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Buckling down and Buckling up

posted by mzemait2 at 10:24 pm.

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I did it! I drove a car! It had a steering wheel and everything!

After 5 years of living in fear, I decided it was time to become a big girl. I had my first driving lesson with my friend Jacqui. Jacqui is a generally awesome human being and your life is worse off for not knowing her. I’ve known her since my second day of classes freshman year, and over the past four years, I continuously am in awe of her many wonderful qualities. She’s patient, has a magical ability to make others feel completely at ease around her, is one of the least non-judgmental people I’ve ever known, and she used to be an Education major — in other words, she’s the best person in the world to teach this skittish chicken how to drive.

As the old proverb goes, give a girl a fish, and she’ll eat for the day. Teach a girl to drive, and she can go to the McDonald’s drive-thru whenever she’s hungry. It was in the empty parking lot of Rhodes Furniture Store where Jacqui would teach me how to fish a car.

Jacqui gave me the keys, and I climbed into the driver’s seat. What an odd view that I hadn’t seen in so long. Did you know that there’s a mirror attached to the roof of the car?! Yeah, it helps you see behind the car! Weird!

“Are you scared, Mary?” she asked me.

“Completely. But I’m ready.”

I told Jacqui to approach me as though I had absolutely no knowledge of driving a car…which after 5 years, wasn’t too far off. She slowly took me through the process of starting the car, and made me explain it out loud as I was doing it. Buckle up. Adjust the seat. Check your mirrors. Key in the ignition. Foot on brake. Put car into drive. Take my foot off the brake.

Take my foot off the brake.

Take my foot off the brake.

I took my foot off the brake.

And it was awesome.

As I inched my way through the deserted parking lot like a snail doing the electric slide, my foot hovering over the brake, I couldn’t believe I was finally doing this. I was driving a car. Later on, Jacqui even let me use the accelerator! And we went to another parking lot, where there were real live cars! Oh, and I learned how to park! And I did a good job too! I didn’t kill anyone!

Looking back, I think it took me this long because I was afraid of failing. Besides dying alone, failure is one of my greatest fears. You see, when I failed my Behind the Wheel test years ago, I was able to blame it on other things: My parents’ car was wrecked so I couldn’t practice, my instructor was the douche-bag wrestling coach, blahblahcrymeariverjustintimberlakeblahblah. But with this, I would have no one to blame but myself if I failed again. And that’s scary.

But to quote the cinematic classic House Arrest starring Jamie Lee Curtis, sometimes ya gotta “feel the fear and go for it.” In conquering every irrational phobia (driving, snakes, the dark, clowns with knives), you just gotta buckle down because getting over the initial fear is the true obstacle. Once you allow yourself to participate in your phobia, you realize that the whole phobia was silly and that you have nothing to fear but fear itself.

And car crashes.

FDR obviously never saw a clown with a knife before.

Mary Zemaitis: I enjoy comedy. And entendres. Sometimes, Triple Entendres.