The following essay was written by my son Carl.

DRIVING LESSONS WITH DAD
Recollections for Father’s Day


My Dad gave me my first driving lessons when I was five. In those days, we lived in a house situated on a flag lot behind the two neighboring houses, with a long driveway between the lots in front. As daylight seeped away and the air began to cool, my brother Bobby and I, anticipating Dad’s imminent return from work, would go out to play in the front yard. When we spotted the tan Plymouth Duster stopping at the mailbox at the end of the driveway, we would run down to meet Dad.
Dad’s Duster was a relic from Mom and Dad’s college days. The seats were upholstered with perforated black vinyl that burned your skin on hot days. The car had black sports stripes and a long, bulging hood, and its grill bared a wide, steely grin. Looking back, it must have struck our neighbors a little strange that my Dad -- a risk-averse math major -- drove this car that was clearly meant for Steve McQueen or some Tarantino film anti-hero. But there was a time when all cars were muscle cars.
Arriving at the end of the driveway, Dad would tell us whose turn it was to drive and tell us if we got anything in the mail, like a notice that we might have already won $1,000,000. We never understood why Dad didn’t think those notices was so exciting. Growing up and learning the true nature of the promise of Publisher’s Clearinghouse was, I think, more of a disappointment to me than learning the true nature of Santa Claus.
On days when it was my turn to drive, I would sit on his lap with my little hands grasping 5 and 7 o’clock on the leather-wrapped wheel, the hum of the engine tickling my hands as we coasted up the driveway. We would park the car just out of reach of the dropping berries from the mulberry tree, and rush into the house for dinner.
These laptop driving lessons ended, of course, when I got a little bigger and could no longer fit on Dad’s lap. But my driving lessons resumed when I was fifteen. One day, after work, Dad took me over to the parking lot of the neighborhood church. He told me to get behind the wheel. He told me to just guide the car on its automatic coast around the parking lot and to stop from time to time, in order to allow me to get used to the steering wheel and the brake pedal. As we meandered around the light posts in the parking lot, the vibrations from the idling engine that I could feel in my hands and the floor under my feet could have just as easily come from the excitement I felt to enter the gate to the exclusive club of drivers. This was no club for mere boys: it was time to cancel my subscription to Boys’ Life.
Soon thereafter, I got my learner’s permit, and Dad would let me drive home from my basketball games. Sometimes when I was frustrated as a result of my poor play, Dad would drive instead so we could talk about the game. On those nights, he would remind me that my shot was just as good -- if not a better -- than anyone else’s on the team and I shouldn’t get discouraged if I missed a couple. And he believed it. And because he believed it, I did too. Mom was reassuring as well, but I expected Mom to think I was good -- even if Mom could somehow surgically repair the peculiar cataract that causes a hallowed glow to surround her children and obscure their faults, she never played basketball, so she really couldn’t know the difference between When I was playing well and when I was playing poorly. But Dad, was a legitimate player. I had seen him play as the go-to guy on the city recreation league. In fact, once Grandma had pulled me aside and confided in me a fact that Dad would never have told me: Dad was the star basketball player on his high school team, was an academic All-American athlete, and turned down several offers to play in college. So Dad had serious basketball credibility. Besides, he would never tell us we were good at something we aren’t good at. Mom and Dad are really a complementary team in that way -- Mom gives us confidence that we can do anything and Dad gives us direction to something we are actually good at.
Aside from allowing me to drive on trips back from basketball games, Dad also would bring me along on Saturday errands to practice driving. These errands usually followed my early morning driver’s training sessions that the DMV requires you to take with a “certified” driver’s education instructor, who, in my case, turned out to be a disturbing old man who wanted to park the car more than drive it, and had a creepy habit of resting his hand on my knee or shoulder during long expositions on proper driving.
Once I had completed the required hours with the certified instructor (which couldn’t happen to soon), my father was my main driving instructor. One Saturday, driving the family’s big blue Chevy Astro minivan, I forgot to check my blindspot before changing lanes. I sideswiped a low-profile El Camino. There was no real damage: some paint rubbed off the Astro’s bumper onto the other man’s car. My Dad got out and offered the other driver a matter-of-fact apology. The victim of my recklessness shrugged off any damage, saying he would rub the paint off with a rag.
