Unlearning and Re-Learning to Drive Across the Millennia
Or, how I made peace with the 21st century
Between 1988 and 2020, history ended (arrogantly) and un-ended (sheepishly), we changed millennia, and I passed that melancholy crossing point where more of my life was the past than the future. During that same time, I traveled an oddly parallel, sometimes phobic road of learning, unlearning, and triumphantly re-learning to drive.
Learning
I first learned to drive in Amherst, Massachusetts. In 1984, the first time since 1972 a woman was anywhere near the presidential ticket (as a VP), the Country was so newly — and, god help us, prophetically — Red that even Massachusetts (and 48 other states) went for Reagan; Amherst stayed Blue, along with Mondale’s Minnesota. Town was gown, gown was tie-dyed, and the ambitious ideas still in vogue at the time permeated the whole place, albeit in safe, manageable portions: a seminar, a scoop of newly-fancy ice cream, a yoga class. (At least, this was my perspective as a straight, white kid.)
Human perfectibility aside, I myself could not manage to reach a full stop at a stop sign, thus bombing my driving test the first time I took it. I wasn’t reckless, just savagely uncomfortable. My father decided to outsource to a professional teacher, a stoic older man resistant to disappointment (at least in my memory) who hailed from a stoic nearby town that never fully recovered from the Depression.
He, my father, grew up in the suburbs north of Chicago and drove well. My mother, a city girl who got her own license only at 28, not so much. “What am I looking at?” was the catch phrase that caused chills, though she never had accidents, which was good because she could not have afforded them. (I was scared of economic insecurity and later became a lawyer.)
Note the knowing psychoanalytic bent of that paragraph! When I passed the driving test on the second try, in the late 80s, the idea of the self was still psychoanalytically informed: intense internal imperatives driven by factors you could barely understand, making you circle and circle the same patterns. Sex: important. Drives: important. Death: important. Ineffability mixed with a rather boring determinism, viz.: she was afraid of insecurity and so she became a lawyer.
The car I drove in high school — the first and last I ever owned — was a used, gas-guzzling 1970-something Ford Grenada courtesy of my aunt and uncle. Luck, the frequent presence of sharp-eyed friends, and low population density prevented accidents. The social contract prevented towing. I worked at a movie theater box office, prominently displayed near a main entrance of a bustling 1980s mall. Customers might buy two tickets for The Last Temptation of Christ or Robocop then ask me to announce on a loudspeaker that someone left their car lights on. Often I was that someone.
My parking was not ideal. More than once, someone wrote a missive on my car (that being a paper-and-pen carrying time). “Hey asshole,” read one note matter-of-factly, “you blocked me in.” “Dear moron,” began another. Amherst may have been the happy valley, but there were limits. Parallel parking? No. It struck me as that sort of extra credit problem that was needlessly abstract and presumptively unnecessary in real life. But, I could drive.
Unlearning, or ‘The Person Too Neurotic To Drive’
I moved to larger and larger places (surely there is some golden ratio with population size and grocery store aisle width): Western Mass to Eastern Mass, Cambridge to DC, and finally, in August 1994, to NYC. Places for those reasonably happy or otherwise resigned to rely on the creaky, northeastern U.S. infrastructure of buses and trains.
Recall the launch of the Acela, an underperforming cousin of other countries’ far superior and accessible fast trains, whose touted exceptionalism was itself a symbol of our fealty to our 20th-century car culture choices? Probably not you, but me.
In the 90s and early 2000s, I drove about every two years, generally short trips, at least as compared to the many in this country who drive hours a day. In 2002ish, for example, I drove with a co-counsel in the Albany area to meet potential clients in what was to become a lawsuit against Walmart for underpaying its workers. I drove shakily, terribly, consumed with unfamiliarity. This was even before we met our cheerfully paranoid would-be witness who bragged about his ability (in his own mind) to hack into any company’s systems. He offered to follow us to our hotel and implied monitoring was not out of the question. (Walmart faced multiple lawsuits, settled most, and lost a couple of trials. I had a similar case against A&P. Notwithstanding the serious wage theft practices we alleged, it was also true that A&P paid better than Walmart and was unionized. You can imagine which of the two companies failed to survive the first decade of the 21st Century. Reagan ultimately won everywhere.)
Next was a bona fide road trip. My then-boyfriend and I planned to meet in Vegas and drive to New Orleans together, luxuriate in the Big Easy, and then I would fly home. I was accommodating his own fear of flying (no metaphors intended, though that consummately 20th-century book beckons…). I previewed my limitations as a motorist. I thought I was clear, but who knows. Maybe I softened it, concerned the trip would morph into something more perfunctory and short if I laid it on too thick.
