the ride home

This one, I thought I'd written a review for during the jam! It was one I connected with, but it felt almost silly to write, or to remember fears from high school. And it suggests some fears are still very real, if not especially crippling. I knew what I wanted to say. But I did not. At least, for a while. I wasn't sure how much to share. But on replay, I had even more. So here goes.

You see, I went to a horrible four(?)-week driver's ed school the summer before my senior year. For many kids, learning to drive was exciting. But I had quite a lot of my mother saying how expensive insurance was, and how teen drivers had better shape up because they are careless, and so forth. It was a bit of a shock to me that some people enjoyed taking Drivers' Ed. That includes kids who would lower their grade-point, even with the easy A, because of the boost from honors and advanced placement classes! One other thing about Drivers' Ed: it was at the fourth floor in my high school. I never went up there as a student. So it held some mystery when I finally went back on an open house night, after having sold my own car because public transport was good enough. It wasn't that exciting when I got there, of course. But it was a reminder of other things I'd built up and not looked into.

My first instructor apparently spent a lot of time in nightclubs, and he'd yack on endlessly about it, so as not to put people on edge, apparently. The (very faulty) reasoning being that if we were being deluged by the subject of how interesting and outgoing he was, we couldn't feel fear!

This confused me, since drinking occurred a lot at nightclubs. And drinking and driving was bad. Suffice it to say that I did not need the negative reinforcements from certain driver's ed movies, the newspaper clippings on the wall of very sweet and lovable kids who screwed up, assuring me that I had better not drink and drive. All blissfully unaware I'd never even been to a party with alcohol at that point!

How does it relate to the work? Well, TRH's background music--well, it reminded me of those horrible driver's ed movies that tell you not to screw up or you'll endanger your lives and others. It establishes fear, but a totally different one than perhaps the drivers' ed movies want you to feel. It's a fear of understanding too well how you might screw up and not having the confidence to avoid that. It's a fear based in how you maybe aren't acclimated to how cars have safety feature, and the rules of the road--well, how to be a safe driver has a lot of precautions, and if you're paying enough attention, you'll catch things. Or you'll wind up getting close to a mistake, but not really, and if you're conscientious, you'll realize why people do certain things.

At some point, though, being over-cautious is too much. And I never had anyone address that until my nightclub-visiting instructor said "YOU ARE OBVIOUSLY TOO SCARED TO GO ANYWHERE WITH A HIGHER SPEED LIMIT." Between them and my parents--ouch.

And the parents in this reminded me of, well, my own. They know how to nitpick. They never suggest the simple truth, which is that you learn things fairly quickly if thrown into the melting pot. And ... well, having a kid drive at night for their second lesson is a really, really bad choice. There's more to remember, with turning on lights. It's harder to look for a stop sign, or for people not wearing reflective clothing or whatever. There is so much to process, but the parents failed to keep it simple.

So I see, intended by the author or not, two parents that threw the kid in the deep end and, conscious or not, had something prepared for the kid's inevitable failure, or almost-failure. And the kid certainly beats themselves up. There is more fear than there needs to be and a shocking lack of empathy from the parents, who don't outright tell the kid they're a flake but jump on small mistakes.

Oh, that combined with [spoiler]the kid realizing they could have hit two pedestrians not paying attention[/spoiler]. I empathize with the narrator, for being pushed into fear that drains them, trusting adults to plan and do things correctly, but the adults did not.

This is all very negative. My story had a happy ending--I had a second driving instructor later who said "just go ahead. I trust you." And it worked. The second instructor actually smoked in the car, and it did not bother me. I reacted favorably to his lack of "exciting" nightclub stories tinged with belief he should be an even bigger man when out on the town than he was. (Note: the first instructor did shut up, but I felt guilty that I was so distractable, he couldn't share the stories he wanted. Also, he is on Twitter now, and one of his most recent pictures features an odometer going up to 100 MPH, which is well over all speed limits.) I don't drive much now, but I feel confident I recall the basics quickly. It's the opposite of fear--competence without excitement.

This is a bit long-winded, but it's my own driver's ed story, so different from the average "I AM GETTING MY CAR!" But I hope it shows more growth and overcoming fear and how TRH brought that home but also reminded me I had progressed past certain fears. In a nutshell, what is a joyful rite of passage for most teens is extremely stressful, for the narrator. And they, unlike most "normal" kids, are unable to put small mistakes behind them, likely due to adults who needed to flex how with-it they were and others weren't. That's sad and terrible, even before the story's climax.