Hugh got his driver’s license yesterday!  Third time’s a charm.

I will spare you the details of the long, tedious wait next to the litter-filled scrubby hillside behind a grocery store, which is where cars line up for the test drive.  The wait is usually an hour, so bring entertainment.

I will also spare you the details of the long, tedious wait inside the building for the photo and documentation.  Let’s just say that I have renewed sympathy for all Kafka characters caught up in nightmarish Russian bureaucracy.

Instead, today’s post features three short stories about driving.

1.  My brother Tom called me in early January from his Colorado cabin.  He reported on his family’s outing to the ski slopes, in which his wife and teenage daughters had gone off on one ski lift, and Tom and his kindegarten son Griffin had gone in another direction.  “We got to the top of the slope and started down, but then Griffin’s boots hurt, so I readjusted them.  We got a little farther down when he realized he was hungry.  Then he had to go to the bathroom and started crying, so I ended up taking his skis off, putting him under one arm, the skis under the other, and skiing us both back down to the lodge.”

My response was “Hey, my son went skiing today too.  His friend drove over early in the morning, Hugh ran out with all his gear, and the two of them headed off for a fun day trip with no pesky parents involved.  You see, you won’t always have to play nursemaid to Griffin!”

There was silence.  Then Tom said in a small voice, “Tell me that story again.”

2.  Before Ian got his license, my friend Helen (mother of 5 boys!) shared her experience.  “When my eldest got his license, I was so nervous about him driving his little brothers around that I wouldn’t let him take them anywhere.  This lasted for a week or so.  After that, I was completely over it.  ”Drive your brother to soccer practice!  Then pick up milk, come home, and take another brother to his lesson!”  So true.  It’s wonderful to have another driver in the family, and very quickly, the convenience trumps the anxiety.

3.  As we walked to the car yesterday, I handed the keys to Hugh and said “I’ll be your co-pilot.”  “No,” he responded “Malcolm is my co-pilot.”  The backstory:  Chris’s brother Ken called me in December to report that he had seen a car on I-95 with a bumper sticker reading “Malcolm Reynolds is my co-pilot.”  Since that is exactly the name of our kid, he did a double-take.  I told Ken that, having seen some inappropriate Facebook fan pages for a Malcolm Reynolds while looking up my own Malcolm’s page, I knew the name belonged to a character in a sci-fi TV show called Firefly – and the car he saw must have belonged to a Firefly fan.  Ken immediately went online and ordered the product for Malcolm’s birthday.  What could be a more perfect gift from an uncle?

And hey, seeing how grubby our auto is at the end of a long and messy winter gives me an idea.  Maybe Hugh can take it to the carwash!

I hate filling out forms.  Therefore, I am quite bad at it. 

Back before our school district became completely computerized, there were little colored cards to fill out – in triplicate – for each boy.  And because so many parents are divorced or never married or have never even met, there are different spaces for absolutely everyone’s address, office phone, home phone, cell phone, fax, email, and favorite coffee shop where you might be found in case of emergency if your cell is dead or the ringer is off.

That’s just the parents. 

Then there are the lines for the pediatrician (and all his/her numbers) and the dentist (ditto) and the person authorized to pick your kid up in the car line in the event no biological relatives can drive that day.

It became exceedingly tiresome to fill out these cards.

To ease the tedium, I started filling in the address line with an ink pad and a stamper.  Chris and I work at home – the address is always the same!  Or I would use those charity address labels that otherwise have no purpose, since nobody uses the US Mail anymore. 

There was one year when I made the mistake of facing the little blue cards late at night after drinking too much of what Chris calls Mommy’s Special Juice.  They quickly became an inky, smudgy, messed-up mess.  Reduced to trying to make copies on our fax machine so I could start over, I succeeded only in faxing smudgey, whited-out forms to god knows where.  If there is any justice in the world, they went to the fax machine of that mythical Nigerian prince.

So, bottom line, forms are not my thing.  I would make a terrible bureaucrat.

I didn’t realize anyone else in the family noticed or cared about this until yesterday, when Hugh and I went for his driving test (Take Two).  I had printed out the form validating that yes, he had put in at least 50 hours of driving on the road.  It was all filled in properly.  I had my driver’s license, we had the insurance card and the registration from the glove box (which I used to call glove compartment, but that’s another story).  After waiting in a long line of cars for nearly one hour, it was finally our turn.

The examiner asked for the forms.  She told me I didn’t need the 50 hour form since that had been turned in during the first driving test (parallel parking was the downfall there).  I handed over the other things – she examined them – announced “your insurance expired, make another appointment,” – handed back the papers, and off we went.  Again.  In dismay.

