Baby, you can drive my car

Fun times behind the wheel

I am a hell of a great driver if I want to be, if it’s a good road.

I’ll have you know, I drove two school buses. I delivered dental supplies and fresh blood, I parallel parked a courier van with nothing but side mirrors downtown in rush hour. I can do it.

But watching the road constantly is boring. I just want to read a book. I used to read a book driving when I was single: drive, smoke, have a Coke, and read a paperback. It sounds dicey, but it was no big deal.

Attention utilizes several layers, have you noticed? It can. There is the space cadet with no attention at all. That’s one. That’s how I drove home 26 hours alone, from New Hampshire. Then the laser attention if you are super cautious because someone just about sideswiped you, or you are impatient, trying to beat a jam, to weave and get downtown. Then there is the transcendent attention that allows you to oversee the traffic in front of you — to stare twenty feet over it, yet you see their brakes, blinkers and lights, you register a periphery of 270 degrees. Or just 150 degrees. I remember mornings on such short sleep that I’d drive my truck from the suburbs, over the Mendota Bridge, so high over the river it could make me shudder, up Hiawatha Avenue all the way to a parallel parking spot at the Grain Exchange on Fourth and Fourth with my flashers on. I’d knock the side door open, hoist out a tub of envelopes, stop and ask myself, “How did I get here?” I was never high, just stupefied. It was great.

Time was, in the Black Hills of South Dakota, at night, winding up the hill to our hotel, a white pipeline of light shone across the sky, above the trees, glowing like a drive-in movie. It turned out to be spotlights on Crazy Horse.

I kept telling my wife and son, “Look, look. It’s northern lights! Look, you guys!” I nudged the steering wheel to the right for a better gap in the canopy to see it.

“Look!” — and, off the road we rumbled, bangity-bang, into a shallow ditch, crumpling to a stop. Didn’t hit a thing. It was fine.

“Get out of the car!” my wife snapped. “I’m taking over.” Oo, was she mad. We did the quick driver swap. Once she calmed down, she got great mileage out of retelling that story.

So the verdict is, I’m a good driver, if the trip is interesting, without UFOS or ball lightning or northern lights.