Things you learned out of driving school

I just watched LLTV’s YouTube of the auction and cringed when Sean, sitting in Bullitt, rested his elbow on the door for a moment. My father was sitting at a red light on a hot summer night in south Louisiana, windows down and arm hanging out the car, when a truck took the corner too wide and sideswiped his car on the driver’s side. After being a bombardier over France and Germany during WWII and coming home without a scratch, he lost his left arm above the elbow a few years later in peacetime. No one considered him handicapped. I have his Louisiana champion skeet medals. He bagged his limit hunting and fishing. He could turn a corner and shift from first to second at the same time. He had major success with the women (a big reason my parents’ marriage broke up). He could do pretty much anything. However, he was no longer the golf pro at the local country club and he couldn’t put on his right cufflink. But.... growing up, if we stuck any part of our anatomies out a car window, we got smacked. I still don’t. Drivers ed doesn’t teach this but one-armed parents sure do.

Other lessons from him: cops with radar like overpasses. Don’t look at oncoming headlights when driving in the dark, it’ll ruin your night vision for awhile plus there is a tendency to steer where you are looking. And he taught me how to drive a stick shift, I took drivers ed the first year it was taught on automatic transmissions.

I’ve violated the ‘never pick up hitchhikers’ rule a couple times because they had dogs with them. The last hitchhiker I picked up, 35 years ago, was a skinny little hard-faced female in Fayetteville, NC, because it was sleeting and she had on a thin jacket. I’m sitting there at a red light in a warm car watching her shiver and I couldn’t stand it. I gave her a ride to her trailer and she was so very relieved because it was the one time she had forgotten to bring her knife and gun. Yow.