I’m sure with anyone else, the other driver would not have been so nonchalant, but like nearly everyone else, he proved susceptible to Dad’s contagious aura of reasonableness and good humor. In fact, the only person who seems able to resist Dad’s reasonableness is Mom. On occasion, Dad’s reasonableness sometimes caused Mom more grief than she would have felt if he had actually gotten angry. I remember one of their fiercest arguments they ever had was about parking too far away from some restaurant, and even in that discussion, Mom was responsible for the lion’s share of the arguing. In the end, it has probably been the combination of her tenacity and his temperance that has made their marriage -- and our family -- so happy. Without her tenacity we probably wouldn’t have accomplished much, and without his easy-going temperament we probably would not have enjoyed it.
* * *
Around the time I got my license, Dad leased an Acura Legend that was the nicest car we had ever had in our family. Dad commuted 45-minutes each way to his office at the time, and I think the leather seats, automatic temperature setting, CD-player (a novelty in those days) and sunroof made it mostly bearable. I attended seminary for church at 6 in the morning Monday through Friday. Mom would drop me off and Dad would pick me up at 6:45 to drive me to school. Sometimes he would let me drive the way to school. I don’t think school was exactly on the way to his office, but maybe he enjoyed the time together as much as I did. Or maybe it was because it allowed him to stop at Winchell’s donuts for apple-fritters under the pretense of rewarding me for attending seminary. We would listen to “Kevin and Bean in the Morning,” who would make crank calls and read stories from the Weekly World News about things like a psychic who said she could use her spiritual powers to return a woman’s virginity. Those kind of things were really beyond me at that time, but if I had any other father, I expect I would have received a lecture me about how the crass hijinks of Kevin and Bean was not really an appropriate entertainment to follow scripture study. But Dad has a generous sense of humor and a tolerant nature.
Sometimes, if my friend Sam missed the bus we would pick him up on the way to school too. Sam was a kid with quixotic fantasies that he was a hip-hop street-urchin and a baller: in fact, Sam came from a fairly well-to-do Persian family and was a terrible basketball player. I liked Sam because, despite his pretenses, he was pretty innocent and well-meaning. Sam liked to pretend to be annoyed that we didn’t listen to any hip-hop stations. But whenever Stings “Fields of Gold” was playing, he would comment on the “sweet” bass in the Acura Legend’s stereo system, and request that we turn up the volume.
One summer afternoon, I was driving the minivan home from working out with the basketball team. I stopped for fast food on my way home, and ordered one of those fountain drinks that contains enough drink to quench the thirst of a small African village, and secured it between my legs. As I began to pull out of the drive-thru, I noticed that my view to the left was obstructed by a large signpost, so the prospect of turning left was a bit daunting. Mustering all the logic my 16-year old mind could, I determined that my two options were either to just take the chance that there might be something I can’t see and go for it anyway, or spend the rest of my life languishing in a minivan at the end of a drive-thru. Just as I pulled out of the drive-thru and entered the street, I heard a screech of tires. I turned my head, but before I could process what I saw -- SLAM! My head ricocheted off the window and root beer sprayed all over the car and my skinny, shirtless torso.
My Mom’s first questions on the phone were whether I was okay, followed by whether everyone else was okay. She picked me up. A tow truck came to pick up the Astro. She said I would have to be more careful. My Dad, who carried the responsibility for overseeing our finances and auto insurance, really never mentioned anything about the accident.
I was honestly a bit surprised by Mom’s measured response. She later explained why she had been able to be so calm. Apparently Dad had picked her up from a few accidents before, and she was simply echoing his response on those occasions. Dad downplays his ability to keep his cool at these times, telling a story about once when he had sternly given Mom a lecture about filling up the gas tank after he had to take gas to her standing in the emergency lane of an Los Angeles freeway, only to run out of gas on the road himself the two days after. His implication is simply that he was forced to learn, when dealing with someone else’s mistakes the meaning of that phrase: “there, but for the grace of God, go I as well.”
* * *
For the most part my driving record in the years since that accident has been spotless. In fact, living in Manhattan the last four years, I seldom drive at all. But not a day goes by that I don’t use lessons I learned while driving with my Dad.