Driving Daddy crazy

Exactly 116 days from today, my daughter Chloe can get her temporary driver's license.

I know this because Chloe takes it upon herself to keep me updated on the Chloe Driving Countdown. This has been going on for the last year or so. We'll pass each other in the house and she'll casually mention, "You know, I can drive in four months." As if this is the single greatest thing that will ever happen to me and my life will be complete once she gets that learner's permit.

(QUESTION: Am I dating myself by calling it a "learner's permit?" Does anyone call it that anymore? Or did that phrase go out with the last episode of the "Love Boat?")

Anyway, having already taught Elissa to drive, I'm fairly confident I know what I'm doing. I took Elissa down to the high school parking lot on Sunday evenings for her first few times behind the wheel. The parking lot is undertstandably deserted on Sundays, which is good when you're trying to give the widest possible berth to someone whose grasp of which one is the gas pedal and which one is the brake pedal isn't exactly solid.

I would have Elissa drive around and around and around the school, just to give her a feel for accelerating, steering, stopping, parking, not running into stationary objects, etc. Then, just to mix it up and really live on the wild side, we would turn around and drive the other way around the school. It was almost too much for her to take in.

I was telling someone recently about the first time I had Elissa drive in traffic. We were near the end of one of our circle-the-high-school-57-times sessions when I said, "OK, now drive home." And her response was classic: "You mean on the road?" Yes, on the road. You'll find that that's the generally accepted method of traveling from one location to another: on a paved road.

Now understand, it's not like I was asking her to drive across the country or anything. It's maybe three-quarters of a mile from where we were parked to our house. But it's up a big hill and there are stop signs and yellow lines involved, and the whole thing can be a little intimidating to a newbie driver, I suppose. But Elissa was game, so she pulled out onto Rockefeller Road slowly, just as I had instructed her.

Actually, she took the "slowly" part a little too seriously. As we started climbing the hill to get back to our house, Elissa pushed the gas pedal down a full one-sixteenth of an inch, bringing us up to the mind-boggling speed of 12 MPH. And of course there was a car behind us. (As it turned out, the driver was our friend Jim McIntyre, who was actually on his way to our house, too, so it was OK. But he was required by the Guy's Code of Sarcasm to let Elissa know that she was a reckless driver who really needed to slow down out there.)

Anyway, we did eventually get home, though as I recall it took about an hour. And Elissa did eventually learn to break the 20-MPH mark and is now a licensed driver...a pretty good one, too. Having a third driver in the house is a handy thing when you have young kids, we find. Which is why I don't mind Chloe getting her license.

Whenever I'm out driving and Chloe is in the car with me, she likes to make these "vroom vroom" sounds, like she's 5 years old and pretending to drive the car herself. This makes me think that we're going to have the opposite problem with her and that staying under the speed limit may be a challenge. Maybe we need to institute a "no vroom vroom" rule.

All I'm saying is, if you happen to be in Wickliffe on a Sunday evening this spring, you might want to stay away from the high school parking lot. Consider this your warning.