Charting Van Wallach's adventures and obsessions, from small-town Texas to Princeton, Russia, Latin America and beyond. Open mic videos are included at no extra charge for your viewing enjoyment.
In June I attended my 50th reunion at Mission High School in Mission, Texas. I go to all of our reunions, typically having the longest trip to get their from the Northeast. In 1996 I got a ceramic angel to protect me on my travels from New York and, now, Boston to Miller International Airport in McAllen.
I wrote this piece for the monthly poetry open-mic at Whitelam Books in Reading, MA, where I now live. Haikus give me a framework for writing poetry, otherwise everything I write would sound like a combination of Led Zeppelin lyrics and Edgar Allan Poe's works.
Fifty years out
Texas reunion beckons
Back to MHS
Mission High School
Maroon and white, Eagles fly high
I couldn’t wait to leave
But loyal alum
always return to my roots
Long flight to McAllen
Guarded by the ceramic angels a gift for the distant traveler in 1996
My first impression
Blazing hot, fierce Gulf Coast winds
Turn on the AC!
Settle at the hotel
on Shary Road, fruit groves gone
Strip centers sprawl
Friends gather at night
Half century to cover
Tito’s Vodka helps
Tour ranch with pal
Edward, expert guide to raw
land’s unmarked roads
History, critters,
cactus, windmills, barbed wire, ponds
“This land can kill you”
Unforgiving land
“Don’t get lost, no cell service here,”
ruts dug by stagecoach wheels
Friday 70s party
I wear a “Ford ‘76” shirt
Cowboy hats, hippie chicks
Old and new faces
Chats settle into patterns.
Grandkids, work, sore backs
Playing tourist at
Butterfly Center, a treat.
Drive past border wall
Historical museum
Tour with David and Lois
Land sales, orchards, roads
Photo with my Mom
1930, school band
Playing saxophone
Warriors, workers
Mexican revolution
Rio Grande and railroad tracks, dividers
Drive to St. Peter’s Novitiate
Built in 1912, burned 2009
Wreckage fenced off and haunted
Saturday night at last!
Event center, dinner dance
Phone cameras flashing.
Hilda’s video series and
Forever flowers
Honor the departed
Too many, too many.
Lena, Laura, Letty,
Olalla, Joe, Nacho
Tavo, Richard
A rose for each of dozens
Deacon Javier Garcia’s benediction
Joe Valadez’s Tejano crowd pleasing song “Te Lo Juro”
My champagne toast in commemoration Salud, compadres
Kudos to the organizers
Dalia, Sylvia, Frances, Nora,
Genie, Janet, Hilda
Flawless
Bittersweet moment
Sunday morning Taco Ole
Last chance for last thoughts
So we said it; surprises
Final photos
Next journey, McAllen to Dallas to Boston
Home to Reading
I wrote this in October 2017 for LinkedIn. For this Father's Day, I'm posting it here, a glimpse into a father-son relationship.
My father recently called me to find out the date he and my late mother were divorced. He needed the information for a matter involving his military pension for serving on Okinawa in World War II.
“You were one of the parties there, not me,” I said, both amused and annoyed.
The papers had all been misplaced, he replied, in moves from South Texas to Michigan to the East Coast. He hoped I could apply my sleuthing skills to dig up the details. With some reluctance, I agreed. I knew I’d be walking into an emotional minefield in this personal case of document discovery and management.
My parents were married and then divorced in Hidalgo County, Texas, on the Texas-Mexico border. The divorce took place between 1960 and 1962. I hoped the public records would be online, but the Texas divorce decrees are online only back to 1968. The county government’s website offered up a likely source to call for details. Never could I imagine, 40 years after I last lived in Hidalgo County (Mission, to be exact), that I would be dealing with the district court in Edinburg to request this document. But I pulled up my big-boy britches and did what I had to do. If not me to help, then who?
