Behind The Wheel

You know, the next time the doctor tells me that I should have one of those tests to see how my heart responds to stress, I'm going to ask if I can skip the treadmill and instead just ride along with a teenager learning to drive. Nothings gets my heart racing quite like literally putting my life in the hands of someone whose driving "experience" is almost entirely confined to video games with names like "Need For Speed 3" and "Evade the Police IV." The one thing these games have in common, by the way, is that the cars always seem to be crashing. And I'm not just talking fender benders here. I'm talking about high speed head-on and t-bone collisions, multiple rollovers, and fiery plunges off bridges and into canyons.
As you may have guessed, we are in the midst of it again -- teaching one of our teenagers to drive. It is the second time around and I thought it would be less frightening. In fact, if anything, I am more frightened -- not because the first child drove any better than this one, but because I took a statistics course in college and I understand the laws of probability. The more chances you take, the more likely it is that it will catch up with you. And we have one more teenager to go after this. Heaven help us!
Still, as scary as it is riding along with a teenager learning to drive, I realize that it is something that has to be done. People can't learn to drive just by memorizing the rules of the road, or reading the operator's manual for the car, or by watching others drive. If you want someone to learn to drive, sooner or later you have to let them get behind the wheel.