“Dad, you’re gonna have to teach your grandson to drive,” said Lisa, my eldest child. “I know he’s going to drive like you, anyway: hunched over the wheel, hands at 10 and 2, looking right, left, right, right, left, right again and left again before creeping into the intersection.” I was in New Jersey over the Christmas holiday with my daughter and son-in-love and my first two grandchildren. My 15-year-old athlete grandson, during the course of his basketball/football high school career, had managed to tear the meniscus in his left knee. After undergoing a surgical repair, the knee is healing well, but through the Christmas break from school, Xavion was required to go to physical therapy to rehabilitate his “million-dollar knee.” His father and mother allowed me to drive him to those daily appointments, and I would pick up Lisa after her workday ended. It was during those drives home that she would visit upon me her derision and disdain for my old man driving. But during my daily “Travels With Xavion,” I attempted to bridge the septuagenarian-to-teen divide with humorous commentary about driving in a way designed to avoid “mashing my grandson.”
During my first tour of duty in Indianapolis, Indiana, a co-worker’s wife was a caretaker for my second daughter, Lauren. I would drive to his house, deposit my child and carpool with the co-worker to our jobs in the advertising department at L.S. Ayres. One day, as we hammered south on I-465 toward downtown, the co-worker made a mild comment: “You’re not from around here, are you?” I told him of my Pennsylvania, California, Indiana circuit; his response was, “You have big-city driving habits.” I laughed, thinking of my initiation on the hilly and pencil-thin streets of Pittsburgh, and told him, “I made my bones on the freeways of Los Angeles. I yield no quarter and take no prisoners.” I don’t drive in that way anymore.
Lisa recently posted videos on a social media site of her instructing my grandson on the fundamentals of driving. “He’s going to start driver’s education after he turns 16 so I thought he should at least get behind the wheel.” In her commentary she tells my grandson that he is driving at “Cool Papa speed,” but also notes that he should come to a full stop before his turn, “unlike your mother.”
March 30th will mark the 16th year since my first bride called me at my job in St. Louis Missouri, to tell me that our daughter had delivered a child, the baby boy, Xavion. That child no longer calls to me from his crib to say to me, “Cool Papa: Would you rub my back?” I can amuse him by slowly creaking his door open and starting “Harassment Time,” but he no longer asks that I institute the giggling practice I called “Tickle-Pits.”
One day, as I was driving the wounded warrior to his daily drills, I came to a stop at a red light, my blinker ticking an alert for my pending left turn. The light changed, but the car headed in the opposite direction did not immediately move forward. I carried on a jocular but informative conversation with my grandson, noting out loud that I had no intention of making that left turn until the car moved through the intersection. As I safely executed the left turn, I said the driver had wanted me to turn in front of him so that he could smash our car. Xavion added to my banter, chuckling as he finished my monologue in his newly developed bass:
“And mash your grandson.”
cjon3acd@att.net