Driving Lessons

Not mine, obviously. My grandmother’s. She learned to drive late in life, sometime in her 50s. Probably not the best time to learn, but her husband’s health had begun to fail, so she decided that she had best learn. She asked my mother to teach her.

She did. And Gramma became a driver. She was probably not a very good one. But she was good enough to negotiate the streets of Cochrane.

I remember Gramma driving Keith and me. I believe she was driving us to school. It was in the winter, anyway. Regardless where and why, she was driving us somewhere. Keith was in the front with her. I was in the back, hanging off the back of the front seat. None of us were wearing seatbelts. Car seats and rules about how tall you had to be to sit in the front weren’t a consideration then. Not really. Kids sat in people’s laps then. I don’t think seatbelts were installed in cars then.

If she was driving us to school, it would have been in the winter of 69-70. I’d have been about four years old then, and in kindergarten.

We were driving up 7th Ave hill, approaching Transfiguration Church, and halfway up when the tires began to spin.

Gramma stopped and backed down the hill. That must have been frightening for her. Terrifying, in fact. Had the car begun to slide, she probably wouldn’t have had the skill to correct. So, she must have had a white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel as we inched back down the hill. She tried again to the same affect. On her third attempt, as we were nearing the top, the tires burning on the ice, Keith and I began to yell, “Don’t stop, Gramma!” She persisted, she hammered the fuel pedal to the floor, tires spinning like mad the whole way. We made it that time. Much to Gramma’s relief.