Driving

In a few weeks my son Alex will be taking his driver’s test.

If all goes well, by the end of the month there will be another licensed driver in my family.

I can barely contain my excitement. You can tell, can’t you.

Finally, there will be someone we can send to go pick up dinner when my wife and I don’t want to cook or who can haul himself to religious education class, provided he remembers to park several blocks away from Holy Rosary’s parking lot on a Wednesday night. Even I have nightmares about that parking lot on a snowy night.

For the past several months, my wife and I have been going out driving with Alex.

I am not sure if it is that Alex is just a better driver at this point than his sister was, or that in the past half decade I have become more accepting of the inevitability of my own eventual demise, so that I am much more laid back and mellow.

Considering how mellow most drivers education instructors are, I am sure it has something to do with knowing that being tense and stressful will put you in the ground faster than a teenager inching their way through a parking lot.

I was pondering this the other day, as I was having Alex drive to Rib Lake and back in the rapidly approaching dusk. We had some time to kill before meeting a friend for a fish fry and Alex needed the practice of driving at highway speed.

Part of me got to thinking that I was probably unfair to my daughter, Beth, when I took her out driving. It occurred to me that the most stressful time driving with Beth was in the ice and snow, and her tendency to want to stay so far to the right when making a turn that I would fear ending up in snowbanks. While I still break into the occasional cold sweat thinking about those first weeks of driving with my daughter, in fairness as someone with a birthday at the end of May, Beth first started driving in the snow and slop of a Wisconsin winter.

By comparison, Alex’s first driving lesson was in the empty parking lot at Medford Area Senior High School on a clear, dry summer night.

As Beth grew in skill, the weather got nicer and by the time she was ready for her test we were on the cusp of summer. Alex fortunately got past his initial jitters when road conditions were still good in the fall before winter weather hit.

There is still some fine tuning that needs to take place when it comes to Alex’s driving, but that comes mostly with time and practice.

Often in life we forget how many times we stumbled and fell before we were able to run and climb and jump.

Each winter, I spend time helping with the youth curling program. Inevitably there will be some youngsters who barely outweigh the rock and whose feet will slip out from beneath them. There will also be some older boys who have to be reminded not to go body surfing in any slippery surface they can find.

It is remarkable to me how they can quickly get back up and shake it off, while those of us with more gray than brown in our beards would need a stretcher or at least a couple of strong teammates to get us back up and a brandy old fashioned or two before we headed back out on the ice.

In life, lessons are learned only through doing them. No one jumps behind the wheel of a car able to steer their way through an obstacle course or at least not be intimidated by merging onto a busy freeway. Heck, even with decades of driving under my belt, I would just as soon be a passenger when it comes to driving around Chicago or navigating in the Twin Cities.

It is inevitable that we will make mistakes along the way, like missing the turn on a highway and ending up in Tomahawk rather than Abbotsford. It is also inevitable that we will learn from those mistakes and it will make us better for having had that experience.

Some day my children will be taking their own children out to teach them drive. The best I can hope, is that they remember some of lessons I taught them and that they remember to breathe through the abject terror. They will get better. It just takes time and practice.

Brian Wilson is News Editor at The Star News.