Nobody to Kill

I got my first car at age fourteen, a $40 Volkswagen Beetle. By fifteen, I had graduated to power-sliding our 1972 Ford pick-up truck, equipped with a cool “suicide knob” across frozen parking lots. But that was in the frozen north and not in heavily trafficked San Francisco.

While I was growing up, my father had acted as the town’s driver’s education instructor. I always thought this was a great position as we always got to have these great cars that had two sets of brakes, the normal driver’s side one and an extra one on the passenger side. When I was young, he would let me stop the car. I thought that was great fun.

This weekend I took my sixteen-year-old driving for the first time, in San Francisco. As he is just practicing for his driver’s license, he’s still a bit shaky behind the wheel. During this driving practice, I found that I could have used such a passenger-side brake because the psychosomatic effect of me continuously trying to push the passenger-side brake caused my right leg to fatigue.

But the lesson went off without a hitch because in preparation for the lesson, I had thought carefully of where I should take him to practice. I finally settled on….a cemetery. What better place to learn to drive because at the cemetery, there is no-one to kill.