Drive My Car
The last time I was behind the wheel of a car was in May of 1996. A friend at NU needed to pick up one of the university's vans for a dorm event and he asked me to drive his car back as he would be driving the van. I was a bit apprehensive about it because I hadn't driven at all in the year since I had received my license. However, I drove his car without any difficulty and the task was accomplished. It must have been the first time I had ever been in a moving car alone since I had always been either riding or driving with a passenger qua instructor.
On Saturday, after handing over a check and signing a number of documents, I sat alone behind the wheel of a car as I drove it off the lot of the CarMax store in Oak Lawn. Remember my apprehension in the first paragraph? Multiply it by the number of years since my foot last touched the pedals of a vehicle.
Driving is easy isn't it? It's just like riding a bicycle, or something like that.
I piloted the vehicle into the twilight and onto 95th Street, cruised along at a moderate speed and arrived home without incident; although my parking leaves something to be desired.
Having a car is such a novelty for me, I feel constantly compelled to be inside it driving somewhere, even if I have really no place to go. But even if I did have some place to go, it is not unlikely that I wouldn't know how to get there since I'm not accustumed to travelling by car.
I had perceived the necessity, made recently unavoidable, to have my own vehicle as a rather onerous burden that I would otherwise prefer not to accept. I'm not sure now that is the case, but owning a car certainly brings ordinary life a step closer in it's terrible pursuit of me. I only have a 4 cylinder engine; I don't know how long I can out run it.
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