Learning to Drive

I learned to drive like I learned to shoot: a golf cart can’t be so different from a bb gun, can it?

With the golf cart you’ve got two pedals and a wheel. With the bb gun, you’ve got two sights and a trigger.

My poor son. He’s learning to drive on a 12-year-old stick shift, six speeds +reverse, a parking brake, and three mirrors looking out two windows and a hatch. Forget the radio, headlights, wipers, and turn signals.

One of us teaching him took the wheel on a pro track, pushing the car so hard a colleague said, “I don’t drive this fast going forward!”

The drill, reverse evasion, left skid marks and smoke on the track. This colleague became a senior figure with the US Mission to drug-torn Mexico. Hope he learned reverse.

In defense, I learned driving in a golf cart. I had the wide expanse of fairway greens, nothing to hit but rich assholes in golf pants, sand traps wide enough to swallow the Wabash Cannonball, and a few ponds filled with snapping turtles. I knew the wide-open spaces from sledding in winter, felt the ground like the back of my hand.

My son, meanwhile, a gentle kid making barely a splash with his hand against water in freestyle, guides our stick through narrow turns at the old elementary school where he attended kindergarten. Today he knocked over a traffic cone learning to park from the left. He felt sheepish.

Lookit, he was leveraging pedals by nickels and dimes, steering an expanse of painted lines, eyeing cars that pulled into the lot, including a county security car.

This kid will be ok behind the wheel. He should drive a bus. He might save us all with his patience and adaptability. He’s barely legal but he can park in a tight left or right turn. How many others do that: check the local grocery lot for cars parked crooked over the line.

I learned by driving a golf cart, speeding over humps in a chase without consequence. I shot jar lids wired to a realtor’s sign in my grandfather’s Maryland back wood home.

My son handles tight suburban sprawls in a car that bucks us to the roof if we miss a nickel or dime of gas or clutch.

Let up slow. Press down sure. Pump the gas and run.

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