Get off the road, quick!
I passed the written driver’s test. No worries. I didn’t previously know that in Wisconsin you are required to report an accident to authorities if it causes $1000 or more in damage—but now I know, and apparently that makes us all safer. Or something.
(What I don’t get is how you’re supposed to know. Call your insurance adjuster, then call the cops? Weird.)
The me and driving story isn’t so much funny as it is pathetic, honestly. I waited until I was a senior in high school to take driver’s ed. The guy teaching it wasn’t the brightest candle in the candelabra, but he was a patient and conscientious teacher, which was a good thing as I was about the nervousest student driver you ever did see.
I wasn’t bad at it. I was very good at reading and reacting to traffic. I just wasn’t very good at controlling the damn car. I am, shall we say, not terribly physically gifted, and driving takes a lot of coordinated movements that were just plain unfamiliar. I got better toward the end of the course—I will never forget the red Saturn wagon that cut me off trying to get to the exit to the Beltline; I handled the freakin’ moron (I mean really, cutting off a student driver?) just fine—but I surely could have used more practice time.
My parents duly offered same. But my parents clung stubbornly to their stick-shift cars, and I just could not manage the damn clutch. I managed a couple of shifts of a long drive to Indiana with my dad in the car, although when we stopped to have lunch I had to unclamp my seized-up fingers from the wheel. Highway driving, not so much with the clutch.
When we got back, though, I made the mistake of practicing some in-town driving with my mom. Who was nervouser than I was, and I was plenty nervous enough for two.
I was driving Gus-Gus the little gray Nissan (Mitsubishi, hat-tip to my sister), a low-slung critter that always had trouble getting into our driveway without scraping its undercarriage on the sidewalk. Mom hated that. She never failed to yell at my dad when he did it, and she yelled at me when I did it—
—which scared me so bad I missed the brake with my foot and drove right into the front yard.
No harm done to me, Mom, house, Gus-Gus, driveway, or even plants (Mom had the sidewalk edged in monkey grass liriope, thanks again at the time, and that stuff is totally indestructible). But I haven’t been behind the wheel of a car since.
First lesson Tuesday afternoon. Word of advice? Stay off the Madison roads, ’k?