My oldest son, our first child, was a lot of fun! Like all parents we learned a lot with her first child. He got a lot of attention, but he also bore the brunt of a lot of learning on how to be a parent.
One of the areas that I learned the most and was in teaching him how to drive. At the time we had two vehicles, a smallish four-door car and then a full-size conversion van so that we could carry our four children and us in all of our stuff on road trips and comfort. I drove the full-size van full time, even when we were paying $4.50 or more for a gallon of gasoline. That was a challenging time because $80 plus a week to drive back and forth to work was a challenge. But that's okay!
Jacob was a good driver. My wife started to teach him at first because I was very uptight about the whole thing. Once he got some basic skills going I started letting him drive with me in the passenger seat. He did fine with the minor things. I do remember the first time that he went on the interstate.
The first time that he went on the interstate was an exciting moment. He turned left onto the on ramp and he was going along. There is a lot of traffic, I 75. And he started to slow down and creep along looking for a place to merge. I yelled that he needed to speed up because the only way you merge into fast traffic is you speed up and get to a speed that fits the flow and slides into a spot. Because nobody's gonna give you a spot if you stop! I think is the only time I ever told him to speed up.
We survived that just fine, but there were other things. One night we were driving to go to the store or something. We were in the full-size van and it was pretty newish to us, we'd only had about six months. We were driving on this four-lane road with the median in the middle and nothing on either side because it was an undeveloped brand-new kind of road. As we were going along we saw a box stent standing in the middle-of-the-road. In the middle of the right lane. A box that was about windshield hi. Standing straight up. Jacob was doing about 50 miles an hour.
As we got closer to the box I asked him if he saw the box. He said yes, I see the box. I can look at him and looked at the box. I asked him what was going to do. He just kinda got this silly slight grin on his face. And we got really close to the box and I had to yell move to the other laying! Because he was going to run over the box.
He slid over just barely missing the box. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw that the box didn't even move as we blew past it at 50+ miles per hour. And I started chewing him out, explaining that you don't know what's in the box and you don't run over things that you don't know what's in them. Because it could be a solid block of wood or it could be a bunch of sharp objects that are to flatten your tires or it could be this and that and you just don't hit things in the road if you can avoid them ever. And I was yelling very loud! And he was in looking at me like I didn't know what I was talking about like he often did. And making the file she thought I was stupid. And I said what were you to turn around and go see what the hell is in the box. And at the next point he did a U-turn and we went back and then we did a U-turn and I told him pull up on the side of the road near the box so we could go see it.
He put the van in park and shut it off and we got out and walked to the box. He went to pick up the box and it was too heavy for him to pick up. It had a full piece of solid wood furniture in it. At that point I began explaining to him how that would have totaled our band and possibly could've killed both of us as we slammed into it and it ran to the engine into our laps. As I was chewing him out a teenager pulled up in a little pickup truck behind our van. His pickup truck bed was full of furniture and other bits and pieces like they were moving an apartment or house somewhere. The kid got out of his truck and sheepishly came up and said that I dropped that and can I please have my furniture and put it in the bed of my truck again.
That moment is so vivid in my memory! The moment of just barely missing the box and then the look of shock on my son's face when he realized how bad the damage would've been if he had run over it like it had been a box in a videogame like he wanted to do.
Luckily he is a grown into a fine young man that is responsible and does not run over anything in the rooms. Because he doesn't want to damage his own vehicle at all. Since he's almost got it paid off!
, Memories!
