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e passed a
new milestone in my household when school started this month. It feels
more like a millstone around my neck as I think of the tremendous change
in lifestyle it will encompass.
The high
school where my 15-year-old is a sophomore has decided to take away her
health class and, lo and behold, give her driver’s education classes for
a semester.
As the father of a little girl who
has not missed a day of school in about nine years, I must protest that
she continue with health classes and stay as far as possible from any
class involving driving the family automobile.
All right, so her driver’s education
class does not involve actually getting behind the wheel of an actual
automobile. The mere thought of my child, the little red-haired tot I
once held in one hand, driving a car is more than enough to turn the
rest of my hair gray.
She has relayed that if she passes
the written test in her driver’s education class, she can use it to
waive her written test at Motor Vehicle Services when she applies for
her driving permit.
How did it come to this? Whatever
happened to that little girl who cried when I drifted off to a corner to
build something with her Giant Loc-Blocks? How can that little girl
possibly even think of driving a car?
I have not grown so senile that here
in my 40s I cannot remember when I took driver’s education classes in
high school.
There seemed to be a prerequisite
for all driver’s ed teachers to have had a gazillion accidents. It
seemed that every time they spoke of an accident, it was as if the
teachers themselves had the accident.
That applied to nearly every
accident the instructor discussed - including the ones where no one
walked away. But driving was different when I learned to drive.
First of all, the cars were all
bigger back then. Plus a lot of them had things in them called seat
belts, which some of us even wore on the occasions we remembered they
were there.
This, of course, I would explain to
my daughter as learning to drive in the dark ages when I was a teenager
in the 1970s.
“Yes, dear, we did have cars when I
was in high school. . . . No, dear, it was long ago, but there were no
dinosaurs around when I learned to drive . . . except for the Sinclair
dinosaur. No. Never mind. There were no real dinosaurs when I learned to
drive.”
In the early 1970s, it was fun to
drive. The speed limits were 60, 70 m.p.h. and higher on some roads. We
could pile into the car and go to the drive-in restaurant, or the
drive-in theater - where they showed a movie on a giant screen and you
watched it from your car.
Then you could go to the food shack
and pay an enormous amount of money for some lousy food - no, there were
no video tapes then, or VCRs. If you wanted to see a movie without
commercials, you had to go to a theater.
But I digress, as
Stephen Dedalus
used to say.
Driving was great in the early
1970s. You may not believe this, but gasoline was about a quarter a
gallon for the expensive stuff. No, really, I’m not making that up.
We could fill the tanks of our old
gas guzzlers for about eight bucks and drive all week. When we got our
licenses, we’d put our money together and fill the tank and drive around
and around and around and then around some more.
Sometimes we’d get together with
whoever we were hanging around with at the time and take a ride to
Albino Village or up to
Monk’s Castle.
No, they weren’t night clubs. The
Albino Village was a place I never actually saw. But we planned to go
there a lot of times.
You see, you take this road along
the river, go over a bridge then down a long road and then under a
highway, and after you come out of the underpass, that was where
everybody said the Albino Village was.
Everybody knew that if you went into
the underpass, you had to go to the end before you could turn around.
And the only time we ever heard
about somebody who went to Albino Village was when they came back and
told us about how scared they were and how lucky to get out before they
were grabbed by the Albino people.
But I was at the Monk’s Castle,
once. I don’t remember who drove, but it was probably Jerry in that
great big Pontiac he drove, with Louie and Cindy and maybe Cathy and her
sister Coleen and Barbara and me one day after Thanksgiving. We parked
the Pontiac and headed to the abandoned building that did look like a
castle.
Really, all we knew about this
building was what we had heard from the other kids. Undaunted, we
tarried up the hill for a closer look, passing signs that said,
Keep Out This Means You Kids
that caused us to tarry even slower.
The dry autumn leaves crunched like
church bells under our sneakered feet.
It had looked a lot bigger from far
away. There was no one here, and no one to chase us away from a closer
look. We returned to the car .
And that reminds me . . . the
stories my driver’s ed instructor told me about being on the road were
not nearly as scary as really being out there driving responsibly with a
load of people in the car.
What is most scary about all this
driver’s ed stuff is that a long time ago, Cindy and Louie got married
and their son, little Louie, I guess, is probably out on the road right
now heading with his friends to Albino Village or Monk’s Castle but, of
course, not with my daughter, who will be taking an extra semester of
health classes from now until she’s 30.
Copyright © 1997, 1999 by Anthony Buccino, All Rights
Reserved
This essay was adapted
from
Rambling Round - Inside
& Outside at the Same Time
First published in Rambling Round - Oct. 9, 1997, in
The Independent Press of Bloomfield, Worrall Community
Newspapers.
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