When I was 15 my stepmother accepted the dubious job of teaching me how to drive. Her car was an old, stick-shift Ford and the last Ford bought by my Evansville family.
My dyslexia made certain basic perceptions different for me. Even today, I can’t use mirrors to backup the car and trying to remove a hair or medicate a spot on my face means I have to force one hand to move to the spot with my other hand.
Determining right from left has been made possible by me translating left as the side with my bent finger, leaving the other side as right.
Mother Alice started out by driving me to some quiet rural roads, but I’d stall the car so often that she decided to try a place where there was very little traffic.
She chose a local cemetery with narrow lanes and graves to remind me what could happen if I didn’t drive safely. A win-win.
She’d drive us from home to the cemetery and we’d swap places. I was a big kid by that time. Over six feet tall with long legs. So I could reach the pedals, handle the unpowered steering wheel and shift gears. What I couldn’t get into my head was how to use the clutch and shift gears. I couldn’t coordinate the movements.
We tried and tried and tried. I just couldn’t get the sequence right. Then, one day I had a small success. I shifted from neutral into first an off we lurched and lurched and lurched like one of those bucking bull machines until I stalled yet again.
Her capacity for patience was amazing. I’m sure my dad would have been yelling at me by this point. I just couldn’t get it.
I don’t know how she knew about these things. She was so wise about so much. She told me that the secret to learning how to shift gears and drive was repetition. “Just keep working on it and one day it will suddenly come to you.”
And she was right. One day I started off smoothly in first from a standstill and shifted into second. The winding lanes weren’t designed for third gear and she said we’d try that later on a street in town. But at least I’d gotten over the first hurdle.
UNTIL … until I turned into one of the narrow lanes that would take us to the exit/entrance. After weeks of no traffic I was suddenly faced with a big, long hearse followed by a limousine followed by a cortege of cars that snaked off into the distance. I panicked, slammed on the breaks and stalled right in front of the hearse.
In the hearse the two men in black waved at me to get out of the way. I had to restart the car and try to get into a gear I hadn’t tried before. Reverse was beyond me. I stalled and stalled. One of the men in black got out and stood there in the lane waving his arms around as if that would help. I looked over at Mother Alice and found that she had her hand over her mouth. At first I thought she was crying but she was trying to stifle a laugh. She failed and was laughing out loud as the man in black threw up his hands in disgust and walked away to speak to the cortege.
Mother Alice managed to tell me that we’d better swap places and backed up the lane, parking off to the side in order to let the funeral cortege carry on. I turned away from the passenger window and Mother Alice managed to focus her attention on the bench seat between us while she continued to laugh.
Finally, I saw the humor in what just happened and we laughed all the way home although we never mentioned any of this to my dad.
Pieces from a Puzzling Life 