The first time I ever drove a vehicle by myself was a study in “Fake it until you make it”. I had never driven before I got to Drivers Training and I was the first elected to hop in the driver’s seat and get the group underway. Suffice it to say there wasn’t any real teaching, pretty much just hop in and drive. The learning curve apparently wasn’t noticeable by my fellow students and I did quite well considering I was a snot nosed kid.
Quite a bit afterwards I started to refine my driving skills with my parents and my father taught me to parallel park on the left, which only happens if you happen to be on a particular one-way divided residential parkway in Syracuse, New York. My father remembered his driving test and the examiner had this as his secret weapon. I aced parallel parking on both sides, ambidextrously I suppose. When I took my driving exam in Syracuse My examiner lead me right to where I and my father practiced the parallel parking and had this haughty expression, “Park on the left, hah!” and so I did. I got my perfect 1″ square and centered parking task complete and I smiled sweetly at him and he told me to drive the car back to the DMV and he gave me a grudging 100% score. Without that ambidextrous parallel parking training I would have been hard pressed to get the score I did.
The last real lesson I learned with driving I also picked up from my father, and that is to be very careful when swinging your arm backwards to look behind you in a pickup truck. I accidentally belted my father in the face and it was the only time I hit him. I had to park afterwards because I was a basket case.
The things you remember when digging up the past… Wow. 🙂
