Teaching Junior How to Drive

Way back when, in each of my spawn's early days, back when they still wet themselves and ate mush, before they could cuss or say 'whatever--I'm checking it on Google' to any of my well-crafted tall tales, I taught them how to drive.

You may consider this somewhat irresponsible to which I'll say nyaah and, furthermore, nyaah because you're probably a malicious tightwad who started your tough love program at the same time my kids were wielding a Chevy through Edgebrook and wouldn't know whimsy from a hole in the ground.

I think it's hard for grups¹ to grasp the magnificent and terrifying size of the world to a child. Which is kind of weird since every grup started out as a kid. You'd think they remember. I guess the abrasion of height, puberty, and taxes eventually wears away the shine of childhood and we forget all about how the world used to be magical and wild. Some of us managed to recover a little of that shine, maybe through our iron grip on immaturity, a kind of Peter Panic, and we still find ourselves lost in reverie and imagination with the same force and totality as children. We remember how big the world is and having procreated, we wait for the moment when we can do something ridiculously cool to let them know we know. For me, I let them both drive.

Cars feature big in the child mind. They've appropriated all the same connotations as horses in the dreamscape: freedom, power, conveyance, and a certain species of mysterious wildness. Letting a kid control that is ginormous. It galvanizes their bravado. I wasn't thinking about that when I popped them up on my lap, though. To me, it was just cool.

And it was a family thing. When I was their age, my dad put me on his lap and let me steer a Buick Skylark from our house to my grandmas one abandoned field and three dirt roads to the south. Things were different then: he was smoking a Pall Mall and I don't even know if the car had any seat belts. I just know that Dad asked me if I wanted to drive and I screamed and suddenly my perspective changed. I was seeing the world from the headspace of a grup.

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When my eyes rose so far above the rounded vinyl dash I was used to, I got a look at the world as grups see it. It really helped, mythos-wise, that we were in my hometown², Ocoee, Fl., which is perched on the rim of a huge, perfectly round lake. We lived well up that rim in a crappy little rental on a red dirt road. My grandparents lived in a nicer home just a few dirt roads over. When dad popped me up on his lap, the Skylark was trundling along at the top of our hill and I looked down like a micro-moses onto my house, my grandad's house, the houses of all my friends, all gathered together up above Starke Lake which glittered like a mirror below us all, in a big dark green bowl of orange trees.

Dad leaned back and blew smoke out the window and I steered the idling car down the road and managed to make the turns and it was huge. Just HUGE.

I don't know how magical it was when I let the kids drive. Different times on the calendar but the same age for each kid, four years old. Same place, Edgebrook, same time: well after dark.

I popped Sarah up on my lap and said 'You want to drive?' and she didn't even think about it. She grabbbed the wheel and, not really getting it, I think tried to will the car forward. I dropped it down into D and we inched down the asphalt, all the way around the block, from her aunt's to her grandma's and back. She was flush with excitement and couldn't even speak when we were done. Connor was the same way. They both got out of the car and didn't say a word, they had their toungues stuck in their cheek trying not to grin. I think they experienced it as some kind of rite, that it had a magical overtone, a spirituality they sensed and they didn't want their glee to break the mood.

They walked back into the house and plopped down in front of the TV and as I strolled back into the kitchen to pick up a hand of rummy, I caught them, each of them, each time, glance over their shoulder to check me, to see if I was looking, to see if I was really that close to their world, and each time I kept myself from grinning, and each time, solemnly, fraternally, I winked at them.
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¹What, you never watched Star Trek? Grup is a fabricated truncation of grown-up, stolen from a ST episode in which Kirk, Spock, and Bones, beam down to a planet where people who grow up die. Harlan Ellison, ST's prolific scribe, wasn't the subtlest guy in the world.
²One of two. I claim Westover, AL, also. Much to their dismay, I'm sure.