I called and spoke to a woman who took my details and said she would contact me when she found something. I pictured her rummaging around among the divorce decrees buried deep in a box on metal shelves down in the basement of the county courthouse, like the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
After several days, my father called, anxious to get the information. I didn’t have anything to report.
“I could give you the contact’s name and number and you could call her,” I suggested.
“No, you have the right accent to talk to her,” he said, a comment that would have riled me 40 years ago as a dig at my South Texas roots but these days I just let it go and take it as a point of pride.
While waiting for a response, I recalled my mother, who died in 1984, carried in her purse her divorce notice from the public records column of the local paper, the McAllen Monitor. That must have been some kind of red-letter day in her life. I checked with my brother, but he didn’t remember that and didn’t have a clipping.
After a week, the court official called. She found the divorce decree, which she scanned and emailed to me. I thanked her for her document discovery and immediately called my father with the date, from 1961. I mailed him a printout of the decree, having no interest in keeping a hard copy for myself. To the extent I can, I’ll leave the past in the past rather than dwell on it. My father was deeply grateful for my successful South Texas sleuthing.
The document unsettled me. Here I am, on the verge of my 60th birthday, reading about my brother and me when we were still toddlers. There was the child support order, payment of legal fees and the other mopping-up of the end of a marriage. I read it once and gladly rid myself of it. The decree had a toxic quality, since I knew the rancor, resentments and silences that would follow in the decades after that red-letter day in Hidalgo County. I can envision the day, my mother taking time off from her job as a secretary at Conway, Dooley & Martin, an insurance agency in Mission, to drive to Edinburg in her Chevrolet Corvair. She did what she had to do in court, probably smoked a cigarette and returned to work to support her family. Knowing her, she probably sent a thank-you note to her lawyer, Cy Mills, for his service.
Fifty-six years passed and the decree cycled back to me. I did what I needed to do with it.
To close the loop, I mailed a handwritten note to the court official, thanking her for a job well done. She made several lives a little more secure. Meanwhile, my father and I will share a weekend lunch with our significant others at a Chinese restaurant after my birthday.
Update: My father, Mark Wallach, died in March 2018 at the age of 92 and is buried in the Veterans Administration cemetery in Rockland County, New York.
HBO Max's "Hacks" reached its series finale in episode 10, which I watched last week. I found it surprising, poignant, slightly contrived and a satisfying wrap-up to plot lines.
The previous episode, episode 9, however, really caught my attention. Diva comedienne Deborah Vance (played by Jean Smart), had her career comeback at Madison Square Garden derailed by vindictive corporate honcho Bob Lipka (played by Tony Goldwyn). That was just the latest in a series of abusive moves by Lipka against Vance.
Vance finds herself squaring off against Lipka in an empty Garden, as he bought all the tickets to spite her and dramatically appear to make an offer to finally shut her up.
After she declines and tells her staff, they explode into rage at the media-industry suit. Courses of action mount in hysteria. Call the lawyers, this can't be legal! "We need to do a media alert, we need to do a press conference!"
Ava Daniels, played by Hannah Einbinder, raises the stakes: "Siri, Google how to sink a superyacht, no AI!"
Then the excitable, no-filters talent agent Kayla Schaefer, played by Megan Stalter, declares, "We need to kill him! We need to Luigi his ass!"
Dark comedy in action.
Did I hear what I think I heard? The character proposed assassination as a potential response to an ugly corporate dispute?
After watching the finale, I rewatched this scene and took notes on who said what. Nobody rebuked Kayla, but Deborah shouted, "OK, stop, stop, now listen, listen."
"Luigi," of course, refers to handsome homicidal Luigi Mangioni, who "allegedly" shot and killed Brian Thompson, CEO of United Healthcare, on December 4, 2024. Since then he's been the subject of dedicated websites, positive graffiti, online funding drives, the adoration of the ditzy modern equivalent of the Manson Girls, and entertainment references, as in a Simpsons episode.
