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Wednesday, October 21, 1998 By Samantha Bennett
I've just taken a week off and spent it in the car. With my mother. We're still speaking. I know you're impressed. We traveled all through northern Pennsylvania, stopping at night in bed-and-breakfasts and observing the fall foliage.
Mom flew out here from Philadelphia, and I picked her up at the airport. It was a dreary, wet day, and as I drove down the Parkway West I savored the last few minutes of a luxury I knew I would be giving up for the next solid week: unscrutinized driving.
I have a passenger so seldom that the front seat of my car is used as a table and laden with cassettes, shopping lists with directions scrawled on the back, sunglasses and food wrappers. All that vital stuff literally has to take a back seat when I give someone a ride.
Alone and, I hope to God, unobserved, I play the music that provides an appropriate soundtrack to my journey, at the correct volume. I sing. I practice telling off people I didn't tell off properly when they were actually present. I laugh at radio contests in which callers are trying to sing something for money.
But it's really the simple things you take for granted, isn't it? Choosing your own speed, for example. Passing or not passing. Yes, I knew as I took the exit for the airport that I was saying goodbye to all that along with the city behind me.
Mom was remarkably even-tempered for somebody who cannot completely unclench everything except in deep REM sleep. She didn't say much as I drove. I'm really a pretty good driver: I've been at it for 16 years now without, as of press time, an accident serious enough to require insurance company involvement. (Incidentally, please take a moment right now to reach over and rap something wooden for me, will you? I'll sleep better.) Mom even admits, in weak moments, that I am a better driver than she is.
Also, my car is newish, well maintained and has dual airbags. Mom, however, prefers to rely on the Hand of Safety. If I turn too fast, the Hand of Safety grips the door handle. If I stop too short, the Hand of Safety deploys onto the dashboard where it would probably, in the event of an actual emergency, be whapped back into her face by the Airbag of Peril. When I was a child, the Hand of Safety shot out across my vulnerable little body from behind the wheel with lightning speed.
Often as I drove (I did all the driving, because I didn't want to take more than a week to get across the state), a beautiful autumnal vista would open to our view on one side of the road or the other. We'd crest a hill and "Ohh, Mom! Look there! Off to the right! The oranges! The yellows!"
"Oh, yes," she'd agree tensely, snapping her head back and forth to alternately take in the scenery and confirm, via the windshield, that the car had not left the road.
I know it's not just my mom, or my vehicular vagaries. I've heard fathers and sons as well as mothers and daughters complain of being driven to the braking point. Usually, there is no cure. Things just go on that way, decade in, decade out. Sometimes one party refuses to ever get in the car with the other again. But sometimes, the keys are successfully, gracefully passed to the next generation.
My neighbor Paul says he knew he had achieved full official driver certification when his dad not only let him drive the Lincoln Town Car from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, but actually turned to him on the Turnpike and said, "Everything OK?"
"Yes," said Paul.
"Well then, I'm going to get some sleep."
Wow.
I have come to accept that, try as she may, my mother will never achieve this level of serenity.
For parents like her, automotive distrust is just one more symptom of the disbelief that someone you brought into the world could ever be a fully functional adult like you. Nothing stunts one's future credibility like being observed singing the alphabet, or kneading spaghetti into one's hair.
I know it's a mystery to Mom that I sign leases, purchase cars and even just get up and get to work in the morning. And she doesn't even know about how I'm usually late and wind up eating Hostess Brownie Bites for breakfast at my desk.
Please don't tell her. I may need to get her into the car again come the holidays, and I don't want to have to resort to drugging her eggnog.
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