ventures in teenage driving
I am teaching my son how to drive, and apparently I’ve forgotten
everything I learned since the last time I taught a child of mine
to drive.
As I got into the car and handed over the keys to Hunter, I
thought,
”
Okay, what do I do now?
”
ventures in teenage driving
I am teaching my son how to drive, and apparently I’ve forgotten everything I learned since the last time I taught a child of mine to drive.
As I got into the car and handed over the keys to Hunter, I thought, “Okay, what do I do now?”
And panicked, for just an instant.
Then I remembered that I had done this before, and could certainly do it again.
Only there were some differences between this time and the last time. Four years ago, Ross had been eager to drive; Hunter not so much. In fact, Hunter had never so much as turned the key in the ignition until just a few months ago.
This, I had to admit, made me nervous.
Hunter has had zero interest in cars and not much more in going places by himself. He has always been my homebody, the boy who was happy playing in the corner with Legos, while his brother always wanted to do things, go places, see people.
Hunter doesn’t have these same motivations. So it’s hard to figure out what the motivation should be. I suggested to him that it might be a good idea to get his license before he goes to college in the fall.
“Do you want to do this?” I asked him point-blank.
“Well, yeah,” he said. “I’m just lazy.”
Kids are less eager to drive these days than they used to be. When I was in high school, everyone wanted to get behind the wheel, and they were more than ready by the time they were 16.
These days, it’s a little different. The roads seem more dangerous. The stakes are higher, if a bad accident should occur and other people are involved. And lingering in my mind are memories of another 18-year-old kid in Aromas who died while driving to work, a friend’s son who fell asleep at the wheel.
Maybe it’s not so much my son, but it’s me who has some hesitation.
At any rate, we are now going out just about every day and working on something: three-point turns, going 55 miles an hour on the faster roads, parking and so forth.
He is doing pretty well, but I was afraid at first that I had infected him with my nervousness. He drove very slowly and carefully in white-knuckle fashion. Very unlike any teenage boy in a car I’d seen before.
Now, though, after a few hours of instruction, he is starting to loosen up a little, which unfortunately has translated to abrupt stops and a tendency to go a little fast around the turns, slinging me, the passenger, into the door.
“Um, need to slow down a little bit,” I say as casually as I can.
There was a recent day when I had him drive to the end of a road and then turn around to go back. He’s still a little fuzzy on the concept of reverse, and so when it came to backing up, he applies the accelerator a bit too much.
I looked behind us, where a group of mailboxes loomed. Luckily, he stopped in time.
“Um, you almost hit those mailboxes,” I said.
“But I didn’t,” he helpfully pointed out.
“It was pretty close.”
I smoldered for a bit and then decided, well, let it go. He didn’t hit anything. It was just a brief moment of terror on my part, which perhaps is not important in the scheme of things.
Today, we’re going to tackle putting gas in the car. This should be an adventure. Wish me luck.