Still, Hacks made me think about the intent of this reference. Sure, Hacks has been described as a "dark comedy." Was this a hipster attempt at humor targeting corporate executives? A scathing critique of the Gen Z mindset? A progressive endorsement of violence as a valid response to corporate disagreements? How would the scene play out if Ava, played by bloody-hands-pin Hannah Einbinder, screamed, "Let's 10-7 him!" That would shock the squares for sure. Or, being Los Angeles, what about "Let's Sirhan Sirhan him!" although I doubt anybody under the age of 60 on the show would get the reference. What about "Let's Karmelo Anthony him with a knife!" That would be edgy, probably more suited for a Saturday Night Live "Weekend Update" segment.
I doubt this second-long reference will cause any disturbance in the Hacks universe given the outpouring of affection for the now-concluded show and Jean Smart. I watched every episode and enjoyed the series' look at the ups and downs of Deborah Vance's LA-Vegas world. Still, a little drop of Luigi makes the dark comedy a lot more sour.
I
come from a family of letter writers. My mother Shirley and her sister Charlotte
swapped letters every week. They remembered their mother Eva writing to her parents
Esther and Lehman in the 1920s. And she
expected me to carry on the tradition when I left for college. The rule: No
letters, no tuition payments.
Long
after my mother died of cancer in 1984, a cousin sent me a stack of airmail letters
she found that my mother and father had exchanged. They are from 1959 and 1960,
when my parents had separated. My father, Mark, was in France, where my parents
had moved after their 1955 wedding; my mother had returned stateside with my baby
brother Cooper and me to Tyler, Texas, where Aunt Charlotte and her family
lived.
Mom
saved all the letters from Dad and made copies of some of her typed responses. Reading
them 60 years after the fact, I truly recognized her plain-spoken eloquence.
Let’s
start with the marital context. My father’s letters echo the browbeating tone that sounded so
familiar from my visits to him as a teen, when he lived in Manhattan. He
alternated between trying to hustle money for his dubious business ventures and
berating Mom for her personality, her post-childbirth appearance and her
baffling need to work. December 4, 1959, he wrote,
“Since you are still sulking
in your shell I’ll say a few things, as you can see I am in no position to send
you money. . . If you have confidence in me then do what you once proposed,
sell everything and come back, or bring the stocks and some money or get a loan
on the stocks.”
My
mother’s letters start with a wistful, affectionate mood. June 7, 1960: “When I
married you it wasn’t for your money or your good looks—call it love if you
like. . . You have many good traits and I still love you. I would like nothing
better than to be with you again and have our family together.”
But
she turned to a steely determination to move on as a divorced working mom. No,
she would NOT attend charm school (he really did suggest that!), hock her
wedding ring, sell her late parents’ stock investments and return to France. I broke
the following paragraph from November 28, 1960 into poetic lines,
“If
all your troubles were just plain hard luck I could be sorry for you
but I think you brought so much of this on yourself.
The day I married you, you didn’t have a dime and now you are broke again
but badly in debt, this time you work it out alone.
I am going on with the divorce—
this life is going to get me if I don’t,
you know a person can stand just so much.
Maybe later when you get your problems worked out
and get a job where you can take care of
your family
you will come courtin’ again, until that
time it is quits for us.”
Hearing
my mother’s Texas accent in every line, I thought, “She could have been writing
songs for Patsy Cline and Tammy Wynette.”
Dad
returned to Texas, they divorced, he soon remarried a retired ballet academy
owner and moved to New York. Cooper and I saw him one weekend in 10 years.
Mom
and I exchanged hundreds of letters while I was in college and then a writer in
Brooklyn. I saved all her letters, and typed mine on carbon paper so I have all
my replies.
And
she still had things to say about Dad. In November 1983 Cooper had visited me.
I tried to get us together with our father, but that didn’t happen. She wrote,
“I know you all enjoyed being together. Too bad Mark is such a stinker and
didn’t get to be with you all. It was his loss.”
