DRIVING LIKE A MADMAN

Pop always believed driving wasn’t a privilege—it was a birthright. Forget age limits, forget logic. My older brother had been a freeway pro at fourteen, so naturally, Pop decided I should start then. The only flaw in his plan was that I was roughly the size of a normal ten-year-old and needed a stack of bedroom pillows to see daylight over the dashboard.

Pop didn’t ease me in with something reasonable like an empty parking lot. No, he tossed me straight onto the ranch roads—those dusty, pothole-pocked paths that carved the land into giant squares called “sections.” Pop explained that a section was 640 acres, as if knowing the acreage would somehow help me keep the truck between the ruts.

Pop worked as a pipe mover, hauling thirty-foot aluminum irrigation pipes with a sprinkler at one end. My job was pipe drainer, which sounded important until you realized it meant unhooking the pipes so the water would dump out and Pop wouldn’t have to lift something that weighed more than I did. It was our version of teamwork: he did the heavy lifting, and I made sure he didn’t drown doing it.

But driving? That was another story. Picture a fourteen-year-old perched on a wobbling tower of pillows, gripping the steering wheel like it was a carnival ride gone wrong. If I forgot the pillows, I had to stretch my neck like a prairie meerkat to see the road. Reaching the pedals required either divine intervention or a growth spurt I hadn’t yet been granted.

Somehow—miraculously—I survived long enough to take the driving test at fifteen. My downfall was parallel parking. My brother and I practiced using sawhorses, which turned out to be terrible substitutes for real cars. Sawhorses don’t honk, don’t move, and don’t scream when you hit them. They just fall over.

On test day, I nailed the parallel parking on the first try. To this day, I’m convinced it was pure terror. My brain must’ve decided, You’re doing this, or we’re dying here, and chose survival.

I floated home with my shiny new license, feeling invincible—right up until Mom announced I’d be driving her to her doctor’s appointment in Fresno the next day.

Fresno was not a ranch road. Fresno was a swirling, honking, bumper-to-bumper nightmare—more vehicles than I thought existed in California. Mom navigated using her personal landmark system, which relied on buildings, trees, and possibly imaginary objects only she could see. Addresses were for amateurs.

Naturally, I missed the doctor’s office. That’s when Mom transformed. She clutched her purse like a medieval weapon and started yelling instructions loud enough to wake the ancestors.

“TURN AROUND! TURN AROUND!” she shrieked, whacking me with her purse like she was fending off a purse snatcher.

My panic skyrocketed. Suddenly, I noticed that cars were everywhere. My hands turned ghost-white on the steering wheel, and my foot fused to the gas pedal. Oh, how I longed for my pillow tower!

As Mom alternated between screaming and purse-whacking, I blasted through several red lights. She shrieked, “You’re going to kill us! YOU’RE GOING TO KILL US!” which, shockingly, did not improve my driving.

Finally, I shot us out of traffic and onto a quiet side street. Mom bailed out before the Chevy fully stopped. She slammed the door, straightened her blouse, and marched the quarter mile back to the doctor’s office, muttering that I must’ve scared the driving examiner so badly he passed me just to get out of the car alive.

Sixty-four years later, I can laugh about it. Back then, though, I had recurring nightmares starring red lights, screaming mothers, and airborne purses.