Four Wheeled Freedom

Being an American parent requires a lot of letting go.  It seems like you spend your child's life letting go and you wonder what if anything you ever get to hold on to.  Maybe it is simply the memories.  We certainly can't hold on to our children, if we did they would never fly.  They would never become the self-sufficient adults they must become in order to survive.  I suppose every species confronts the same dilemma.   The only difference is for most the developmental period is much shorter.  A bear for example would raise and see its cub leave in a year, an elephant in two.  Yet for a human being the time goes on and on as one stage turns to the next.  For most of us we will spend a good quarter of our life raising our children.  Arguably the time really only ends upon our own death.

There is one frightening period of development all parents know we are destined for.  Sometimes we like to pretend it won't happen but it will.  It is running at us like a semi-truck five hours behind schedule.  It is joined at the hip with everything we strive for, noble qualities like independence and self sufficiency.  It governs our relationships and most of all our self identity.

In America long ago we made a deal with the Devil.  We decided public transit did not fit in the American ideal.  Perhaps in truth, it was the tire and auto manufactures that decided this for us but that is a topic for a different blog.  We decided that the automobile would rule our lives.  The reality of this decision is that it not only rules our lives, it dominates the lives of our children.

I remember when I first received my own bicycle.  It was a yellow Schwinn and I was so confident in my ability to ride it I took off for my first trip and ran smack into the back of a parked car. Despite this momentary setback, my bicycle was my freedom.  Whole areas of my neighborhood once out of reach were suddenly open to me.  A six house radius expanded to a half mile radius as I joyfully announced to my parents I was going to take another ride around Salem Loop.

Bicycles are a stage but like a tea kettle boiling, pressure for greater mobility starts to build.  This is augmented by social pressure.  One by one all around us our friends start to achieve automotive freedom.  Begging a ride becomes an increasingly humiliating task.   The other day I watched a neighborhood boy get out of a car driven by his girlfriend followed by a session of 'kissie face' and wondered to myself how long that would last.  However, in stark contrast to the realities I once confronted, these days, I simply love to be driven.  Come to think of it, some 'kissie face' might not be that bad either.

First it is learning how to drive because in a child's mind, if they have the knowledge, the argument for a license with a parent is already half way won.  Life seems to follow patterns and for some reason women seem remarkably less able to teach their children to drive than fathers.  In my own experience my mother would set out with me and at the slightest realization that I was in control not her, she would enter into a full bore panic.  Your going to fast!  My God push on the break!!!  One fateful day the last words out of my father's mouth when I went for a lesson were, "Dear, don't let him back out of the driveway, he's not ready."  We boarded my natural fathers Datsun pickup truck that he had left in our care.  Retrospectively, it was a curious choice as it did not belong to my parents yet it obviously signaled their lack of confidence in my ability by not allowing me to drive their own vehicles.  My mother of course ignored my father's last words and told me it was okay, I could back out of the driveway.  Happy and eager to demonstrate my ability I promptly ran into a tree.

For my own son his experience with his mother was equally stressful and after an attempt at simply driving in a straight line for fifty feet has pleaded to me to handle his four wheeled instruction.  Children are so excited to do what we do every day and we forget what an amazing experience it was once to achieve.  The question however that exits in all parents minds is simply, how long can we stall them.

My parents did a good job of this.  They put one financial obstacle in my way after the next and it took me several summers of jobs to overcome them.  Essentially I had to pay for everything.  Car, maintenance, gas and insurance.  Today it seems like another world.  Perhaps this is more a reflection of the area we live in than a greater reality.  We live low on the spectrum of affluence in an overly affluent region.  A visit to the high school parking lot will find students driving brand new cars, many of them BMW's and Mercedes.   There seems to be a solid expectation now that it is the parents job to provide the vehicle.

I remember growing up my reality seemed so far from that.  I can't think of a single friend or even acquaintance that had a new car.  Instead, we had a menagerie of everything a used car lot could provide.  My oldest friend Mike drove a beat up Volkswagen Beetle that seemed perpetually in pieces on his driveway.  My other friend Robert had a blue Grand Torino Sport, the object of his desire.  It had a fast back and an engine larger than a truck.  Every time he would accelerate the gas gauge would actually decrease.   In Mike's bug the pace was fast.  He would crank his Alpine stereo with Boston and while the bug was severely limited in acceleration, it seemed like a rocket.  The Torino was a different issue all together.  It was American and it felt big, huge in fact.  I would sit on the front bench seat and another friend Todd would sit in the back.  We always wondered why Todd would get so sleepy when we drove until one day Robert discovered the exhaust was leaking into the back and the poor kid was inhaling copious quantities of CO2. 

When it came time for me to realize my own car dreams I gathered together an entire summers worth of savings and ventured to a small farm town named Palmer.  There I secured my pride and joy.  It was a British racing green 1971 MGB.  My father and I drove it back to Anchorage stopping periodically to jam a muffler back on that kept falling off and created a shower of sparks that made the Fourth of July seem modest.  I drove my car for part of a summer and one winter before I scummed to the stupidity of youth.  First it was a fender bender, then it was the entire side of my car the result of not looking while making a left hand turn.  Both accidents were my fault.  The first didn't cost anything, the second cost me my car.  I gave away my love to a man who traded me with a beat up Toyota station wagon.  The fenders were so rusted the flapped when I drove down the road.  The key failed to work andt I had to cross two wires to start it.  One girl friend called it my orange limousine. 

The limousine

All the while I think my parents quietly tried to reassure each other that at least I hadn't killed myself.  Needless to say, I was never allowed to drive their cars.

So these days my son has embarked on his quest to drive.  It has started with the weekend lesson in a parking lot. Vintage dream cars are being viewed on the internet that cost more than a small Hyundai.  It started as a tiny Fiat, now it is a Porsche.  I have already resigned myself to the fact I will probably have to give him one of my cars but how long can I hold out?  Can I stall him with the insurance and maintenance?  Every time I see him looking at an old European car I try to offer him the words of wisdom my father gave me.  He said, "son, it is okay to have an MGB, just make sure you have a Japanese car to take you to the parts store."

I guess driving is a right of passage for both a child and an adult.  I shudder to think how I will feel the first day I watch him set out on his own but I know that day will come.

Oh and what happened to the other old cars my friends had?  Mike ended up rolling his bug and smashing in the roof.  Thankfully he bought a slow pickup truck that never allowed him to repeat the exercise.  Robert received a lesson in automobile maintenance from a guy I used to take my car to when I had completely screwed up the engine working on it.  He was a southerner some how stranded in Alaska named Gene that owned his own small garage.  After keeping the Torino for a day he called Robert aside and said "Son, you got to change the oi-all.  Cars don't work to good without oi-all.   The MG returned to my doorstep one day.  The guy that bought it from me had completely fixed the side and asked me if I wanted to buy it from him.  Sadly the MG had already taken enough money from my life and college was busy taking the rest.

I don't know how I will survive my son becoming a driver but some how I will make it through.  I will probably clutch my telephone and hope it doesn't ring.  I might even have a beer and ponder how long it will be before he has a child and watches them drive away.