Jan 20 2009
Learning to drive…
Now this isn’t my first rodeo, maybe it will be my last, but teaching teenagers to drive can really get your nerves set on edge.
Maybe it has something to do with teaching him in a late model hemi powered pickup, or a 2000 firebird, but I like to think it is because I would really like to walk away from the crash.
We all have put the fear of god into our tutor’s at one time or another, I did it and I am waiting for my youngest to get his turn….
I was sixteen when I forced my own father to contemplate his fate, driving home from a road trip to California.
I was driving the last stretch, heading for the off ramp on I-70 when it happened and Dad was sound asleep.
If you have never experienced waking a sleeping gorilla in a man suit with a life threatening situation, you have never lived!
It was a simple thing really, just pushing in the clutch, a simple act of putting one’s foot to the floor and down shifting the tranny. I had just left the Interstate and was still moving pretty fast when I decided to slow that mustang down. That 69 mustang, with an automatic transmission….
It didn’t take me long to realize that the brakes should not be locked up while pushing in the clutch, but the damage was done, dad had seen God. I nearly did too.
I can hardly wait for my youngest son’s turn….
Thomas H. Forthe
