secret 8 - oooh, i'm driving my life away

i had some really weird thoughts as a kid. like that eventually, you wouldn't need to pay attention to those pavement markings which signified a no passing zone, because you would get so experienced at driving that you would just know when someone was coming. luckily, by the time i turned 14 and got my license, that wacky thought had gone.

yup, you read that correctly. i grew up in a place where you get to drive, fair and square, lawfully and legally, at age 14 (brief pause here for anyone with a 14-year-old to come to since they have undoubtedly fainted). it was, i'll grant you, a learner's permit. which meant that you could drive between sunup and sundown, but that if you drove "after hours," you needed an adult in the car. and by an adult, i think they meant parent, as i don't recall any of us trying to hang out with 18-year-olds after dark. at least not for the purpose of driving.

but i digress.

when i turned 16, the license converted to a regular driver's license, where i could drive (and did) at all hours of the day or night. because a) there was nothing to run into out there on the prairies and b) there was nothing better to do out there on the prairies. it could get a little dull out there on the prairies. contrary to the picture presented by laura ingalls wilder and that show where michael landon played her dad.

before you get your license, you have to attend driver's ed classes. our driver's ed classes were taught by the elementary school principal whose name i don't recall and wouldn't want to use here anyway, but i can picture him and his rather creepy, freakishly heavy black mustache to this day. during the driving part of the classes, i was paired with a girl named snow. snow, as you might imagine, had suffered some brain damage from all of the dope clearly smoked by her mother during pregnancy--because you'd have to be high to name your kid snow, right? she had a sister named spring and a brother named rusty or rock or something like that. very naturey that family.

anyway.

snow had clearly not been paying attention during the classes, so when we went for the driving bit of the course, mr. mustache had to save us from certain death on hairpin gravel road curves more than once with the little brake that had been installed on the passenger side of the car. his car surely forever had my fingernail marks embedded in that little handle on the door, where i clutched it in fear for my life while snow drove.

since i had been practicing driving already for ages in my dad's old blue chevette (later totaled by my sister at the age of 12), i passed the driving part of driver's ed with flying colors. and then it was time to take my driver's test.

the driver's test people came to town once or twice a month and camped out at the city office. you went in and took a written test (which a blindfolded monkey could pass) and then, if you were new, you had to go out for a little drive with the examiner--BYOV--bring your own vehicle. i had been saddled with lurch, our elderly station wagon--picture the one from that chevy chase vacation movie--only dark blue with faux wood side panels, not green like the one in the movie.

now this car had been dubbed lurch because of its tendency to die on you whenever you slowed down (and definitely when you stopped, like at a stop sign). it would then lurch to a stop. and you would spend the next five minutes turning the key, furiously pumping the gas pedal and begging it out loud to start.

naturally, this happened to me at a four-way stop right in front of my grandma's house right by the school. lurch died and i  pumped the gas pedal and begged it to start again. which it only did after about 38 tries by which time the sweat was pouring off of me from both nervousness and the sheer exertion of getting the damn thing started again. the examiner, not even remotely able trying to stifle her laughter, put me through a few more paces and then directed me back to the city office, saying as we pulled up there and she wiped the tears of laughter that were streaming down her face that i had passed the test and that if that was the car i was going to have to drive, i DESERVED that driver's license.

i think i should probably take a page from spudballoo and get a formal grudge book and scrawl my parents' names there for making me take lurch to my driver's test. i guess they wanted me to really earn it. and i did and i've been driving ever since.