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Sunday our daughter, Trinity, made comments about the fact that she’d never seen me actually drive the Foose. I hadn’t realized that all my practice driving had been either when she was at school or with her father. I hadn’t done that deliberately, or maybe I had. I mean when driving a stick shift for the first time in twenty-five years, do you really want to have your kid see the learning curve? I guess my ego was fragile enough to avoid that last humiliation. And humiliation it has been.
Yes, Charles and Jon have both told me that I’ve been doing well, but I didn’t think I was doing well, and in my world, in the end, that’s what decides how I feel about something. I had decided to feel bad about the Mustang. I mean it was impractical, and it was flashy, and it was . . . It was so not me. I found excuses not to drive the car, or to have Jon drive the car. I hadn’t realized how bad it had gotten until Trinity made her remarks, and I realized she was right. She had never seen me drive the Foose.
So this weekend when we went out to see a movie with our friend Richard, I drove the Foose. Drove to lunch and drove to the theatre. Yes, I killed it a couple of times in the one parking lot of the first restaurant, that turned out to be closed until far too late to be useful, but it was okay. It’s okay that I’m not perfect, other than that moment, I was fine.
We saw FORBIDDEN KINGDOM, and it was good. It was a Woo-ping Yeun, so it was great wire-fu. I mean it’s a movie with Jet Li and Jackie Chan in it, so it was fun, and visually wonderfully. It was nice to see Jet Li in a movie where he got to laugh.
When we came out after the movie it was raining. The Foose, the Baby, was getting wet, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that Jon asked if I wanted him to drive home. I was insulted at first, then realized that it was what I’d trained him to do about the car. I would drive us somewhere, then he’d drive home. If it got dark; I didn’t want to drive the Foose for the first time in the dark. If there was a line of traffic, I didn’t want to work the clutch in stop and go traffic. If there was a chance of ice anywhere, I’d let him drive. I realized that I had found excuse after excuse not to drive the car. And given Jon excuse after excuse to drive the car. I mean what sane man is going to turn down a chance to drive the Foose?
But as we stood there in the rain, and I considered his offer, I realized it pissed me off. Both that he’d offered and that I was actually considering it. We let Richard and Trin get in the back seat out of the rain and we discussed it.
I asked, “Is it really that much more dangerous to drive this car in the rain?”
“A little, but you know how when you spin the wheels you tend to panic?”
“Yes.”
“In the rain, that will be worse.”
He was right, I had been panicking when the wheels spun, or I gunned the engine accidentally. I had panicked when I killed the engine. We stood in the rain, and I thought about all of it. I thought about how I’d been giving up. I thought about a lot of things as the cold spring ran came down. Finally, I made my decision. It was my car. If it was truly my car than a little rain didn’t change that. Screw it, I was driving home.
And that’s exactly what I did. I had no trouble, other than a bumpy moment shifting, but only once. It was no harder to drive in the rain. I’m sorry, wet or dry, the Foose hugs the road like she’s got Spider powers. Admittedly, I made sure I remembered where the windshield wipers and light switches were before we started moving. The fact that I still didn’t know where everything was, tells you just how much I’d been avoiding my car.
I drove home, in the rain. I drove home and didn’t fear the lights as they changed, or having to shift. I’m not perfect, yet, but that’s okay. I’ll get better. The important thing is that, for the first time, I decided that the Foose, truly is my car. Rain or shine, day or night; it’s mine. Jon will have to get his own muscle car to play with, because I’ve finally decided that the Foose is mine.