Driving Lessons

The time has come when my child is going to start her practicing driving section of drivers Ed.  The thought causes both anxiety and excitement deep inside me all at the same time.  Certainly Carter is ready to drive.  She has been adult size for years.  When she was about seven we started letting her drive at the farm and she has been giving her friends lessons on driving the gator and the Kubota bus for years.   But driving on your own property with no other cars coming at you is easy; facing traffic and real time decision-making is another story.

Learning to drive is so different for kids today than it was for me.  Since I went to boarding school and I have a May birthday my parents paid a private driving school to give me the required class and practice driving time.  I never went to any classroom, but was given the Connecticut DMV book with all 125 questions and answers of which 25 would be on the test.  I was told to memorize the whole thing.  Then a man who certainly was unemployable in any other profession came to my house with a very old sedan and we spent a few hours driving around the rambling Wilton, Connecticut roads.

I had learned to drive from spending my life sitting in the front seat watching my parents and driving our tractor to cut the grass.  It was just not that complicated.  Cars only had a few buttons, dials or levers.  No phones, navigation or back-up cameras to distract us.  Traffic was not much of an issue.

My first summer I had my license I did back my parents ship-like Chevy station wagon into the top of the Hurdman’s spit rail fence and broke the wood.  Tommy Hurdman and I went by the Wilton Riding Club and picked up a spare piece of split rail that was sitting along the entrance driveway and brought it home to his house.
It only took us about twenty minutes with a hand saw to get that rail to fit into his mother’s fence and no one was the wiser.

Since we did not have this yearlong practice time that North Carolina requires today I don’t remember spending much time driving my parents around while I learned to drive.  I think that I memorized the book, drove four hours with the could-be pedophile and went on down to the DMV and got my license.  I know the night I got it I went to the movies in Westport with Tommy Hurdman and no one thought twice about me being a ‘new” driver.  Boy, have things changed.