AROUND THE KITCHEN TABLE

By Donald Ward

I am not a bad driver, but I don’t consider myself a particularly good one, either. I took my first driver’s test in a 1968 Dodge station wagon — sort of a living room on wheels — and managed to knock a headlight off the car behind me while executing an otherwise flawless parallel park.

“That slot seemed pretty small,” I commented as the examiner, grim and taciturn, wrote my name, address, phone number, birth date, shoe size, known criminal tendencies and history of mental illness on a page of official letterhead, which he then ripped out of his pad and slipped under a windshield wiper on the car behind.

“They’re all the same size,” he grunted, and gestured for me to proceed. I don’t know why he bothered; we both knew I had failed.

The next time I hit another car it was once again during a parallel park, and the car belonged to my wife. Forty years had passed since the first incident, however, so I don’t think I’ve done too badly.

In the interim, it is true, I managed to plough into the back fender of a Buick that had run a yield sign, and a big square Mercury once accelerated into my own fender, having failed to see my bright red little Dodge in the intersection. In neither case was I held responsible.

A Plymouth Reliant I was driving burst into flames at Oyen, Alberta, but I can’t reasonably be held responsible for that, either — nor for the incident at a service station in Southey, Sask., when a Mack truck tried to drive over my little Chrysler Cirrus from behind. The other driver was held at fault, as I was in the washroom at the time.

So, with a driving history spanning 42 years and six incidents, only two of them my fault, you might say I was a pretty good driver.

You might be wrong.

I have a friend who drives a taxi in London. What strikes me most about his skill is that he knows to the millimetre where his car ends and the rest of the world begins. One Sunday afternoon we were heading up to Hampstead Heath in congested traffic when suddenly a space opened up ahead. Laurence deftly steered into it and accelerated, and soon we were doing 30 mph up a roadway so narrow that I couldn’t have stuck my hand out the window without breaking it against the parked cars we were passing.

I have another friend who can judge road conditions so accurately that I have never known him to get stuck. Travelling from Gabriola Island to Calgary in a single day recently, we encountered every driving situation possible: high winds and low clouds, sunshine, rain, sleet, light snow, driving snow, fog, dusk, darkness, moonlight, black ice, and a dozen other variations. I would have pulled over any number of times, but Bob just kept on going, supremely — and justifiably — confident in his skill as a driver.

Three days in Toronto recently convinced me that, in that city, I would be a very bad driver indeed. I’m not aggressive enough. Getting into that far left lane isn’t worth my life. If I had had to drive myself from the hotel to the airport, I would have missed the flight. I probably wouldn’t have left the airport in the first place.

It’s not that I’m afraid — well, yes, I am, but I have overcome fear before and I am confident that, if I had to drive in Toronto or London, I could. But since my wife’s aneurysm 19 months ago I have become acutely aware of mortality in general and my own frailty in particular. If I am to continue to accompany Colleen on her healing journey, it is rather important that I remain alive. If that means taking a back seat to better and more experienced drivers, I have no problem with that. I’m behind the wheel of something much more important than a car.