Driving Miss Foxy...
Something has been happening to me lately which perplexes me and worries me a little too. Maybe I’m making too much of it and of course, it wouldn’t be the first time, but it still bothers me. Perhaps I should explain more fully. Let’s go over some background here… You see, I’m a driver! I love to drive.
I’ve done my fair share of driving over the years and I kind of hate to relinquish the control of the driver’s seat to anyone else. I’m a terrible passenger! I really hate being a passenger, although I try to stay calm and not be a pain in the neck. I think I’m reasonably successful at this. Other than Dear Husband, most people probably don’t catch on to the white knuckles. I plaster a smile on my puss and try really hard not to wince out loud or scrabble for the door handle too noticeably.
Her Sweetness (my mother) has always been an absolutely impossible passenger and what’s more, she’s an abominable driver! A long time ago we made a pact that when I got a license I wouldn’t drive with her and she wouldn’t drive with me. We’ve both broken the pact on occasion but we manage to do it very infrequently. Her Sweetness’ driving has become the stuff of legends but then so have her antics as a passenger. She winces, screams, scrabbles up the side of the door with a death grip on the handle, cries pitifully (pretend cries) and swears you’re racing if you’re going more than 20 miles an hour. She hyperventilates…
You can see why I don’t care to go anyplace with her. My nerves won’t take it. She says her nerves won’t take it. One of us is wrong here and I swear it’s not me… The only place she drives me is nuts! To be a passenger in her car is a quick bid for sainthood. For one thing, she’s a yo-yo, she speeds up, she slows down, she speeds up, she slows down… She’s been known to stop dead in the road if she sees something she deems worth seeing or fetching (like pretty weeds, seed pods or vines for dried flower arrangements or wreaths) and she does this with absolutely no thought for anyone else who might just happen to be behind her.
Her Sweetness was the one who showed me (by example) why you don’t make a right-hand turn from a left-hand lane on a busy highway when a huge milk tanker truck is zooming along in the right-hand lane. She reminded the truck driver too, apparently, since he had to pull over on the shoulder a little ways up the road to recuperate. We could see him slump and shake his head repeatedly as we turned the corner. Bet that truck driver turned in his license for a safe little desk job shortly after that little maneuver of hers.
I can still describe the underbelly of the tank truck if you’d care to know sometime… “Did you see him(?)” she asked. Uh…yes, yes I did, I croaked. “Well, you should have said something” she said. For one thing, my vocal cords were frozen up and being tugged unmercifully by my bulging eyes, nearly choking me to death. “I never saw him” she said in an amazed sort of I’ll be doggoned voice. “I wonder where he came from?” I wonder where he went…
Do you want to know the irony? We were on the way to the hospital for a doctor’s appointment. I remember the doctor saying something about my blood pressure being awfully high for a person of my age…
Her Sweetness is also pretty good at panicking and taking her hands off the steering wheel, waving them around and yelling “aaagh, it’s out of control!” Well, yeah, it sure is… She’s had a couple of interesting little accidents. I never have (knock on wood).
From her I’ve learned what happens if you trounce on the brakes on ice, especially when you’re going downhill and around a bend. If it hadn’t been for a glorious heavy snowfall the day before, we wouldn’t have had that miracle inch when the bumper tried to snug itself around that tree in a rapture. The tow truck didn’t have enough oomph to pry the car out so they had to get the firetruck because it was heavier…we were stuck there pretty good. This was many years ago, before tow trucks got so hefty. Heck, it was before a lot of vehicles got so hefty. It was also before seatbelts. Makes me shiver to think of it…
Her Sweetness has killed a few nice cars over the years, but not before maiming them completely. Sigh… Such nice mechanical marvels done in by one sweet little woman with a penchant for drama and inattentiveness. She built up quite a nice little reputation for herself in the town where we used to live. The garage guys loved her. My dad is an absolute saint. He has never harmed her…
I, on the other hand, pride myself on being a good driver. In fact, I used to make my living out of driving. I was a school bus driver for several years. I drove the big yellow birds and I drove special education vans and Suburbans. One of the Suburbans was literally held together by duct tape. My boss was a frugal man…so frugal he nearly killed me on several occasions by his cost cutting measures.
