Driving Secrets

Hot news of the week, Tiger Woods, America's sweetheart of golf, hit something with his car. Big deal, I have been hitting inanimate objects with my car for years. Just ask momma, I almost hit a garbage truck while learning to drive. Actually you don't have to ask momma, she tells anyone who will listen now that she has had her driver's license "snatched right out of her hand" at the Georgia State Patrol Office. She thinks that she is rubbing salt into an old wound when she mentions it.

Little does momma know about the incident at Miss Tommy's corner store the day after I successfully suckered the Griffin, Georgia State Patrol officer into giving me a driver's license. I will always view it as a gift considering he had to tell me to move the 1959 Dodge's push button gear shift from drive to neutral when the car wouldn't start. I would like to point out that momma left it in drive when she parked. Also he didn't make me parallel park, I guess his life insurance policy need to be increased before facing such danger.

Okay, back to the "incident". I was carefully backing that enormous car, have you actually seen how big a 1959 Dodge is, out of Miss Tommy's parking lot while carefully looking over those big blue fins that can easily obstruct your view when BAM the front end struck the car parked right next to me. Oh Lord, momma was going to kill me! I jumped out of the car crying and carrying on like any normal 16 year old girl who had been licensed to drive for one day. I could envision momma inflicting the death penalty, the death of my future driving. The driver came around to check the damage and told me not to worry about it. That is exactly what I did. I jumped in my car and carefully drove home. Have you noticed the careful nature of my driving during this entire incident? I did continue to worry about the incident for many years. I worried that momma would, in the rhetorical sense, run in to him. Now that I think back over those events I wonder why the other driver was so understanding. Perhaps he was not the owner of a driver's license or the car for that matter. Maybe the car was stolen. You know how damaged stolen vehicles can be when recovered by the police. Maybe he knew who I was and just called daddy who paid for the damage without saying a word to momma. So like the daddy I once knew. We could never get away with anything in that small town but sometimes daddy would not rat us out to momma.

You would think the early driving incident would make me a more aware driver, you would be wrong. Once a large concrete pillar in a parking garage jumped out and hit me as I was backing out of a parking space. One day I forgot something from the office at lunch and rapidly backed into my dear friend's pristine Chevy Nova. I have backed into both small and large trees. Once I backed up a hill in to a large bolder, leaving a permanent dent in my license plate and a small dent in the bumper that my husband removed with some sort of hot air.

Backing up is not my only driving disability, I wrecked my husbands 1972 Chevrolet pickup truck on a sharp curve, that incidentally has been straightened by the Bartow County Road Department. That Mission Road curve has taken it's share of vehicles off the road. My incident happened one Saturday morning as I carefully drove to town in the truck. One minute I was driving, the next I was sliding across the road into the guard rail. I hit the rail and started spinning through the entire length of the deep curve, which by the way has now been straightened if you fail to remember that. You know you don't want your last words recorded to be an expletive so I was hoping my heavenly father thought the S word I shouted was in regard to the cow's activity in the adjoining pasture. Miraculously when the truck stopped it was on the correct side of the road heading in the right direction. It scared the tarnation out of the poor young man driving behind me. He said, "I can't believe that you pulled out of that spin". I told him to mention to my husband how well I was driving during the accident. My husband's reaction, "Ah don't worry about it. It is nothing that a little Bondo and a re-chromed bumper can't take care of".

One advantage of being married to a body man is he can fix anything I tear up. My driver's license doesn't expire for five more years. Watch out.