After a trial stint deep in the southwest where I was driving perilously slowly and still missed an exit (and the IHOP!) due to fear of crossing lanes, the verdict was in.
“You lied,” he announced, with the calm certainty — relief? — of someone primed to wait for — crave? — deception and misrepresentations from others. The 20th century would call for a big story, how he was stuck in his unshakeable pattern of using honesty as a sword and shield.
In early 2003 I was to defend depositions around the country of female truck drivers employed by a company called Consolidated Freightways (“CornFlake” to those in the know) that, as we alleged, underpaid women. Very 20th century, very 21st century.
I felt bad about the pay inequity and the other evils of the world and, at that time, prone to feeling stymied and blue when traveling for work about being single and still childless. I’m not proud of the harsh, unrelenting failure to give myself a break, the failure (as the kids would call it today) to hold myself in the sort of kindness I would insist on for any other person. For whatever reason, I decided I simply could not show up for the deposition of a professional truck driver in a taxi cab in the middle of Charlotte, North Carolina. I rented a car.
“Is it easy to get to [location]?” I asked.
Readily I was assured, ma’am, it was the easiest thing in the world. A simple two-lane highway. Anybody could drive it.
Not so. I was uneasy and on high alert even leaving the airport parking lot, the scale was much bigger than expected, and unlike in any recent car trip for many years, I was alone. Once on the highway, I was stuck. I couldn’t change lanes. I couldn’t read the signs. I couldn’t figure out where I was going and where I might wind up. I couldn’t come close to tapping into the unimaginably spectacular human evolution that allowed the processing of billions of signals, that is, to drive alongside other humans. I couldn’t do anything but increase the terror. I was sure I would die or have a horrible accident, or god forbid hurt someone else.
They used to talk about nervous breakdowns. It went out of vogue. Too broad, too unscientific. Mysterious but crude. The data tell us that what we might have called a nervous breakdown, like the reviled moral majority of my progressive childhood, could have been neither. Still, some precision is warranted and available here, and what I experienced was a panic attack. Somehow I got myself off the highway, not sure how, and into a parking lot, not sure where. I called the rental car company, my voice shaking.
“I’m at the drop off point at….” I paused to look where I was. “…X.”
“There is no drop off point at X.”
“Oh, there is now.” I explained. I am eternally grateful to the woman who cut through the bureaucracy and arranged for her boyfriend to just come get the car and call it a day.
My friend and law partner Joy improbably grew up in Charlotte, making her interested in this trip, and I felt obliged to call her next (hardly a chore for an over-sharer). She thought it was hilarious, an anecdote I could own with pride as a New York-y person, and at the moment I felt better. (In 2016, Joy was diagnosed with Stage 4 colorectal cancer and she died in 2018. Her crossing of the past-future line was not a slow, melancholy experience, but a brutal crash. She would have liked this retelling, and so many other things.)
The witness, of course, didn’t care at all how I arrived, having more important things to think about. Litigation is a baffling experience at best. After her deposition, it was her turn to relax and ask me more about myself (this was not uncommon, you are interrogated all day by someone else, then it’s your turn to ask the questions to the person who defended you). First off: had I decided not to get married?
By 2003, I was the official Non-Driver, worse, the Person Too Neurotic To Drive. It wasn’t until 2014 that I revisited this identity. Earlier that year, the news broke that General Motors sold cars with undisclosed and potentially deadly defective ignition switches, and my firm was among those seeking restitution for consumers. I knew law, and thought I should know cars. Plus I had two little kids. Time to show the flexibility I wanted them to have?
Re-Learning
I called a teacher, named A.
“NY lawyer who might move to the suburbs with her kids who never learned?,” he guessed. I was in fact sitting in my office. Not bad, and close enough. I prepaid for ten sessions.
On a chilly Saturday morning I took the 4/5 train to 86th Street & Lexington on the Upper East Side, my heart pounding, stopping at Starbucks, and gazing longingly at the Barnes & Noble where I could have immersed myself in a mystery novel were I the sort to skip out.
A. and I drove around one-way streets that week, and the next, looping around the dull, pretty neighborhood in a spotless car with devices that were new to me (such as the camera when the car is in reverse).
If you’ve ever read a scientific book that supposedly is for laypeople (say, a Brief History of Time), maybe you understand 100% of the first, easy chapters, and functionally none of the rest, no matter how much 21st-century growth mindset. An anecdote about an infinite line of turtles turns into opaque theorems as you are jarred out of the past.
Similarly, a person can drive reasonably well down a short one-way street in a safe car next to a driving instructor, in effect understanding chapters one and two, but the distance from that to “driving in NY” is infinite. I felt rage against New York City. Nothing was easy, it was rigid, cramped, too heavy to go from one level to the next of anything.
