Pedestrianism

                    I have never had a driver’s license. When I was in high school, I passed driver’s education, and I’m pretty sure my parents would have gotten me a car (it's what all the kids wait for, right?), but I had no desire to drive. I took the class because everyone was taking the class and I thought it was what I was supposed to do, what I needed to do in order to become a proper adult. I held my breath and tried not to think while driving the freeway, I studied the book from cover to cover (like a good student should) and took the written tests, but I told my parents soon after taking driver's education that I thought driving was crazy, and I couldn’t believe everyone wanted to do it. It seemed like such an insane thing to want, to be given that much power, you could run over a curb and into a tree, or over an animal in the road, or you could even kill a human being, and the fact that kids were signing up for this, the fact that they were jumping up and down in anticipation of this, was nuts.

                    I have since driven on a couple of occasions. The first being sometime in college when I was in my brother’s truck and he pulled over because he thought he had popped his knee out of joint. I drove us home because he was in pain, and the entire time he was yelling because I was all over the road. The other happened several summers ago in Idaho when my husband tried to teach me how to drive. I drove quite a bit that summer and even got close to taking the driving test, but talked myself out of it not long after getting pulled over by a cop for turning the wrong way down a one-way street (without a driver’s license). The cop told me I was worse than a drunk driver on the road.

                    There is something to be said for being a pedestrian. I don’t do it for noble reasons (although wouldn’t it be nice if I did?), but out of my unshakable fear of doing this normal thing that every other adult in society does without thinking, and although I’m not the slightest bit proud of my fear (I'm embarrassed), it’s worth noting that this state of pedestrianism has taken me to a place I never would have found if I had gone and driven a car like everyone else. I like walking down the street to the drugstore to get what I need, slow enough to see what’s for sale at the sporting goods store on the corner, to wonder, like I always do, why the bakery across the street uses florescent lighting and how the people inside can stand it, slow enough to stop at the burger joint no one ever goes to and get a soft serve ice cream for a dollar, to see who happens to be working at the 7-11 (the old guy or the young guy), and to notice what’s growing in the vegetable garden three houses down on my way back home. Maybe I’m a grandmother and should be living in a different time, but the bus is just fine with me, the train is a nice ride, and there is something perfectly sturdy about my own two feet.