Scaring the Shift out of Me
By Sarah
My husband was all for Sam getting his permit. The boy turned 15 in October, one of the oldest in his class. He's a guy and apparently guys need to drive (unlike Anna who seemed to be in no rush until the summer before senior year, two weeks before her permit expired). Plus, you've got to clock in 40 hours, 8 of nighttime driving to get a license. Better to start now.
And so Sam has been driving back from after-school practice when, I figure, the streets are less crowded. This means that every day around 6:30 p.m., I'm gripping the door and jamming my foot against the invisible brake as I channel my dearly departed mother: "Don't worry about the driver behind you. That's their look out. Slow down! Ease to the right at the curb. Give the other guy clear signals what you want to do. Remember, you are on the road with the same idiots/stoners who couldn't pass ninth-grade math. Jesus &%$#@ SLOW DOWN!"
My mother hated teaching me how to drive and I hated learning. The situation was not improved by our two dysfunctional cars - a 1977 VW Dasher that overheated when it reached, oh, 80 degrees and
you sat in traffic more than five minutes and a 1973 Dodge Dart "Swinger" that was anything but. It had a tendency to stall while taking a left turn, a glitch that strangely left my father unperturbed, though I nearly lost my life twice.
Once, on my way to a Brown alumni interview, I stalled, was nearly killed by a tractor trailer huffing it up a steep, blind hill and showed up shaken and stirred. To this day, I can remember the calm faces of preppers in Mr. Brown University's panelled living room as I collapsed in a chair and babbled about my recent escape from the clutches of death.
Speaking of clutches, this is why I didn't drive the Dasher. At first. Like a lot of Pennsylvania towns, Bethlehem frequently placed stop lights at the top of steep hills. (See above.) And while my brother liked to run down th 
e clutch by stepping on it while remaining in first, I yanked up the emergency brake and proceeded through a serious of complicated steps before burning rubber just to avoid stalling and/or backsliding.
Once a helpful (drunken) man got out of the pickup behind me, knocked on my window and demanded to know if I could drive. Nice, huh? Maybe "accidentally" backsliding into his truck might have answered his question.
ANYWAY...the point is that teaching someone to drive just sucks. On the one hand, you don't want to destroy your offspring's confidence. On the other, you want to... live! This is why schools devote precious taxpayer resources to the matter.
But being a smart kid, Sam's schedule is so jam packed with honors and AP courses, that fitting in driver's ed doesn't quite work. Frankly, I don't know when he'll get his license - maybe next fall if we pay for private courses.
And then comes a new flood of worries - Will he come home in one piece? Will his passengers come home in one piece? Will the car? Will he know better than to let road rage get the best of him? Or alcohol?
The only fact that keeps me from losing sleep over this is my own experience. The night I got my license, I called my friend Lisa (to whom all my books are dedicated) and she came down to my house 
so we could go out for ice cream. We had a lot to celebrate since it took three tries for me to pass the test. (The second time, I was tricked by a state trooper who told me to pull up to the line and then promptly flunked me because I didn't have a licensed driver sitting next to me ON THE COURSE!)
I backed out of the garage in the Dart and stalled. It hadn't even been a left turn. And when I tried to step on the gas, there was this awful scraping sound. Also, the sound of falling concrete. Plus, I couldn't move.
"Look," Lisa said, pointing to where the car was stuck into the garage wall.
My father was very good about it the next morning. And now I know why he kept the Dart - just for this occasion. And why I'm keeping my 2004 Honda Pilot with 122,000K miles and several dents.
What's your driver's ed story?
Sarah