Twice the wheel bearings on the right front wheel went… Most people never have the experience of losing their wheel bearings in a lifetime. But in one year of driving for that guy I had the experience…twice! When your wheel bearings go, you lose your steering and your braking. At least I did. Once I was on my way home (alone, thank goodness) and once I had a suburban load of 5 highly energetic ADHD kids on a warm, sunny Friday afternoon (you teachers can especially relate to this) in the early spring. I had just picked them up from the special school they attended and we were on a narrow back road, far from houses or humanity. When the spindle broke on the right front tire and the axle caved in and we lost the bearings, we were heading straight for the lefthand side of the road and directly toward a 12 foot break in a rock retaining wheel (the only break in the retaining wall), and the drop onto the railroad tracks below was about 200 feet, plus or minus a foot…
If you want an adrenaline rush from hell some time, try to approximate it. There’s nothing to compare to it. To this day I’ll never know how I managed at the last minute, with no steering or available brakes, to get back onto the right side of the road and safely stopped in a nice deep ditch. I feel as if I should have accomplished something more with my life by now but maybe I haven’t come to the special thing that that I’m supposed to do in payment for that life reprieve. I could give you more details of that hellish day but I won’t bother to go into it. Suffice to say that I didn’t actually end my day until 9:30 pm because there were parents needing to have details.
I don’t think my husband fully grasped the dangerous conditions and the full details until he accompanied me to that spot and saw the skid marks and then he knew that I hadn’t exaggerated in any way the incredible danger. Though I’ll never know why, I’m good in emergencies, only falling apart privately and later on, after everyone else has gone on to other things. It turned out that my boss actually knew we had a bad spindle on the right front but had wanted to stall the repairs a little. I saw the maintenance log right afterwards but then it mysteriously disappeared and wasn’t in the glove box the next time I had to drive. He was questioned by the state vehicle examiners but somehow he managed to keep his credentials and continue to run the vehicle, which was 11 years old anyway.
Those kiddoes were an unruly lot in general but a total hush came over them every day after that when we went by that spot. One of the girls always gave me a hug and called me a heroine but the real truth is that Someone much bigger than me or you or anyone else intervened that day and I’ll always be grateful…
Driving for that boss (who incidentally had to have his brother bid for some of his routes because the towns wouldn’t deal with him) made me very familiar with vehicle maintenance and why it’s important. I had some adventures I will say… There’s the time two of the tires completely self destructed about half an hour away from the garage. This same guy apparently took 2 radial tires off his daughter’s Buick the night before (she got new ones) and put them on the Suburban. You don’t switch one vehicle’s radial tires to a completely different type and size vehicle, especially if you put them in different positions on the vehicle. That’s a big no-no! It causes the steel belts to separate from the rubber, effectively turning the tires inside out, with the steel belts sticking out everywhere and digging up the road, and wherever you are when it happens is where you’re going to be when the tow truck shows up. This was before modern methods of communication too…like cell phones and the like. Not that he would have sprung for them…
Fortunately I had dropped off my last load of kids for a couple of hours. They were preschoolers with different types of emotional and learning problems. I honestly don’t know what I would have done then. I drove very long routes through the country and help was never readily available. The same vehicle had the fuel pump go (or maybe it was the water pump, I can’t remember now) when I had a full load of kids to deliver home for the day. The thing went while we were in the middle of a hideous intersection where there was a lot of truck traffic and we were at the light. In this instance anyway, I was near a gas station so I could get the kids out of that vehicle in the middle of the busy interesection and into shelter. It was winter too…very cold. Again, I couldn’t get my boss. He was out on a run too. I managed to call most of the parents except for the most worrisome one…the small kindergartner whose parents had an unlisted number and the kiddo couldn’t talk well enough to give us his name anyway. Oh, it was an interesting job.
I could blog for hours about some of the things that happened, both to the vehicles and also stories about the kiddoes…but that’s for another time. I’ll save the one about the punctured fuel tank too. That was a different place. But it was quite a story…
Anyway, you can see that I know how to drive and handle awkward situations and emergencies. I didn’t inherit Her Sweetness’ lack of affinity for driving. I do okay… I still harbor daydreams about being a stunt driver like in “The French Connection” and “Bullit.” I still love the mastery of a well constructed marvel of modern automobile engineering. I’ve driven in every weather condition known and I’m not afraid of snow. I used to drive frequently into New York City from 2 hours away and I know how to get into the Lincoln Tunnel from the Jersey side when 11 lanes of traffic (with lots of busses) are filtering down into 2 lanes to get into the city during rush hour. I knew how to negotiate New York City traffic with no problem.
