Friday, September 10, 2010

Driver’s Education

If you open a bottle of wine and say certain magic words, then both wine and stories come pouring out. I was on the patio with friends when I mentioned that I’d been taking our oldest child to driver’s education classes, and stories, like heat from the grill, radiated among us. Stories about the classes, the practice driving sessions, those early years behind the wheel, the joyous new freedom and the close calls and near misses and minor accidents, the dented fenders and bashed cars and airbags drooping in your lap, and worse. We are a wide wide country of car drivers and we love to talk about it.

When I chauffered young people home from the driver’s ed. class, the back seat filled with talk about those special driver’s ed. movies. The old blood and guts films were meant to instill fear and propel the occasional teenager over to the wastebasket, but those films have been retired in favor of what our gang of permit-holders calls the bad choices interview. In a bad choices interview, an attractive young driver pops onto the screen in close-up and describes a series of dumb decisions that point most assuredly toward disaster, while the camera slowly pulls back to reveal a wheelchair and the speaker’s no longer free and joyous body.  For certain audiences, that’s just as shocking as filmic gore from days of yore.

Out on the patio among the adults, the stories came with their own lessons, and the names should sometimes be withheld to protect the not so innocent. One sensible middle-aged fellow recalled his first deeply bad behavior in a moving car. Perhaps he was about five or six and standing on the back seat behind his mother, the driver, when he thought he’d instigate a quick game of peekaboo. He wrapped his arms around his mother’s head and clamped his little hands over her eyes—a delightful move under other circumstances, but now not so much. Our former delinquent remembers with special clarity the exact stretch of road where she pulled the car over, hoisted him briskly out of the back seat, and let the spanking commence.

A more recent case had the patio and paté crowd nodding with self-satisfied adult insight. This was the story of a young person who pulled out of his driveway, became distracted by the challenges of text messaging, and wrapped his front bumper around a telephone pole six houses away from his own home. Luckily, while the car and the telephone pole were totaled, only the young man’s pride took a beating when his neighbors rushed out and found him in the driver’s seat, still startled because the air bag had punched him in the face.

And then there were stories that took place farther from home, antics on country roads and highways where a backseat chorus of happy idiots cheered and a young driver engaged the warp engines and everyone wondered what would happen when the speedometer needle trembled past 90 or 100. There on the patio in the gathering darkness, each of us told at least one story in which he or she was either a backseat idiot or a driver pressing down hard on the gas pedal. In my story, the astonishing cornfields of central Iowa were sliding by Mike and Martin and me at 105 miles per hour. The three of us were a special kind of idiot. We were in graduate school at the time.

Broadcast by Ken Smith on September 10, 2010 • WVPE's Audio Archive
Customs & Rituals • Education • Sports & Recreation • Permalink • Printer Friendly
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