Driving Lessons

Posted: October 5, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: , , | 2 Comments

 

 

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.

Driving Hell

Posted: June 12, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Diet- comedy | Tags: | 1 Comment

 

 

For someone who is not working at a paying job this week I certainly had a day reminiscent of my past workdays.  The whole thing started with a carpool to school for Carter and our neighbor Price so they could attend Drivers Ed.  Poor things barely got the weekend off after school ended and now they are sitting in a class for three hours with out a break, each day starting at 8:00 in the morning.

 

After dropping them I ran to the grocery and back home to drop my bags.  Back in the car and drove half an hour to Cary for a meeting.  An hour later back to Durham for two hours of Mah Jongg therapy with lunch.  Go pick Carter up and drove twenty-five minutes to Chapel Hill for her camp physical then back home to drop her off.  Back in the car to Raleigh for a meeting at the Food Bank then a forty-five minute rush hour drive back to Church for a meeting.  Amazingly I was home at 6:00.

 

I spent almost four hours of my day driving.  Yuck, and to think I used to be in sales and spent everyday driving to customers.  With the exception of Mah Jongg everything I did had to be done today so I had little choice, but it certainly felt like a job.  The meetings were not the problem, but the getting to them was the part that wore me out.

 

I can hardly wait until Carter can drive herself places or even drive me.  I remember the day I got my drivers license when I was 16.  No sooner had I gotten home with that little laminated piece of paper than my Dad handed me his dry cleaning and told me to go to the village and drop it off.  Oh happy day!  I was given the car and a chance to drive all by myself.  I happily volunteered for every driving errand my parents had.  I could not imagine not wanting to drive.

 

I guess that I might feel differently when I am in the throws of Carter practicing driving with me as the passenger, but I can hardly wait for her to drive.  Imagine a child who can drive herself.   I wonder if it would be too haughty to sit in the back seat and needlepoint while Carter chauffeurs me around?  I’m a terrible back seat driver already so I am going to need all the distractions I can get so I don’t scare her to death.  When the practice driving get’s bad I am going to remember today and how much I want another driver in the family.