Paradise in a Parking Lot

I’ve been watching the news coverage lately regarding the issue of kids going back to school or continuing their studies at home. I’m truly grateful not to be a parent or a student right now in such anxiety causing times. I do know that if this were an issue back when I was in school, I would have loved to do school from home. I loved schoolwork but hated school—I had no friends and was often bullied for being different. But the summer I was fifteen—the summer before my junior year of high school—I was determined to change that.

I decided that I would go through a metamorphosis that summer—I would return to school in the fall with beauty, wit, and charm. I’d be popular! I had two plans to implement in order to begin this spectacular metamorphosis. The first plan was to study popularity. So I went to the library, found the current and archived issues of “Teen” and “Seventeen” magazines, and I read all the articles about how to be popular. The second plan was to start driving, since I’d just gotten my learner’s permit. I was sure that if I did everything the articles told me to do AND walked into school on the first day casually dangling my car keys, I would be irresistibly popular.

I was nervous about the driving part of the plan. I’d watched Dad try to teach my oldest sister, Lisa, to drive three years earlier. During one of Lisa’s first lessons, she stopped the car and got out, wailing at Dad, “Why do you keep telling me what to do? It’s so mean!” Dad stopped teaching Lisa and sent her to driver’s ed. My other sister Heather, who got her license the summer after Lisa did, had no driving lessons. She just somehow instinctively knew how to drive.

I knew I wouldn’t be in the Heather category. But I also had no intention of doing driver’s ed. I was beyond shy and couldn’t imagine being trapped in a car with a stranger yelling commands at me. So I asked Dad to teach me. He made me so anxious that I asked him to wear a winter hat pulled down over his eyes while we drove—that way, he was next to me but not anticipating my every move. Dad and I made it a couple of miles, with him saying things like, “I know there’s a stop sign coming up soon. It sure doesn’t feel like we’re slowing down.” And “Sounds like now would be a good time to change into third gear.” Finally, Dad asked me to pull over, and he took off his hat. I’d never seen him so pale—I thought my driving was killing him. He said he couldn’t keep wearing the hat; it made him motion sick. So he gave me two choices: he could teach me without the hat, or he could find someone we knew to teach me so that I didn’t have to do the dreaded driver’s ed. I chose option two.

Dad picked one of my classmates to teach me—a nice, responsible boy who had his license. He chose Monty. Monty had been in school with me since third grade. I liked him as long as we weren’t in gym class where he made it his personal mission to be the first to knock me flat in dodgeball. So with no dodgeballs in sight, we began our lessons. It wasn’t legal for me to drive on actual streets without an adult, so Dad told us to drive around our school and church parking lots so that I could get a feel for driving a stick shift while learning the basics of driving.

I loved our lessons from the start. As we drove, we got to know each other. Monty made me laugh. He listened to me and never made fun of me. As time passed, I realized that he was the only person besides my brother that I had ever truly been myself with. And he actually liked me for who I was. I learned very little from him about driving, though—I failed my driving test three times before getting my license. Even then, I wasn’t the most capable or confident driver. So when school started, my metamorphosis hadn’t happened. I was still very much myself, though I did have a new short mullet, courtesy of my mom.

The Rolling Stones sang, “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, well, you just might find you get what you need.” I didn’t get the popularity I wanted that summer. I got something so much better, something I needed far more—a best friend. Monty and I were best friends for several months before we started dating. We were best friends when we got married at twenty-one. And now, thirty years after that summer of driving lessons, we’re still best friends who spend some of our most special times together in the car—best friends who’ve realized that it’s far better to have Monty behind the wheel than me.