Learning to Drive

Right after my sophomore year of high school, I did my only summer class and my only class at a public high school. Every morning for about a month, I would ride my bike to a high school about four or five miles away. We had a class, did a simulation car (this is in 1983 so it’s not anything near what is being done today), and did practice driving on a practice course. The last week of the course we took our newly learned skills on to the road. I found out I had a natural lead foot. I wasn’t the normal timid new driver and kept speeding up instead of backing off the accelerator.

A friend of my parents offered to let me use her small car to take my driver’s test so that I had less trouble with parallel parking. I passed my test but had no vehicle. My dad had told me that I would not be driving his car. So, a couple weeks after I had my driver’s license, I was surprised when my dad offered to teach me to drive a stick-shift with our family’s VW van. At first I blew him off because I thought he was kidding but he asked me again a couple days later. I said sure. He says we’ll do it at 7am on Saturday. I was like, “what?” and he says, “do you want to learn or what?” Well, I did and so for two Saturday’s in a row, we went down to a huge parking lot close to our home and then we’d go around the block and I learned how to drive a car with a manual transmission. Later I had to learn how to shift without a clutch because our van used to break clutch cables all the time.

Like most kids, I was proud that I could drive and would do it any chance I got. At church, I would go out to the car long before we were ready to go home and sit in the driver’s seat so that other people would know that I could drive. 

It was another year before I bought my own vehicle.