I read later that A. closed his business abruptly (allegedly), and suggesting my final seven lessons would remain uncompleted. I take social media assertions with the heavy grain of salt that I pray my 21st-century children will adopt, but who knows. Maybe there is only so much a person can drive in circles.
In early 2016, an unlucky 13 years since the perfection and cementing of the story about myself that I was too neurotic to drive, I realized I was middle-aged. That, incredibly and infuriatingly, I already was middle-aged. An exemplar nightmare from that time involved my husband Andy (much more on him later), the therapist I had started seeing to deal with the midlife crisis (do 21st-century people have those, or is it continuous improvement?), water rushing down the street leading to my office, and a Greek chorus of young people who told me I was behind. That my concerns were 20th-century concerns.
I am an absurdly literal person, as the above reflects, which is why I will make explicit, if it is not obvious, that this is really a story about mental health. And how we age against the backdrop of the stories we’ve told ourselves and the times we live in.
The following year, we temporarily had to vacate our apartment, and arranged a summer in the burbs (Pleasantville!), with me commuting for work. Although we were now fully in the gig economy/Uber era (a perhaps inevitable path since at least the 1980s), lessening the unfairness of leaving all the driving to Andy, you could also really breathe there. Time to try again with lessons.
As with that uncommunicative teacher in Amherst, I was chatty, this time more reciprocally. I learned about the devices on the car for people who had to learn to drive after losing use of their legs (there is a hand device for gas and braking available). When one is the same age as, if not older, than driving teachers, the dynamic changes. The instructor does not bark out, “What is the speeding limit?”; they ask if you happen to have noticed it. The instructor is not going to lecture the student on mortality; that would just be rude.
For a few minutes there, driving down sleepy suburban roads, without fear, without the intervening years of city-phobia-city, I felt some freedom. But one teacher took me too far and I became scared, and then disappointed and disappointing. It wasn’t a bust, though, because of those minutes and the file that opened in my mind: maybe I could do this.
Andy and our kids had never been to Amherst, until the summer of 2020. My family had not lived there in decades; I myself hadn’t visited since 2006, when I played Lily Bart: not contributing to the driving to and from the city, but serving as hopefully good company to those behind the wheel.
In 2020, in the first year of the pandemic, we rented a house on Middle Street at the foot of Mt. Pollux. We arrived amid a biblically torrential rainstorm and when I ran into the open, airy house, away from NYC and that horrible COVID spring, I nearly wept like someone rescued before briskly confirming whether Antonio’s pizza still existed (yes) and whether it would deliver for my hungry kids.
The only camp open that summer was fully outdoors and about 35 minutes away, near Lake Wyola, located in nearby Shutesbury. To drive there, we went through Pelham, where I lived in the earliest period of my life, and was a sweet, quirky, timid, but chatty child who spent a lot of time deep in imaginary worlds while walking around the woods behind our house. The 21st-century descriptors would have been pressured speech, anxiety, perhaps sensory issues. Right and wrong.
I was back to the place where I first learned to drive, first learned to live, and, I hope, first learned to think for myself.
Andy and I started driving, together. Andy is a gifted artist, with a great visual sense.
Andy, also, eschews grand theories. He is not prone to Depression.
We started driving in the parking lot of Fort River Elementary School, which I had attended from 4th to 6th grade in the early 80s. We drove down Amherst road, past the long treacherous driveway up to the first house I lived in, back into the beautiful old towns, exuding an old New England, early American experiment feel. Mostly we took our time. No theories, just time.
I loved driving. One day I worked up the nerve to drive by myself to a convenience store nearby. “I just drove!” I said to the puzzlement of the person half my age behind the counter.
The adrenaline was a bookend to the cortisol in North Carolina (that may be a little off, but we are all 21st-century people, and you get it). The next time I drove I sang with the radio, the time after that the windows were open.
There was no real reason or grand psychological theory about why I couldn’t drive beyond the small pieces (bad depth perception, lack of practice, etc.), just as there was no real reason I had children later than I would have liked to, and so many other things.
I hate the accelerated retrenchment, the screen-size portion smallness, the meanness, and lack of ambition of the 21st century. The talk of grand theories of justice and transformation seem impossible, at least in this country.
But, the 21st century is when I un-un-learned to drive, when my children will live their lives, and when I came to really understand that storytelling wrapped in big ideas can be suffocating.
You can find Rachel Geman the lawyer at www.lieffcabraser.com; Rachel the comedy writer at Belladonna, Points in Case, Jane Austen’s Wastebasket, and others; and Rachel the person at home with family or in a nearby bakery.
