Driving lessons

I didn't get to take driver's ed in school with everyone else because I was too young. I had to wait until my second year of college which meant no Driver's ed. I got Father's ed.
My Dad hadn't been driving all that long himself. He got his first driver's license a couple of years after we landed in the US.  That would have been around 1965. So he would have been a first time driver at 45 years old. In NY state at that time a driver's license came with a warning. The first 6 months is probationary, one speeding ticket  while on probation and kiss that license goodbye. Dad got the speeding ticket, mailed in his fine and thought nothing more.  He rationalized that  the rule only applied to young drivers, not mature family men like himself.  Then the summons turned up in the mail. Mail in your driver's license, you are suspended for 6 months. When you complete driving school we'll see about giving it back. He was the only driver in the family. He parked the car in the garage and there it sat while we all went back to cycling walking.  We lived in a Hampton Bays, a village between the North and South forks of Long Island. Public transportation was non-existent. It was a hardship for everyone.

I guess he'd had it back about a year or so when he started to teach me on his Chevrolet Nomad, a big old station wagon, manual transmission of course and no power steering. The gear lever was on the steering wheel and the clutch pedal was stiff. We went to the most wide open space he could find. The parking lot for the ocean side beach, well after beach season was over. He sat silently and grumpily in the front seat while that big car bucked and heaved and shuddered as I tried to find the right way to ease out the clutch and feed it some gas and get it moving smoothly forward.  There were two poles about a thousand feet apart that I was scared to drive between them.  I knew it was ridiculous but I was still nervous.  I don't remember road practice just that first outing in the parking lot. I do remember Dad's disapproval, lots and lots of disapproval. But to his credit it was mostly non-verbal. He didn't curse or raise his voice but there was a whole lotta body language.

I failed the road test the first time I took it. It was expected. Nobody passed the first time. Even though I parallel parked and hauled that baby through the required 3 point U -turn and signalled in all the right places the examiner failed me anyway because my leg vibrated when I depressed that damn clutch pedal. Dad was probably relieved that I failed. He didn't pass first time either.

I don't remember the second test when I actually got my license or my first solo drive. Likely it would have been along Dune road - the narrow road that ran along the barrier island with the Atlantic on one side and Shinnecock  bay on the other.  No traffic, beautiful views, impossible to get lost or take a wrong turning.  You had to earn the joy though by driving across the impossibly narrow humpbacked drawbridge that connected the village to the beaches. It was the kind of narrow where you instinctively breathe in and suck everything in to make yourself smaller as if that has some effect on the size of the metal box you are sitting in. I lived in fear that the drawbridge would start to rise while I was on the incline and I would have to restart on a hill with a long line of cars behind me.

The old Nomad died on that beach road. There was a loud bang and a rift appeared in the hood where a piece of metal that had snapped off a fan blade had penetrated.  The car was sold for junk and my Dad moved up to a Chevy Impala nearly new. My sister totaled that one on the Long Island expressway.


I got my first speeding ticket on the Long Island expressway. Fortunately, for me, I was in my second year of driving and off probation.  I sent in my fine and they sent it back and demanded my appearance in court. I was nineteen and properly terrified. It seemed I was sufficiently over the speed limit that a lecture was required to impress on me the severity of my offense. Today it would be called reckless driving.

I loved speed when I was a young woman. Roads with curves and hills. Down shifting, double clutching, the combination of moves with handbrake and clutch  required to get a car moving forward on a hill without rolling backwards all made me feel like a real driver. Commuting to work and mother hood cured me of that. Commuting is tedious and mother hood took the edge right off my need for speed.

Now I'm a little old lady driver. I don't enter the intersection when the light turns orange; I drive the speed limit.  I've been known to ease over to the parking lane to let the tailgaters pass me in the 30 mph zone and I smile and wave at them when we meet up again at the next red light. 

The reluctance of the turtle

I like list making. I like order. I like imposing order on chaos. I like being able to locate a tool, a book, an item when I need it. I like control. My control. I like pulling weeds because there is an end product. I like knowing the names of birds, plants, trees. I don't remember place names. I can no longer remember the names of people. I no longer remember people. They come into and out of my life and this makes me sad. I think this is one of the reasons I keep a journal.

I like sequences. Ordering events on a timeline. Life is ephemeral Each moment slips through our grasp. OK that's silly- grasp. What is there to grasp? If I don't remember it - did it happen? If an event doesn't make a change in my brain chemistry/architecture then it didn't happen in my life.

I am a sharp knife. I cut people by my very existence. My first husband sought to blunt me by isolating me. He preferred my company when I was ill, the sharp edges blunted by weakness and vulnerability. My present husband chooses not to engage. He chooses to use me. Pick me up by the handle and use my sharp edges against the world. He makes sure he is impervious. No soft spots. Don't let the knife penetrate. My daughter is also a knife. She and I can fence with each other rapier against rapier, jousting in a prescribed manner.  Books, ideas, psychology - little sparks fly. Occasionally we slip and draw blood. We both get hurt at different times. Often we are oblivious when our knife has penetrated the other. Yet we continure to develop the footwork, the moves, the rules of engagement because we like engagement and having our moves honed.