So should I be worried about everyone else suddenly wanting to tote me around? I mean…I’m a lousy passenger. Is there something I should know that they’re not willing to tell me? I really prefer to drive. After all, I know what can happen…
I’ve done my fair share of driving over the years and I kind of hate to relinquish the control of the driver’s seat to anyone else. I’m a terrible passenger! I really hate being a passenger, although I try to stay calm and not be a pain in the neck. I think I’m reasonably successful at this. Other than Dear Husband, most people probably don’t catch on to the white knuckles. I plaster a smile on my puss and try really hard not to wince out loud or scrabble for the door handle too noticeably.
Her Sweetness (my mother) has always been an absolutely impossible passenger and what’s more, she’s an abominable driver! A long time ago we made a pact that when I got a license I wouldn’t drive with her and she wouldn’t drive with me. We’ve both broken the pact on occasion but we manage to do it very infrequently. Her Sweetness’ driving has become the stuff of legends but then so have her antics as a passenger. She winces, screams, scrabbles up the side of the door with a death grip on the handle, cries pitifully (pretend cries) and swears you’re racing if you’re going more than 20 miles an hour. She hyperventilates…
You can see why I don’t care to go anyplace with her. My nerves won’t take it. She says her nerves won’t take it. One of us is wrong here and I swear it’s not me… The only place she drives me is nuts! To be a passenger in her car is a quick bid for sainthood. For one thing, she’s a yo-yo, she speeds up, she slows down, she speeds up, she slows down… She’s been known to stop dead in the road if she sees something she deems worth seeing or fetching (like pretty weeds, seed pods or vines for dried flower arrangements or wreaths) and she does this with absolutely no thought for anyone else who might just happen to be behind her.
Her Sweetness was the one who showed me (by example) why you don’t make a right-hand turn from a left-hand lane on a busy highway when a huge milk tanker truck is zooming along in the right-hand lane. She reminded the truck driver too, apparently, since he had to pull over on the shoulder a little ways up the road to recuperate. We could see him slump and shake his head repeatedly as we turned the corner. Bet that truck driver turned in his license for a safe little desk job shortly after that little maneuver of hers.
I can still describe the underbelly of the tank truck if you’d care to know sometime… “Did you see him(?)” she asked. Uh…yes, yes I did, I croaked. “Well, you should have said something” she said. For one thing, my vocal cords were frozen up and being tugged unmercifully by my bulging eyes, nearly choking me to death. “I never saw him” she said in an amazed sort of I’ll be doggoned voice. “I wonder where he came from?” I wonder where he went…
Do you want to know the irony? We were on the way to the hospital for a doctor’s appointment. I remember the doctor saying something about my blood pressure being awfully high for a person of my age…
Her Sweetness is also pretty good at panicking and taking her hands off the steering wheel, waving them around and yelling “aaagh, it’s out of control!” Well, yeah, it sure is… She’s had a couple of interesting little accidents. I never have (knock on wood).
From her I’ve learned what happens if you trounce on the brakes on ice, especially when you’re going downhill and around a bend. If it hadn’t been for a glorious heavy snowfall the day before, we wouldn’t have had that miracle inch when the bumper tried to snug itself around that tree in a rapture. The tow truck didn’t have enough oomph to pry the car out so they had to get the firetruck because it was heavier…we were stuck there pretty good. This was many years ago, before tow trucks got so hefty. Heck, it was before a lot of vehicles got so hefty. It was also before seatbelts. Makes me shiver to think of it…
Her Sweetness has killed a few nice cars over the years, but not before maiming them completely. Sigh… Such nice mechanical marvels done in by one sweet little woman with a penchant for drama and inattentiveness. She built up quite a nice little reputation for herself in the town where we used to live. The garage guys loved her. My dad is an absolute saint. He has never harmed her…
I, on the other hand, pride myself on being a good driver. In fact, I used to make my living out of driving. I was a school bus driver for several years. I drove the big yellow birds and I drove special education vans and Suburbans. One of the Suburbans was literally held together by duct tape. My boss was a frugal man…so frugal he nearly killed me on several occasions by his cost cutting measures.
