Driving Miss Crazy

My mother owned the road. When she perched in the driver's seat, every other driver on the road, in deference, parted their vehicles in two undulating lines to the left and right of her path. She sailed, swan on placid water, through the line unassailed to her destination, where she landed gently, slid the shifter gracefully through prindle and descended from her coach in a cloud of beatific satisfaction.

At least in her mind.

My experience, as her shotgun passenger, resonated differently. Her majesty was not pleased with the subjects occupying 'her' road, and made her displeasure quite known. Her tone of voice, her mode of expression, her posture all signified livid, unmitigated aggression towards her fellow travellers. I learned the rankest cuss words, not from my peers in the schoolyard, but right there, shotgun passenger seat to my mother's road rage. I experienced my first one-fingered salute, not from a loosely cobbled gathering of disaffected youth or a peace protest or a rock concert, but right there, sitting next to my mother as she navigated her personal Mad Max-ian pot-holed hell.

She always felt, I think, she'd been born to a chauffered car, but found herself saddled with the soccer mom duties of the mere plebiscite.

You know that queer mix of embarrassment and superiority every kid eventually feels about their parent? I'd get acute pangs of it toward my mother's wild gesticulations and loud profanities while pressed into piloting the family sedan. I guess I was shocked by the realization that my mother, from whom I'd learned the bedrock principles of 'Right and Wrong,' turned out to be as much of a fraud as I at the 'actions speaking louder than the words' thing. It informed the very beginnings of my foundational mistrust in all authority. Poor mom. Probably had no inkling she was shaping a closet anarchist.

My mother's dead lo these almost seventeen years; her impotent wheelian rages stifled, blanketed by the softening of almost two decades of inactivity. She went -- maybe not gently, but certainly -- into that good night where no one impedes her progress on the road by driving too slowly, or too fast, or erratically or by not using their %$##^#$% blinker! I suspect her drivetime plays like Singin' in the Rain instead of Beyond Thunderdome, now. In short, she is at peace, finally, behind the wheel.

But sometimes, usually when I'm behind the wheel, oddly enough, I'll hear it. That string of profanities and wild ravings; I'll see in my peripherals the surreptitious hand ...uh... signals. I'll feel the faint recognition in my spine, the slow slide down into the seat for concealment, the complex embarrassment mixed with equal parts superiority... the recognition of The Drive down Her Road. I'll think to myself "Mother!"

And I realize, with a growing sense of shame tinged with the vaguest beginnings of forgiveness... I am just like my mom.