My youngest daughter got her driver’s license last week. Actually it is her restricted license. Now she can go where she needs to and she can run errands for me. I think she has been to Hobbs Home Center at least twice a day every day.
I have been through this before. My two older children survived getting their license unscathed. I only turned partially gray with them. And this one should have been easy. She’s been driving since she was about 10. But the other two went to driver’s school and this one didn’t. And it showed. She learned to drive like her dad.
One of the first times I remember driving with Jimmy was in his brand new truck. We were driving up to the lake. He was not speeding. But he wasn’t staying in his lane, and he was not watching the road. Talk about distracted driving. I mean, I hadn’t ever lived in the country. I was used to interstates and expressways. He was scaring me to death. About the third time I hollered at him to watch the road he pulled over. He told me to drive. He was too busy checking out everybody’s crops. I was relieved but scared to death. I mean, it was a brand new truck. But that became the norm. I just got used to driving at certain times of the year: when the crops were coming out of the ground, while they were growing, and right before they were harvested. Yeah, pretty much all the time.
I didn’t mind. I enjoy driving. And I knew that we would be safe. But I have come to know how he’s going to drive.
He will take a right turn into oncoming traffic. He does pay attention if there is a car there. There have been times I thought he would hit the ditch on the other side of the road when he is turning right. He always drives in the middle of the road or into the other lane. My dad used to say “well you pay taxes on both sides of the road”. He hurries and gets over if there is some on-coming traffic. And he won’t stop at a stop sign if it’s a four-way stop. If he’s turning right he will treat a stop-sign as a yield. Yeah, he’s not a good example for a new driver.
In fact, my daughter didn’t pass her driver’s test the first time she took it. She didn’t pass because she couldn’t parallel park. She didn’t pass because she didn’t know how to do a turnabout. She didn’t pass because she hit a curb or hit a car or anything like that. She didn’t pass because she rolled through a stop sign. She argued with the examiner. She assured him that she had indeed stopped at the sign. He informed her that she did not make a complete stop. When she got in the car she told me she didn’t know you had to.
The examiner gave her a list of things that he was looking for. He explained to her that when she stopped at a stop sign she needed to count, “one thousand, two thousand, three thousand”. She fussed at me that I hadn’t told her all of these things. I mentioned that I hadn’t taught her brother or sister how to drive, I paid someone to do that. That guy’s main job is to teach these kids the rules, the laws of driving. I told her that there would be no way that her dad could pass a driver’s test, I probably couldn’t pass a driver’s test. That was not very reassuring to her.
She didn’t drive again until the day she retook her test. She passed and immediately became an expert. That’s the way kids are. Oh, wait, that’s the way we are too.