Va-va-vroooom!

Just like all good ideas, the idea for this post comes from someone else.

It's the story of my first solo drive, a taste of independence. (Not my first. That's here, although you'll have to register/log-in to read it. Maybe I'll post it here in the future.)

It was the last week of October 2001, and it was one of (if not the) worst weeks of my life. Sunday, my sister and I came home from our dad's, and our mom came home from work about 8 or 8:30. We weren't expecting her home until after 10. (Because that's the time Hardee's closed each night, and she was the closing manager.) She had been crying and told us her district manager had visited the store that day to tell them all it would be closing, effective immediately. I came to understand it being something about a misreading of fine print in the loan agreement the management company signed. (When the papers said the company would "take over" the stores, my mom's people thought it meant the company would take over running them, not take over the buildings.)

I thought it had been rough when half a dozen of my friends worked with my mom; now none of them even had a job. I spent the next week answering questions of my peers; Hardee's had been a popular place for lunch. (My lifelong locker neighbor went there almost every day and sometimes he saw my mom more often than I did.)

To add to the stress, it was finals week. It was one of my toughest terms, and that Friday I had Algebra II first thing in the morning. That was one of my toughest classes, and I still think Mr. Hansen was a terrible teacher. Each Friday, for the last 10-15 minutes of first period, they aired "Warrior World" on closed-circuit TV. The feature of that week was the restaurant's closing. There were a few of us who hadn't finished our final by the time the episode began, but it was showing in the room next door. I cannot describe how stressful it was to be taking a math test while you can hear your best friend and neighbor screaming on the tv "Hardeeee's!! Hardeeeee's!!" as a nice reminder that your single mother was now unemployed. (Unfortunately, I couldn't find that particular episode to link, but they did this week's weather feature in front of my house because the guy doing all the talking lived next door. It's around 9:30. Dan, the guy appearing around 1:30, was killed in Afghanistan in Feb 2009.)

My aunt picked me up after Physics to go take my driver's test. (That may or may not have been the day I cried and D.A. took me into the other room to let me break down about the problems I was having understanding Algebra II.) My mom had insisted my car wouldn't have passed the "in working order" clause because the shoulder strap on the seatbelt on the driver's side didn't roll forward automatically like it was supposed to; I would just slide in underneath it and buckle the lap belt. The solution was to drive the 6-month-old car my aunt & uncle had bought brand new. So, no stress there.

The route the tester took me through happened to be the one that went closest to Hardee's. I was severely distracted by seeing my mom's van there because she was at the picnic table with everyone's final paycheck. So I misunderstood the direction to turn at the next intersection and ended up at a terrible intersection down the road because of it. I got points taken off because I didn't pull far enough forward to see around the car on my left when I wanted to turn right. If I had failed, I would have said something, but I passed so I didn't care.

We stopped by Hardee's to tell my mom I had passed. Then she asked if I could drive down and sit with the checks while she took hers to the bank and then go pick up my sister from school.

So those were the events leading up to my first experience driving alone.