Where'd you get your driver's license, Kmart?

My mother put me behind the wheel of a Jeep Cherokee when I was 15. I'm not sure what year the Jeep was, but the peeling brown metalic paint allowed us to dub the thing "Coppertone." To a 15 year old girl, it was a massive behomoth to maneuver through the backwood roads of our county. Couple that with the impromptu tiny wooden bridges without railing, and well...a girl could imagine driving herself and her mother into the most convenient creek bed or cliff side. The radio cranked out whatever handy tune was snatched by the satellite, and this girl tried to keep the brown hulk of peeling metal between the lines.

My first driving lesson happened much earlier, actually; I was probably 12 and I ran down the pine tree sapling we'd planted in our yard in commemoration of my birthday that year. Perhaps that's why I truly do not care for pine trees to this day. We won't discuss that further at this time.

I did go through the driver's education program at my high school. It's required, and I did it during the winter of my senior year. The teacher was "the cool football coach." Coach Hefner was the kind of totally awesome teacher that had his finger on the pulse on the entire school, from drama nerds to cheerleaders to golf nerds, and of course, all of the football nerds thought he hung the moon; how he ended up with the driver's ed postition, I will never know outside of guessing he had a death wish. I climbed into the silver Ford Taurus and listened to him sing under his breath to the radio. I didn't want to kill the coolest teacher ever to grace the face of the earth, however, there was ice on the road, and he wanted me to learn how to drive on it. Through the grace of God, we both made it through that experience unscathed. Imagine if I'd manage to off the coolest teacher on the face of the planet in my senior year...? Yeah, no pressure there.

When I was 17, I moved out of my parent's house, and into my best friend's house, with her family. Her mother was an elementary school math teacher, and her father was the captain of our county's sherrif's team. Jim bought a sky blue Chevy S10 and dubbed it Papa Smurf. He carted home a deer he'd shot, and I watched him skin the thing in the back yard one day. He asked me if I was going to get sick, and I said "nope," and continued to stare, slack jawed and feeling green around the gills, despite my saying that I was fine. I mean, have you ever seen someone peel the hide off of an animal? UGH.

Jim showed up one afternoon at my job. He pulled up and handed me the keys to Papa Smurf and said, "see you at home!" He pulled his bike out of the bed of the truck and smiled in complete trust as he set off for the house. I, on the otherhand, was a completly wasted ball of nerves; sure that I would not only die on the way home, but manage to wreck the truck - not necessarily in that order. There was about 6 miles distance between my job and my current front porch, and I was driving the captain of the sherrif's team's Papa Smurf. Did I mention that I didn't actually have a valid driver's license at that time? YEAH, NO PRESSURE. It wasn't very hard to imagine myself strung up in the tree in the back yard, being skinned for destroying the truck.

I made it home in one piece with Jim's truck in one piece. It was miraculous, and I felt a surge of pride as I saw the grin on his face as I pulled into the driveway. But then there was his riding lawnmower, out of the middle of nowhere, and a moment of panic turned into a scratch the length of the truck as I parked. I saw his face crumple in symphony with the paint that peeled from the side of Papa Smurf. Shit.

One night he took his daughter and I out to a deserted parking lot and let us have our way with his poor scarred up Papa Smurf. We squeeled rubber on that thing.. trying to find the clutch. He gave us about a half an hour before he decided to call the local police to tell them he'd run across some joy riders. Imagine my horror as police sped into the parking lot, blue lights blazing and sirens howling as my best friend was pulled over in a freakin' parking lot. I could hear her screaming "DADDY!" across the blacktop, and I crumpled into laughter along with her father.

Years later, when my husband and I moved into another house, I ran into our neighbor - the coolest coach slash driver's ed teacher on the face of the planet. We met at the mailbox row one afternoon, and I bragged to him that I had never had a ticket or an accident in the [then] 13 years that I'd been legally driving the roads of our state. I left out the incident with Papa Smurf, and one other when I'd managed to leave a massive dent in the side of some brand new plastic car, thanks to the surprisingly LONG front end of my classic Chevy Impala when I was backing out of a parking spot at Burger King when I was about 19. He smiled and said he wished he could say the same about his own son, who was 15 at the time.

About a month later, karma caught up with me, and I nearly ran down the coolest coach slash driver's ed teacher on the planet's father-in-law with my car. The father in law slash other neighbor came up to help my husband jack up our car so we could change the tire that had gone flat. We had a stick shift, and I'd accidentally left it in neutral... it ended with an $1800 insurance coverage, and a near miss of epic proportions. My husband actually tried to chase down and stop our car as it collided with the neighbor's truck - I imagined squashed people and lots of jail time as I stood in our driveway and gaped.

A little after that, I found myself getting onto the highway. A maroon Cadillac was behind me on the on ramp, and passing me before I even got onto the highway. I had to slam on my brakes and enter the highway behind the Cadillac, and the driver of the Cadillac was gifted with many foul words and flown birds. I was behind the car all the way to the grocery store, and coincidentally, the very same Cadie cut me off as I was trying to park. I threw my hands in the air in the universal "WHAT THE FUCK" gesture, and finally found a place to park. I got out of the car at the same time as the Cadie driver and we met face to face - Jim's wife and I. The road rage immediatly drained from my veins and turned into pure shock and wonder.

Not all teachers know how to drive, apparently.