My Life as a Road Warrior

"Go right around the left," I told my brother, whom I was teaching to drive. This was about 60 years ago, when we were still living in our childhood home in Newton. "What?" he said. I then explained what had seemed perfectly obvious that he was to go around the traffic circle that we were approaching and then take the left-hand fork. He managed to become an excellent driver in spite of me.

My own driving skills were nothing to brag about, for I was much too cautious, frustrating the line of drivers behind me, which I suppose was almost as dangerous as if I had been driving too fast. Since mothers are responsible for everything, it's tempting to blame mine. Even slower than I was, she taught me how to drive. "Now stay in the left-hand lane," she would tell me, during our stately progress down Beacon Street at 20 mph, "and don't pay any attention to the honking behind you." She wanted me to make a left turn about three miles away and wasn't taking any chances that we'd be in the wrong lane when the time came. Honesty compels me to admit, however, that even with the best instruction in the world, I would have turned out to be a timid driver.

My mother-in-law, in contrast, was a speed demon, tail-gating recklessly from my slow-poke point of view. Her driving frightened me so much that I learned never to look ahead but to gaze out the right-hand window instead. But in close to 50 years of driving, she never had an accident, so it's clear that I was frightened, as so often is the case, for nothing.

My slow driving once so exasperated my father-in-law, whom I was driving, along with my pregnant wife and first child, from Montauk to Manhattan, that he ordered me to stop the car and change places with him. He would drive. I loved him and treasure his memory, but his irritation shocked me so profoundly that I've never forgotten it. But no doubt it was well deserved.

The few times my generally calm wife has lost her temper with me were in Los Angeles, when she was driving and I was navigator. "Which way should I go, left or right?" she asked. I pointed to the road on the left, although it was dark and there was no way she could have seen my hand. "You speak English, don't you?" she cried out angrily. "Left," I said.

In spite of my slowness and the need to stop every 50 minutes or so to snooze at the side of the road, I've driven across the United States by myself twice, without incident. I must admit, though, that I once drove back and forth across the Mississippi several times before figuring out that the place I was looking for did not require me to cross at all. But in recent years, I've had fewer and fewer occasions to drive. We lived in downtown Jerusalem, within walking distance of most of the places I needed to go, and I preferred walking to driving. My skills, such as they were, became rusty and I began to lose my nerve. In one of my last forays on the road, I drove too close to a bus on my right, clipping my side-view mirror, which flew into the car, landing not too far from me. This so frightened me that I decided not to renew my license when it expired. So after more than 60 years as a driver, I finally hung up my keys. My wife, however, is a splendid driver and likes to drive. It's she who now rents our cars and it's she who drives them, while I do my best not to tell her to drive right around the left and not to point out in the dark which road she should take next.