The
last letter from her was December 27, 1983, two weeks before she died. I was
trying to support myself as a freelance writer in Brooklyn. Her final thoughts:
“Wanna
buy the Dallas Cowboys? We don’t have to worry about watching them anymore this
year. I hope ’84 will be a good year for you, may even find a job. Love, lots
of kisses, Mom.”
After
Mom died, I continued to write weekly to Aunt Charlotte until she died, 13
years later.
What
to make of this? Mom had an authentic voice. Chatty, earthy, absolutely honest.
She could capture a mood in a few phrases that left no confusion about where
she stood. I can only aspire to that. What a legacy. If any of you have letters
from friends and family, treasure them. And write some yourself—folks will be
shocked to get them and will express their delight when they email you a note of thanks. Shirley and Charlotte would be mighty pleased with you all for doing that
Bill Buschel, who died in February 23, turbocharged my involvement in open mics. I had spoken before at literary
salons and libraries, but I didn’t see how to move ahead. Then I discovered the Hudson Valley Writers Center open mic in 2019. With Bill running the show I became a regular.
Over the months and years, first in person and then on Zoom during and after the pandemic, I found my voice with his encouragement.
From Bill’s astute, heartfelt comments I learned
the value of the telling phase, how words can capture a moment, a personality
speaking out, or lashing out. In his honor, I’m calling this piece “Everyday
Poetry,” lines I’ve heard over the decades, or said myself, that I associate
with a dot in time. I’ve provided context for them. They fall into four topical
obsessions: Texas, dating, travel and my parents.
Nobody thinks, “Oh, I’m speaking in poetry!” but, looking back, they were.
The wonder years on the border
“They sit in
the dark, because dark are their sins.” Spoken by a devout Baptist lady, looking askance at her daughter and her son-in-law watching TV in the darkness of their den,
with window shades pulled down to block the blazing Texas sunshine.
“I’d sit
here and talk and you’d eat it all up.” Something directed to me by a fellow
high school student, explaining why she wouldn’t go out with me.
Shirley-isms and stuff my father said
Some are
what I call Shirley-isms, named after my late mother, Shirley Wallach. She had an earthy, ribald quality to what she
said. For example: “She sure knows how to wobble her twat,” about a beauty
pageant contestant, the daughter of a dear friend of hers. In my youthful
innocence, I thought “twat” referred to her hindquarters. How wrong I was!
“Don’t get
anybody pregnant,” her sole piece of advice in 1976 when I left Mission, Texas,
for Princeton University. She had nothing to worry about during my college
years. She also passed on this bit of life experience when noting a friend was in the family way: “Pregnant ladies need to pee a lot.”
“You’re just
like your father.” “You’re just like your mother.” My divorced parents, alas,
used me as a target in the unfixable resentments of their short marriage. They
both expressed the same thought. My mother spoke from frustration, my father
from malice.
“They’ll eat
you alive at Princeton if you don’t know opera.” That’s from my father, part of
his relentless campaign to convince me to spend my senior year of high school at the Lawrenceville School
in New Jersey, to become a polished young gentleman. Actually, not knowing much
about Bruce Springsteen was a bigger impediment at Old Nassau.
Youthful influencers and fellow Texans
This sports
classic came from an assistant coach for my high school baseball team. Coach
Canales thought some of the players weren’t hustling enough at a practice, so he
said, “Grandma was slow but she was old.” Did the guys run faster? I don’t
know, but I remember this pithy observation and use it to this day.
“Motorcycle
helmet laws are a form of communism,” a beauty from my high school typing
teacher, which captures a common political viewpoint of Texas in the 1970s.
Maybe now, too.
“Polo, I’m
going to get the hell out of Texas.” A high school classmate reminded me I told
him this. And I did get the hell out, although I always like going back. In
fact, I’ll be returning to my 50th reunion in June.
