Everlasting Youth

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A new place, new people, new job. New should be fun and exciting, right? If fun and exciting are euphemisms for petrifying and "outside-of-comfort zone", then that sounds about right.

The secret to everlasting youth (as if I would know) is fear. Fear is usually associated with learning something new or pushing yourself to a new level, like high rates or racing. You do not have to go skydiving to experience fear. You can find fear in the most ordinary things.

As a teenager, I feared driving. Truly, deeply feared. But I feared driving not because of the possibility of dying. I feared driving because it made me feel dumb, real dumb.

My learn-to-drive experience began the same as the experience of many other kids at school. My parents had sent me to the local driving school where the class spent three whole Saturdays watching driving videos from the 1980s and listening to the old cranky instructor gripe about life. The driving school package also included three driving with an instructor sessions in those awful cars with “Student Driver” written all over them.

These sessions were the beginning of my fear of driving. My instructor was a nice middle-aged woman who, in the long-run, was totally unhelpful. I escaped each session unscathed, but with very little confidence in my abilities. I truly believe my instructor thought her job was not to teach, but to sit, lay back, and pray really hard that “Student Driver” signs on the car were a fair enough warning to all other cars on the road.

Three of these sessions went by in a fearful, anxiety-filled blur, and I was now on my own. Correction--I was now on my own ..with my parents, that is, with my dad. My mom is not the most confident driver and  probably secretly suffers from some of the same fears of driving that I do. So driving with my mom was out of the question.

I feared driving, but it wasn’t until I had to practice driving with my dad did I passionately hate driving. Not only was I not a confident or really, to be honest, competent driver, but now throw in the typical parent-teenager tensions and we had an explosion that was barely containable inside of a 1994 Toyota Camry. My dad who had every reason to be fearful for his life only exacerbated the tensions by sitting in the passenger seat, ready for impact with his hands tightly gripping the door handle and his legs locked and jammed against the front. He would bark orders to turn here, drive slower, brake earlier, and ask, in a nagging tone, “Did you check your mirrors first?”

Although our car didn’t have any “Student driver” signs, I felt as if it would have been better with those signs rather than have all the other drivers peering into our car to get a glimpse of this person who clearly didn’t know how to drive.

The best lesson with my dad came one weekday evening when he insisted that I practice driving. We drove around town for ten or fifteen minutes with no incident. Then, somewhere I missed a turn, and we were driving on a one lane backcountry road, which was actually Dougherty Road before they developed and expanded the road. By now, it was dark and this road had no lights.

The road had several curves and with each curve, my dad, still holding his impact-ready position, would tell me to slow down. Soon, I was driving at a snail’s pace, but that didn’t bother me. What I had angst about was the number of cars following us. I could see their headlights in the rearview mirror, and I saw the car behind us flash his headlights, signaling me to pull over. He did this several times. Each time my dad told me to ignore him and to keep driving forward. I really wanted to pull out, but everytime I saw a turnout, I was either too late or too timid to act.

This drive continued on for at least a lifetime and a half, with me feeling dumber and more embarrassed every minute. Finally, I saw light, a traffic light, at the end of the tunnel. Welcome back to civilization. As the road widened and split into two lanes, all the cars behind me now passed me, and I was too timid to see whether  the drivers were glaring at me. I breathed a sigh of relief and thought I was in the clear when I realized that a police car was following me with flashing lights! Oh no! I didn’t even have a driving license and I was getting pulled over already?! I felt horrified and deeply embarrassed.

As I rolled down my window, the police officer peered in and was surprised to find a daughter and father duo in the middle of a perfectly-innocent learn-to-drive lesson. The officer explained that someone had phoned in a drunk driver, and the officer had positioned himself at the end of Dougherty Road, ready to catch this drunk driver, that is, to catch me! After a few understanding glances at my dad, the officer wished me safe driving and let me go. At the time, I was simply miserable. Who gets pulled over for driving sober and driving so poorly as to be mistaken for a drunk driver?

That was the lowest point in my fear for driving. From that point, things started to look up. I failed the driving test twice, but passed on the third try. With enough time and practice over several years, experience and confidence began to replace my fear of driving. I no longer have to ask my passengers to help me keep an eye on the road and let me know if I am clear. In fact, now I actually enjoy driving. As for parallel parking,
however, that’s a whole other story.