 My son is not a knife. Not a hammer, not a whetstone - he doesn't like sword fights and knife play. He refuses to engage. Withdraws turtle like into a shell. He's a tortoise, I'm a hedgehog.
          "The elegance of the hedgehog" is the title of the book.
Perhaps I should write one and call it The Reluctance of the Turtle.

That's my story for today. Knives, turtles, hedgehogs.

August 16, 2012

I'm a survivor.  I know that about myself. I've gone to the edge and looked over and said - Nah, it ain't that bad. It will work out.

I went to a college where there were lots of bridges over narrow deep gorges. It was a pretty campus. It was also known for having a high suicide rate. When it all got be too much some jumped over, "gorging out", we called it in that cynical  college student vernacular. Every day I'd walk to class, cross a bridge and look over and down to the rocks below. It was too pretty to spoil with a smashed up body. And anyway the pressures on me were not so great - I was an ordinary kid with unexceptional talents. Simply completing 4 years was enough. All around me my compatriots were doing self destructive things. There were lots of drugs and of course the old standby - alcohol. Easy routes to self destruction and copping out. As a female I didn't have to worry about getting drafted to fight in Vietnam but I did have to be concerned about an unplanned pregnancy. Abortion was illegal back then and the pill not readily available to 18 year olds. I graduated from college at 19 years old, not knowing very much but knowing deep down in my bones that I am a survivor - I don't quit.

I had to look at that again about 10 years later. I had married young, to a guy who was essentially the boy next door, although I'd had to return to the country of my birth to find him. I made the vow "for richer for poorer, for better for worse, in sickness and in health till death do us part." My parents had remained together, although from the outside they seemed to be ill-suited so I didn't expect marriage to be easy or a bed of roses. One by one I gave up my ideals; that he would be an intellectual companion, that we would encourage each other to be bold, to take risks, that we would travel and have a diverse group of friends. He was sickly, his stomach hurt a lot and he used his pains to control me. We couldn't eat out, our diet had to be bland, no pizza no Chinese food and so on. He din't like my friends or the people I worked with. My world got smaller. I gave up job opportunities for him, I moved to cities I didn't want to live in for him. I stifled myself for him and I told myself it didn't matter. He wasn't a bad guy; he didn't drink, he didn't abuse me - until one day I woke up and I knew I would die If I continued to live in this marriage. It wasn't a question of changing, or accomodating or adapting, it was a question of survival. If I didn't leave I would die, I would have an un-intentional car accident or I would get sick. So I left. Just - like - that. I found a place to live- took half of our savings account and moved out. Started over. Tapped into that core that believes in survival.

August 22, 2012

It's 2:15pm Eastern Standard Time, August 22 in the year 2012. I am 60 years old, soon to be 61. But that is not what this is really about, is it? Clock time. How many minutes, how many seconds do we get to live? And of those finite number for how many are we really alive and fully conscious as opposed to just functioning, respiring, digesting metabolizing. I could go down the path of what it means to be conscious, conscious of self, the entity that resides somewhere in this body? the head that watches, thinks, calculates and evaluates. I could speculate about biochemical pathways and synapses and chemical messengers being transmitted and received. But that's not what this is about.

Where I am in time. From a biological point of view I'm finished. I've reached adulthood, procreated, reproduced myself and my mate and raised offspring to adulthood. If we were to disappear from the face of the earth tomorrow they would survive, they have the skills. In a Darwinian sense I'm done. In a philosophical sense every day hence is a bonus. Each day a gift to be savored and enjoyed.

I was privileged to observe the nest of 2 wrens. They built it in 24 hours in a hanging plant directly outside my kitchen window. They abandoned it, or so it seemed for 5 days and on the 6th day I peeked in and spied an egg or two. In total the female laid 4 eggs. Exactly 15 days after hatching 4 tiny birds flew the nest. Those were a busy 15 days, a constant to-ing and fro-ing of adults carrying spiders and other insects. When the nestlings finally fledged 3 of them flew up and away into the trees but the last one fluttered down into the grass and chirped feebly. He had feathers fully quilled but there was down on his head. By my count one egg hatched 2 days later than the others. I hovered anxiously watching out for neighborhood cats and other predators as did Mom and Pop wren. They sat in the nearby bushes and trilled loudly and longly and aggressively. Wrens are tiny birds, smaller than a  house sparrow with a voice that belies their size. This is what it feels like to  turn your teenagers loose in the world - a 16 year old with a freshly minted driver's license. They are as vulnerable as this tiny wren. He blinked a couple of times and hop-hop-hopped  into the cover of some hostas. A few minutes later the azalea bushes began to quiver. At least he was off the ground.

That's where I am today - a human being who has the time and the curiosity to watch a pair of birds build a nest and then observe on a daily basis as the family grows, develops and leaves.