Hooniverse Asks – Who Taught You How To Drive?

It may have been a parent, hair graying with every block, or maybe it was your high school gym coach, who whacked you with his clip board every time you strayed the double yellow. Or maybe it was one of those driving school instructors, whose calm demeanor was evidence of a healthy Lude intake. Whomever it was, somebody must have taught you how to drive. Driving after all isn’t an innate skill, passed down genetically, generation after generation. It’s a learned behavior, one that some people just can’t be taught. Our driver’s education starts somewhere around the age of fourteen, when a license and freedom becomes close enough to be more a practical goal than a conceptual one. For car nuts, that may arrive earlier, and I for one started reading the DMV handbook when I was eleven. You probably paid almost as close attention in the classroom portion of Driver’s Ed as you did in Health when discussing the chapters on reproduction and human sexuality. Of course no number of film strips demonstrating correct lane position could substitute for practical experience, and movies such as Red Asphalt only made you even more keen to get out there and race a train or attempt some other risky automotive behavior. After passing the classroom portion, and achieving that oddly uneventful milestone of turning fifteen and a half you took a test and got that piece of tissue-thin paper that separated you as an adult from you as a child- your learner’s permit. After carefully folding it and placing it gingerly in your wallet, your next task at hand was getting your behind the wheel training, and that’s where we come in today. Maybe the above scenario does not match your own. Perhaps you arrived here from somewhere else, Mars say, and didn’t learn to drive until much later. It could be that you grew up with the farmer in the dell and spent your formative years piloting a tractor down rural route and Dairy Queen drive-thru. Whatever the experience, who was it, there by your side, that provided you with the sage advice and cool direction that has made you the cool operator you are today? Image sources: [AnitaGale.com, pictureisunrelated.com]