“The Sandinistas are going to march up through Mexico and invade Harlingen.” This was a prophetic comment by a high school classmate at our 10th reunion on the Texas-Mexico border in 1986 during the Reagan era, after the revolution in Nicaragua. Amusing and somewhat dubious sounding at the time, the comment became far more accurate when the Biden-Harris junta flung open the borders to one and all in 2021. And yes, tens of thousands, or even more, barreled across the Rio Grande where we had lived.
“I love it
here in Texas, we can build whatever we want and shoot our guns.” As said by a
contact involved in Houston real estate. The building part is because Houston
really does have no
zoning laws.
Sharp observations from tour guides
“One thousand
percent they hate the Jews here,” from Benny, my tour guide in Israel in June
1982 when our group visited Hebron,
in Judea and Samaria.
Marina in the Kremlin
“It is not
so interesting to kill them quickly,” a keen historical observation by Marina,
my peppy Intourist tour guide in Moscow in September 1987. She was referring to
how Ivan the Terrible treated the nobles, but I’ll always associate that with
the vast bloody sweep of Russian history. I’ve borrowed the phrase when I share
my thoughts on innovative approaches to criminal justice and counter-terrorism.
Paradise lost
Two poetic
musings come from a romantic interest of the early 1980s. “Van, you’re only 25
but I’m already 25.” She wanted to move our relationship along, after two
months. Her biological clock was ticking and she had no time to waste.
She also
said, “I’ve been fucked so many times I had to get a bigger diaphragm.” Was she
trying to make me jealous, or grateful that a woman of such vast erotic experience
was dating me? People who knew about such sensitive matters later told me, "Ummmm,
no, that’s not the way it works."
And finally:
“You’re a self-involved prick who just doesn’t get it.” Another moment from a
relationship gone south. That could be the title of the next volume of my memoirs, or a
key line in a rom-com novel.
What do others remember about me?
All these memories are coming, of course, from my side of the story. I am sure I have said many, many things that lodged in people's memories, ranging from moving to hurtful to sublimely idiotic. I would often blurt something without thinking through the implications. I cringe at the time I told a woman her mother's apartment was, if I recall correctly, "a great example of 1950s Jewish home decorating." That certainly didn't land right.
If anybody reading this wants to contribute your own example of my everyday poetry, well, hit me with your best shot.
Remembering Bill Buschel in his own words
So, Bill, thanks
for everything. May your memory be a blessing for your many friends and family. I'll always remember you.
I recently received a misdirected email from a women's program at a writing group. The topic was writing for 20 minutes a day as a form of "accountability." I liked the idea and wrote this to describe my own form of creative accountability.
Writing 20 minutes a day has been an obsession
for so long I feel anxious when I don’t write. I started a journal on September
15, 1970, when I was 12 years old, and I never stopped. Early entries were
sporadic but by 1972 I wrote daily, musing about school, books I read, the
Dallas Cowboys, religion, my divorced parents and girls girls girls.
I still write at least a few sentences every
day in 140-page wire-bound notebooks from Target or Staples. I fill at least
three every year. Each notebook is numbered and closes with an updated total page
count. I avoid using the same pen for consecutive entries, so the ink color
varies. The topics range from national news to anxieties about aging to creative
ideas and my relationships. I even reflect on what happens to my journals when
I’m gone.
Scribbles and screeds, sometimes in capital
letters, from decades ago provide the raw material for blog posts, essays,
fiction and open mics. What I tossed off in the 1970s as a teen says a lot to me
as I’m into Social Security territory.
My suggestion: Devote yourself to a creative
effort daily for even a month or year and you’ll write an amazing amount of
content. Far from a burden, it will become a daily passion.
You want to hear some tough-love stories? I know the genre well: horrible job reviews. They came when I
worked for two consulting firms, McKinsey and Booz Allen Hamilton,
between 1999 and 2001. I had joined McKinsey from the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, where
I had had a great run as a writer and editor in my first job after 15 years in business journalism. However, the team I worked with at PwC relocated from Manhattan to Jersey City, and I
then lived in Connecticut. That commute required taking three trains each way. In a spasm of practicality, ego and a wildly
inflated sense of my capabilities, I talked my way into a job with McKinsey in
Stamford, much nearer my Fairfield County home.