On further examination, I saw that the insurance card was good up until the very day before the test.  In a cell phone call, Chris said “Of course our insurance is valid, it runs from October to October, that must have been a temporary card from when we bought the Jetta in September.”  We cursed, and felt cursed.

As Hugh drove disgustedly back to tennis team practice, he lectured me.  Our roles were reversed.  I sat, ashamed, in the passenger seat, while Hugh lambasted me for the insurance screw-up.  Even in anger, he is very mature.  “I know that insurance isn’t your area, but this is the kind of thing that happens too much in our family.  I hate how forms aren’t filled out on time.  I was always the kid who turned in his permission slip on the last possible day, or even later.  And that was really embarrassing.  Maybe I shouldn’t have felt embarrassed, but why can’t we just do this stuff on time?”
I pointed out that Hugh has only one more year at home and in high school, there are no field trips, so it’s not much of an issue for him any more.  “Well, maybe if you change, it can help Malcolm.”  Ouch.

My next defense was that no family is perfect.  Perhaps the kid who turns in permission slips exactly on time is also being raised on a steady diet of Lunchables and Spaghettios.  Or worse, Burger King crap served in the car while his mom drives him from lacrosse practice to music lessons.

Hugh didn’t exactly respond with “Irrelevant, your honor” but it was close.  The poor kid has a point.  I am awful at forms, and paperwork, and organization.

While I have resolved to reform, I am also a realist. 

Can I improve on this score?  Yes.  Will I ever be one of those perfect moms?  No.

Thank God.

Hugh has a folder labeled MORE CRAP.  This might seem like an unlikely file for a carefree 16-year-old who, after all, is not paying a mortgage, balancing a family budget, handling home repairs, or cooking meals.

However, it turns out that  junior year is a time of huge stress, by American kid standards.

A blizzard of mail has been arriving since September, most from colleges we’ve never heard of.  Hugh has not tossed any of it out, and he plows through it one envelope at a time.

Hugh’s course load this semester contains all serious classes.  Evenings and weekends are spent working on projects with friends.  (Or so he tells us).

Tennis team starts soon, with its rigorous practices and distant away-matches.

And then there’s Hugh’s part-time job as chief dishwasher and factotum at a local market/cafe.

All this, plus he has to learn how to parallel park by next Tuesday, when his driving test will take place.

By comparison, my own life at the moment is just a bowl of cherries.  Plus, after years of living in the city, I am already an excellent parallel parker.  Nothing like real-life experience to teach that particular skill.

See the headline?  That’s August in Philadelphia.  It’s the way you’ll hear weather described on the radio and by people in the grocery store.  Around here, folks pronounce “humid” not with an aspirated H at the beginning, but as if there’s no H at all.

This is also true of the way my middle son’s name is pronounced.  Chris and I didn’t think of this before choosing the name, but it became apparent shortly after bringing him home from the hospital.  One of my friends called to check on us. “So, how is you doing?”  she said.  I had three reactions.

1.  Shock at her poor grammar

2.  Amazement that I had never noticed before

3.  Realization that she was asking how HUGH was doing. 

The poor kid was called Ewe-eee at nursery school, where the teachers nicknamed everybody.  When he got older and started playing organized sports, it was confusing to hear coaches yelling “You, pass it!”  Belatedly, we realized that names with hard consonents were best for cheering from the sidelines.  MAX.  CHUCK.  BRETT.  DIRK.  All are good for screaming during sporting events.  HUGH just sort of drifts away into thin air.

Mind you, I still love the name and don’t regret choosing it.  Except when some Fluffian, as they say in South Philly, calls him EWE.

One great feature of family reunions is that you find other people with the same likes/dislikes as you.   Banana-hating has been found on the 18th chromosome of our DNA.  It is expressed most clearly in the forms of my son Hugh and brother Richard.

Hugh shared a story from third grade (calling Mr. M!) when he was playing tag at recess.  A kid shoved him, Hugh fell.  His hand landed in a blackish mass on the ground.  The gunk proved to be a rotten banana.  Hugh started gagging.  He went to the nurse and told her he was feeling queasy.  She listened to his tale of woe, then rasped out harshly:

“Let me get this straight.  You feel SICK….because you TOUCHED…a BANANA.”  She gave him a Tum (singular) and sent him packing.

While the rest of us guffawed at this story, Uncle Richard took Hugh’s side.  I think he was ready to file a lawsuit for school nurse incompetence.   Banana Solidarity.  Another reason to love family reunions.