Twice the wheel bearings on the right front wheel went… Most people never have the experience of losing their wheel bearings in a lifetime. But in one year of driving for that guy I had the experience…twice! When your wheel bearings go, you lose your steering and your braking. At least I did. Once I was on my way home (alone, thank goodness) and once I had a suburban load of 5 highly energetic ADHD kids on a warm, sunny Friday afternoon (you teachers can especially relate to this) in the early spring. I had just picked them up from the special school they attended and we were on a narrow back road, far from houses or humanity. When the spindle broke on the right front tire and the axle caved in and we lost the bearings, we were heading straight for the lefthand side of the road and directly toward a 12 foot break in a rock retaining wheel (the only break in the retaining wall), and the drop onto the railroad tracks below was about 200 feet, plus or minus a foot…
If you want an adrenaline rush from hell some time, try to approximate it. There’s nothing to compare to it. To this day I’ll never know how I managed at the last minute, with no steering or available brakes, to get back onto the right side of the road and safely stopped in a nice deep ditch. I feel as if I should have accomplished something more with my life by now but maybe I haven’t come to the special thing that that I’m supposed to do in payment for that life reprieve. I could give you more details of that hellish day but I won’t bother to go into it. Suffice to say that I didn’t actually end my day until 9:30 pm because there were parents needing to have details.
I don’t think my husband fully grasped the dangerous conditions and the full details until he accompanied me to that spot and saw the skid marks and then he knew that I hadn’t exaggerated in any way the incredible danger. Though I’ll never know why, I’m good in emergencies, only falling apart privately and later on, after everyone else has gone on to other things. It turned out that my boss actually knew we had a bad spindle on the right front but had wanted to stall the repairs a little. I saw the maintenance log right afterwards but then it mysteriously disappeared and wasn’t in the glove box the next time I had to drive. He was questioned by the state vehicle examiners but somehow he managed to keep his credentials and continue to run the vehicle, which was 11 years old anyway.
Those kiddoes were an unruly lot in general but a total hush came over them every day after that when we went by that spot. One of the girls always gave me a hug and called me a heroine but the real truth is that Someone much bigger than me or you or anyone else intervened that day and I’ll always be grateful…
Driving for that boss (who incidentally had to have his brother bid for some of his routes because the towns wouldn’t deal with him) made me very familiar with vehicle maintenance and why it’s important. I had some adventures I will say… There’s the time two of the tires completely self destructed about half an hour away from the garage. This same guy apparently took 2 radial tires off his daughter’s Buick the night before (she got new ones) and put them on the Suburban. You don’t switch one vehicle’s radial tires to a completely different type and size vehicle, especially if you put them in different positions on the vehicle. That’s a big no-no! It causes the steel belts to separate from the rubber, effectively turning the tires inside out, with the steel belts sticking out everywhere and digging up the road, and wherever you are when it happens is where you’re going to be when the tow truck shows up. This was before modern methods of communication too…like cell phones and the like. Not that he would have sprung for them…
Fortunately I had dropped off my last load of kids for a couple of hours. They were preschoolers with different types of emotional and learning problems. I honestly don’t know what I would have done then. I drove very long routes through the country and help was never readily available. The same vehicle had the fuel pump go (or maybe it was the water pump, I can’t remember now) when I had a full load of kids to deliver home for the day. The thing went while we were in the middle of a hideous intersection where there was a lot of truck traffic and we were at the light. In this instance anyway, I was near a gas station so I could get the kids out of that vehicle in the middle of the busy interesection and into shelter. It was winter too…very cold. Again, I couldn’t get my boss. He was out on a run too. I managed to call most of the parents except for the most worrisome one…the small kindergartner whose parents had an unlisted number and the kiddo couldn’t talk well enough to give us his name anyway. Oh, it was an interesting job.
I could blog for hours about some of the things that happened, both to the vehicles and also stories about the kiddoes…but that’s for another time. I’ll save the one about the punctured fuel tank too. That was a different place. But it was quite a story…
Anyway, you can see that I know how to drive and handle awkward situations and emergencies. I didn’t inherit Her Sweetness’ lack of affinity for driving. I do okay… I still harbor daydreams about being a stunt driver like in “The French Connection” and “Bullit.” I still love the mastery of a well constructed marvel of modern automobile engineering. I’ve driven in every weather condition known and I’m not afraid of snow. I used to drive frequently into New York City from 2 hours away and I know how to get into the Lincoln Tunnel from the Jersey side when 11 lanes of traffic (with lots of busses) are filtering down into 2 lanes to get into the city during rush hour. I knew how to negotiate New York City traffic with no problem.
So should I be worried about everyone else suddenly wanting to tote me around? I mean…I’m a lousy passenger. Is there something I should know that they’re not willing to tell me? I really prefer to drive. After all, I know what can happen…
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