situation, complied immediately, allowing me to back off the field and jump the curb again in the direction from whence I had come, and then speed off toward home, none the worse for the wear.

I was fully thirty years old before I told my parents this story. By that time I was a mother of two and judged myself immune to any repercussions for careless behavior on my first solo drive. But history has a funny way of repeating itself, and karma is not so easily escaped. On my son’s maiden voyage, as it were, just as I had waved him out of the driveway and gone back inside for what I considered a well-deserved drink, his truck had a massive tire blowout not half a mile from the house, on a busy road. But my son is a smart young man and handled his first vehicular emergency with much more aplomb than I had done with my own. He pulled off the road into a vacant driveway and called me from his cell phone. I wonder if, had cell phones even existed back in 1979, I would have been brave enough to call my own mother from the fifty-yard line of the high school practice field and tell her what had happened. Then again, maybe there’s something about that flat tire that my son isn't telling me. I guess I’ll have to wait a few years, until he is about thirty, to find out.