Driver's Education

My daughter has started driving. This means I am now old. This means she has learned not all hand signals by drivers were replaced when cars got turn signal lights. This means my insurance rates have gone from “it hurts to write the check” to “does someone have a tourniquet…I’m hemorrhaging money over here.” This means when she has to go to drill team practice at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning I can stay in bed. Ah, there’s the proverbial silver lining.
I have never been the best teacher for my own children. We get frustrated with each other quickly. Even third grade math homework required UN peacekeepers being called to our kitchen table. (“I know this is not the way your teacher explained it to you, but it works so shut up.) Now that she has the rectangle of plastic giving her legal rights to drive we have found some things we did not spend enough time teaching her.
We are comfortable with her forward motion, but backing up has proven to be somewhat problematic. We have a garage behind our house on the alley which is the home for her little red two door. The first time she was driving to school by herself, I was watching from the upstairs window as she was leaving. You’ve heard of a three point turn, well, I needed a slide rule and Stephen Hawking to calculate the points in the geometric figure created by her attempts to get from the cement next to the garage into the alley. That night I used a shoe as a visual aid in describing a more efficient way. It turned out my wife had also been watching that morning and in the afternoon had done a sort of interpretive dance to demonstrate the “pulling into the alley” process.
A couple of days later I got a phone call from my daughter. She could not get the keys out of the ignition. Since the car was not running we decided she would go on into school and I would drive up and figure out what the problem was. A few minutes later I got another phone call. The situation had been solved. One of her friends visited the car with her and figured out the car was not in park so the steering column would not relinquish the key. I am just glad the high school parking lot is flat. A car, not in park, left unattended on an incline would have a very different result.
My daughter and her friend come out of the school and the friend says, “Okay, Emilyjane, where’s your car?”
Emilyjane scans the lot, “I thought I parked it right over there.”
The friend asks, “What does it look like?”
Emilyjane replies, “It’s a red two door Escort.”
The friend says, “You mean like that red two door Escort at the bottom of the hill resting halfway in the ditch and halfway through the principal’s car.”
Emilyjane says, “Oh, silly me. I didn’t even drive to school today. What was I thinking?” As she slowly backs into the building looking around for possible witnesses.
Before anyone starts thinking Emilyjane is a bad driver I need to make it clear I believe she is good at driving. She is just inexperienced and I did not teach her as well as I should have. She doesn’t have the benefit of a top of the line driver’s education course like I had.
She didn’t log hour after hour in a car with two other nervous teenagers and a grumpy man whose greatest pleasure was slapping the roof of the car loudly as the student made his first attempt at parallel parking. She did not watch 16 mm films of horrible accidents which struck abject fear into the hearts of many in the class and caused certain boys to argue whether a ’77 El Camino could even get up enough speed to actually tear a telephone pole off at ground level. (The real kicker was all those films had theme music more appropriate for kittens and puppies frolicking about in a sunny meadow than for the oil stains, cracked windshields and gnarled metal of disemboweled Chryslers.) She didn’t “drive” in a simulator helping nascent drivers identify, predict, decide and execute what would happen in a variety of real-life situations (See Mr. Ropp, I was too paying attention). However, I have passed on to her the most important message made blatantly obvious throughout my driver’s ed course: All drivers are deceitful and wish to kill you.