McKinsey has always had a reputation as a tough place to
work, being compared to the Marines and the Jesuits. A colleague at PwC warned me about going there. I dismissed her astute advice. I deemed myself ready for a move to more responsibility. I wasn’t; I should have stayed at PwC, commute be
damned or negotiated for work in the Stamford office.
But I didn't take those paths.
Already stressed over a troubled home life, I struggled with my job as
communications manager for the marketing practice. A review from May 5, 2000, after less than a year on the job, rated me as having “Issues,” one step above
“struggling.” The reviewer collected input from people I worked with. She fairly listed my strengths and
accomplishments.
On the plus side:
Enthusiastic about working to implement a
comprehensive external relations program
Set up a competitive intelligence newsletter
Proactive in preparing materials for an Internet
Marketing Conference (at the time I was taking Prednisone, which just about put
me a mental ward as it exacerbated the extreme tension at home and work).
Then reach the key development
actions.
“Needs to improve the quality of writing—ensure
more value added. Focus on what the implications are for the target audience. Push the thinking” rather than just implement changes suggested by the
authors.
Proactively take advantage of help being offered
Assume better control of the process.
I never even reached out to PwC, although that might have worked. Instead, I jumped to another job in consulting before my next McKinsey review. All the issues traveled with me to Booz Allen's thought leadership journal, Strategy & Business. The
world of deep dives into corporate strategy and management just wasn’t my
forte. I'm far more concrete in my thinking and writing, never adept at interpreting MBA-level analytics. That and my personality foibles were a crippling combination.
Even more agonizingly detailed than the McKinsey review, my “assignment
performance” was “may be a problem.” Creating articles with consultants showed
“a need for Van to be more aggressive in the value creation and/or process
management aspects of this objective.”
And another:
“Van should proactively seek help from his
managers on projects when he truly needs it. Balanced against that, he should
try to address the situation to find an alternative, using his own experience
and/or reaching out to peers or his proposed mentor. And so it went for 10
pages."
Booz Allen laid me off in July 2001 as the dot-com bubble economy started
to implode. The job loss kept me out of Manhattan on 9/11.
Why gaze into this mirror reflecting back some of the most horrendous years of my
life? For decades I stored the reviews in a "career development" folder, never reading them. Finally, I decided to consider them, not out of a sense of masochism but to try to learn from them, a quarter century later.
Taking a long perspective, the evaluations were fair, a form
of tough love to get me to do what I was hired to do. I wasn’t a kid, after
all. I think of them as a corporate version of couples therapy telling me what I needed to hear (and hear again). After those two positions, I vowed to never let status or high pay seduce me. Booz Allen's tough love turned into the best career move I've ever made. In February 2002 I
got a job as a proposal writer for KPMG as the Enron scandal shook up the accounting industry. I had never even seen a proposal until I started writing them, but I found a job that ideally suits my communications strengths and competitive drive. With proposals, your team either wins or loses. It's as simple as that. Dazzling insights for the C-suite matter less than making a persuasive pitch to buy a firm's services. That's a language I understand.
To this day I’m still writing proposals, elsewhere. And the lessons I learned
at McKinsey and Booz Allen, what caused me so much grief, stayed with me. Be
active, not passive. Watch out for procrastination. Find work that plays to my
strengths. Show the confidence to tell people, "I don't understand what you're trying to say here." Offer alternative ways of making your case.
Now I get high marks for writing and managing proposals, and
even do writers' workshops called “The Wallach Way.”
Life rarely moves in a direct line, either personally or
professionally. In between terrible job reviews, layoffs, firings, unemployment,
ill-starred moves, waking up at 4 a.m. in a cold sweat—I stumbled into every possible career briar patch. But here I
am, evidently doing something right. Proposals still work for me. As I once explained to co-workers about why, I simply said, "I like to win."
