Let’s talk about driving. I hate it and have spent much of my adult life actively avoiding it.
It began as a lack of enthusiasm. I was nowhere among my peers clamoring for the license they regarded as freedom. Freedom is a relative term and I’ve never once found it in a car.
I finally got around to taking my driving test when I was twenty, and failed. The next time I failed, too. The next time — OK, there’s a word limit to these columns, so I’ll cut to the chase: I failed the driving test six times. And, while disappointed, sad truth? I really didn’t care. I suspect the root cause was, and remains, my complete lack of a sense of direction. Even now, with Siri as my co-pilot, I usually have no idea where I am.
In the 1980s I moved to St. Louis for graduate school. As I lived within walking distance of the university, driving wasn’t an issue. But, still, I had to get around for errands and socializing. The bus, while it allowed me to read, required planning and was hardly destination specific, so I got a pair of roller skates. I had a job a few miles from home base and skated to and for professionally and socially. It was great exercise and afforded me enormous flexibility. One day, enroute to work, I was pulled over by a policeman on Clayton Road for “reckless rolling” (his words, not mine). I was trying out tricks. After that I confined my practice sessions (delightful to me!) to Forest Park, the St. Louis equivalent to Central Park in New York.
But fall, and then winter, came. St. Louis doesn’t get much snow, and, with my Minnesota blood, it never seemed all that cold. Still, it got dark just as it does here, and skating at night is scary. So, I got a moped because it had a headlight and, in those days, didn’t require a license to operate.
My moped cost $200.00, purchased from somebody who’d advertised in the classifieds. It was fire-engine red, had a one-gallon gas tank that seemed to last forever. What I loved most was its name emblazoned across the fuel tank: Swinger. The smaller print revealed that it came from J.C. Penney. Along with my skates, I was officially a two-vehicle family of one. Ritzy, I know.
But then tragedy struck. First, my beloved Swinger was stolen, and next, the teaching job at a school a mile from my apartment I’d really wanted, and got, had the audacity to move eight miles away — freeway included. This was too much for roller skates or my replacement moped. I had to get a car. But first I had to get a license. I was twenty-six.
My downstairs neighbor, Diane, who seemed high whether she was on drugs or not, agreed to give me driving lessons. There’s nothing like desperation to kick up the learning curve. After a few weeks’ tutorial with stoned Diane, I took the driving test in her smoky car. When my barrel-chested examiner told me I’d passed, I reached over to hug him. Flinching, he said, “Don’t touch me.”
So, a car at last: A 1978 Dodge Dart (again from somebody who’d advertised in the classifieds). It was the color of a russet potato — handy, as it camouflaged the rust. I liked that car. It had neither power steering nor power breaks, no bells and no whistles, only an AM radio, which worked fine. I drove it for six years until it died. By then I was living and working in St. Paul and hanging out with fellow professionals. One evening at a party a woman, who’d just gotten a BMW, a “Bimmer,” was hectoring me about my “clunky car.” When I’d had enough of her overt nastiness, I met her at her game and asked if her Bimmer was paid for.
Since then, I’ve had a string of cars, none of which made me like driving. Driving requires one to focus outward, and I’m not good at that. I much prefer focusing inward, thinking about things, as opposed to looking at them.
I’m fortunate to work at home where my commute is a flight of stairs. My current car, purchased new in 2010, recently turned over 50,000 miles, many of them attributed to my daughters.
Roz Chast, The New Yorker cartoonist, and fellow vehophobe, summed it up perfectly: Driving is either stressful (I’m lost) or boring (I’m not lost). Sometimes you just can’t win.
– Dorothy
