I’d heard tell that my wife had allowed our younger daughter, fifteen years of age, to drive the car down the driveway. In the wee hours of the morning, as the sun was just rising, and I’d made my way around the back yard spreading sunflower seeds on the ground so the critters would come, I took my reheated coffee out of the microwave and turned on the car so as to warm it up. I asked and she was game to dry to drive it up the hill this morning.
Disconcerting, certainly. The same person who was only yesterday in diapers is about to put this SUV in motion. Hold the break and shift it into reverse. Have you gone backwards yet?” “No.” The windscreen is covered in droplets from the night’s rain. “Let me show you how to turn the wipers on. That one. Turn the tip of the knob. Yes, that one, you see? That controls the back wiper. Turn the lights on as well. Just twist it forward.”
She puts the car in reverse confidently and the car slowly moves backward. “Cut the wheel all the way. Now turn it back as you go forward.” She wants to know why this car is not a standard, because there is a gear handle that looks not unlike what Vin Diesel used in “Fast and Furious,” and I explain the difference between stick shifts and automatics. We bank right and then left and arrive at the top of the driveway where cars are speeding by at fifty miles per hour. She breaks just find but I found myself missing an emergency break I might grab ahold of, just in case.
Neither of us are ready to fully imagine the world, where she continues up, puts on the blinker and accelerates out and up to fifty herself. She’ll have a permit soon and then a license and like any normal teenager, she’ll want to drive off to see her friends. For now, she agrees that driving into traffic would be terribly intimidating. For now, that fear is comforting, to me at least and I exhale just a bit as we trade places: driver’s seat to passenger’s seat, and wait for the school bus to chug around the corner.
Tuesday, 02/25/20
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