Fearof Flying? I liked Erica Jong’s saucy 1973 novel, but I never feared flying.
But Fear of Driving? That I can relate to.
When
did my driving anxiety begin? When I realized I was named after a car, the
British racecar the Vanwall? Because my father was a car nut and I wanted to
separate myself from that? When I got broadsided in my mother’s ’68 Impala making
a left-hand turn on busy North 10th Street in McAllen, Texas in 1975
after seeing “The Longest Yard”? Perhaps when I had to buy a car in 1979 for a
summer newspaper internship on Long Island? The 1971 AMC Hornet I bought for $500 from a graduate student was creaky and rusty.
I had to drive from Princeton to Long Island with only a map, fearing for my
life as I negotiated the Belt Parkway and the Long Island Expressway in the dark to Old Bethpage? Fear of getting
attacked in a sketchy neighborhood, the source of panic of Sherman McCoy in the
novel "The Bonfire of the Vanities"?
Fear.
Fear of mistakes, fear of injury, fear of liability, fear of other drivers. Fear
of my ability to respond to split-second situations, fear of not noticing potential danger.
I
spent 11 years without a car when I lived in New York, after I donated the Hornet to Goodwill Then when I moved to
Connecticut in 1991, my then-wife and I got a Saab with a stick shift, and I Iearned
how to drive that. As the decades went on I made reasonably long trips with
other cars. I steeled myself to drive from Westchester County to the Boston
area when my partner Naomi and I visited her daughter and my son up here. Nothing
ever happened although I found I-84 through Hartford nerve-wracking.
We
moved to Massachusetts in April. The Bay State’s fearsome reputation for
aggressive drivers, knowns as Massholes, naturally spooked me. Then I found I
had issues with peripheral vision. Early drives around the area, especially at
night, were terrifying, even with GPS. But bit by bit, I created what I call my
“ant trails” to get from one place to another. Even so, my pulse rate jumps
when I had to go someplace new.
After
living here for 7 months, Naomi and I became a one-car family. We traded in both
our cars for a 2026 Toyota Corolla Cross Hybrid. It’s the first new car I’ve
ever owned.
I
only drove the Cross around the dealer’s parking lot, I couldn’t get myself to
take it on nearby roads. But once we got home, I decided that fear wouldn’t
work. Usually, once I start driving I calm down. I realized that driving is
like sex. The first times are anxiety-wracked and uncertain, but then you
figure out the pedals, buttons, when to speed up, when to slow down, and you
get the hang of it. In theory, anyway. And when you driving a slinky European
roadster like my brother’s Porsche. the rules go out the window.
Pulling
50 years of hard-won driving experience together, I told myself some basics:
Don’t’
speed. I don’t, I’m that old guy who never goes faster than the speed limit, to
the annoyance of people whizzing around me.
Pay
attention (not a problem for me, as I never talk on my phone, rarely listen to
the radio, keep a distance from the car in front of you, signal well ahead of
turning or changing lanes.
Obsessively
check the periphery, like crosswalks and driveways.
Pay
attention to the GPS and don’t blindly turn into a construction site. I’ve done
that before.
If
at all possible, don’t drive at night.
I’m
getting comfortable in the Cross. Gas pedal, brake, lights, turn indicators. It’s
not rocket science.
Yesterday
morning I drove Naomi to a train station for her trip to Stamford, Connecticut
for a weekend with friends. I got there and back. I know my way there. Does my heart go thumpa-thumpa? Sure. But once I get
going, the GPS gives me confidence that I know what I’m doing. Its digital glow
keeps me company and limits memory and guesswork from the car and driver
relationship. It’s like a personal coach saying, “Fear not, you can do it.”
In
the spirit of “Fear of Flying,” I call this calmer state “the zipless ride.”
