Learning to drive.

Three words that strike fear into every parent's heart.

Except perhaps for my father's.

You see, he was a professional driver; a man who had driven coaches, tour buses and school buses for as long as I could remember. So when it came time for me to learn the skill, he had every confidence in me. He enrolled me in the local driver's education program, helped me get my learner's permit, and allowed me to practice with him at every opportunity. He would take me down to an abandoned parking lot by the municipal airport to let me loose on the safer pavement down there, giving me pointers and critiquing my driving skills until he felt I was ready for heavier traffic.

Such was the case on this particular Thanksgiving Day. I was already sixteen-and-a-half, the legal age to get the "provisional" license that would allow me to drive by myself during daylight hours. Since he had the day off to celebrate, he took me down to the parking lot after dinner and put me through my paces. Turn, stop, watch your signals, speed up a little here; together we wove a crazy pattern across the cracked and pitted tarmac. At last, he grew tired of the practice, and told me to drive home.

I was surprised. The drive home meant using Route 1, a usually busy major thoroughfare that cut off the majority of our town from the side that held the airport. It also meant using the raised rotary that acted as both an exit and entry point to and from Route 1, and as a bridge that connected both sides of our town. Still, I obeyed and, putting our unwieldy station wagon into drive, I headed out onto the road.

At first, I was nervous. I sat up very straight and my hands gripped the steering wheel white-knuckled. My lessons from driver's ed came to the fore and I constantly checked my mirrors, side and rear. I'm sure I went slower than the traffic allowed in my carefulness to avoid a collision. My father directed me to go around the rotary, coming out onto the highway itself and driving a few miles down the road to a stoplight, one that required me to use a "jug handle" exit in order to turn around. I put on my signal lights as I changed lanes, and then again as I slipped off the highway, around the handle, and onto the thoroughfare that crossed Route 1 at this particular spot. All of the area was as familiar to me as my own home; we shopped near here and used this street to get out to the interstate for the journey into Boston. I made a left hand turn, conscious of the sparse oncoming traffic, and got back onto Route 1.

A mile or so back up the way we came, then I drove back up onto the rotary, this time to come around three-quarters of the way and take the exit that led into the downtown. But instead of following that, he instructed me to make a sharp turn at the almost immediate first left, getting onto an access road that paralleled the highway for a short space. To my left were the backs of a couple of buildings, small businesses that fronted onto Route 1 itself. To my right was the wide, sunken, marshy field that the fire department would flood in the winter to provide an ice skating venue for the neighborhood. At the far edge of the field, I took a right, and headed up the slow grade to the top, where our street began.

By this time, I was more relaxed, and more confident in my driving skills. I took a left onto our street, that familiar venue I had come to know as home. I passed the home of the old couple, longtime friends of my mother's family, who had three ancient apple trees in their yard. Then the house of the crusty old widower whose wife had been so nice to us kids, giving us candy treats whenever we asked. And opposite his house, at the very cusp of the hill, sat our two-story home, the place where my mother had grown up and where she was now raising her own family. It was three stories, actually, if you wanted to count the full basement that held the furnace, my father's workshop, the laundry area, and the garage.

I pulled into the drive, which sloped downhill to the garage door, and my father said, "Stop."

I put my foot down... but not on the brake. Suddenly we were flying forward, the loud sound of crashing wood and metal and glass surrounding us. There was a teeth-gritting screech as something slid up the windshield, complaining every inch of the way. The station wagon came to a halt, but I'll never be sure if it was because I instinctively hit the brake, or pulled my foot off the accelerator, or because the car was caught fast. I looked around at the damage that the split second of error had caused. We were in the garage all right, but there was now a station wagon wide hole in the sturdy red-hued, wooden door.

I looked at my father.

He looked at me.

I burst into tears.

He started to laugh.

I bawled and bawled and bawled.

He laughed and laughed and laughed until the tears same to his eyes.

I can't remember how I got out of the car. I do remember my siblings standing in the doorway between the main portion of the basement and the garage, staring at the destruction, eyes wide and mouths open like fishes. I was hustled upstairs, where I continued to cry, as my father, now over his laughing fit, tried to pull the car from the wreckage. He managed it, and put the car out in front of the house while he assessed the damage.

The door was splintered beyond repair. Two or three of the cement blocks that made up the front wall of the garage were knocked out. A case of oil, waiting to be used, was spilled over the floor, the cans crushed by the car's tires. My sister's bicycle was wrecked and considered a total loss. And there were other, lesser signs of damage as well. The car itself, made of heavy steel, was relatively unscathed. One of the front headlights was broken, and there was a sizeable dent in the front at the passenger's side. The paint was scraped, and so was the windshield. Later, my father would point out to me that a jagged piece of wood had skidded up the glass, and if the windshield had not held firm, I probably would have been impaled.

My tears had tapered off by the time my father came back in the house. His first words to me were, "Come on."

"What? Why?"

"We're going out again."

I protested loudly. I did not want to get behind the wheel again, not after such a confidence shattering experience. He grasped my wrist, and I used all my weight to try to pull it from his grasp. But he was stronger, and he was adamant.

"You have to go now. You have to get back out there, and face your fears right away. Come on. Now."

Frightened to my bones, I finally complied. He put me in the driver's seat right away and we were off. I don't remember the route that we took this time, but when we came back to the house he had me pull into the gravelly area between the old, root damaged sidewalk and the street, putting the car half off the road at the top of the hill. And this time when he said, "Stop", I did.

The rebuilding of the garage took some time. The door was an odd size, so my parents had to special order a new door from Sears, and it didn't arrive until May. Between November and then, we had a blizzard, the infamous blizzard of 1978, where three and a half feet of snow fell within twenty-four hours and all we had to keep it out of the garage was a blue plastic tarp. Fortunately, everything was covered by insurance, though I'm sure my parents' auto coverage took quite a hit after the accident.

As for me, I went out driving at least one more time during that short vacation, and five days after Thanksgiving I went downtown in my family's little red Sunbird and took my road test. I passed with flying colors.