I am enjoying the privilege of being driven around these days. My new chauffeur is young and good-looking. He’s got a great personality. And he has some pretty awesome playlists. There are a couple of small downsides to this arrangement. Our destinations are never the places I want to go, but rather, where he wants or needs to go. I also can’t say that it’s ever a relaxing drive, since vigilance is the watchword.
You’ve probably guessed that my driver is Will, who recently earned his permit, and this first week back to school after spring break, he has been taking the wheel of the car to get to school every morning. With Katie I remember being fairly white-knuckled a lot of the time, and flinching as if to duck the tree branches and mailboxes it felt like she came within inches of swiping. But with Will, I am definitely more laid back. Some of this probably has to do with the fact that this is my third time around with a new teenage driver, so I have become a little more relaxed and confident in the abilities of my children.
But I also have no doubt that some of this has to do with the fact that Will actually is a good driver. Is it because he believes he is, so he is? Is it all those times we let him drive the golf cart, or going way back into his childhood, that battery-run Jeep we let him drive around the neighborhood when he was just four years old? Could it have been the go-karts at the fairgrounds, or even the bumper cars at the carnival, which actually should have been a lesson in how not to drive?
There could be something to the gender difference explanation: with Will, he exudes an air of — I’ve got this, I know how to drive — which is frightening to me as well as sometimes infuriating. Overconfidence can lead to trouble, I warn him, and I also remind him that he is not operating in a vacuum. It’s not only himself that he has to worry about; it’s the other variables out on the road: trucks as well as bicyclists and pedestrians, compounded with all the distractions — the same ones we grew up with, and then the others that are new today, namely smartphones and texting.
There’s a great series of video clips making its way around the social media circuit. A dashboard camera recorded teenagers texting while driving, losing control of their cars, and barely escaping a serious accident and possible death. It is a must-see video for every driver, but especially teenagers, many of whom have no sense of how dangerous it is to take your eyes off the road, even for a couple of seconds.
So it’s a very good thing, this system of having teenagers receiving permits at 16 and having a whole year to practice driving with an experienced driver at their side. In the northeast, this means navigating through all four seasons and through snow, ice, sleet, and rain. But it’s not inclement weather that worries me most. It’s the influence of those distractions, and eventually, peers — how he’s going to behave with friends in the car, when I’m not by his side to admonish him and correct his behavior. Hopefully, we will have trained him right and he will follow the rules. Hopefully.
Meanwhile, I have an update on the saga of the stuck rings from my last column. First, a shout out to Roger of West Windsor, who was kind enough to write to me to let me know that I was not alone in my predicament (it made me feel better) — that the same thing had happened to him with his own wedding band. He suggested that I go to Hamilton Jewelers in Princeton, who had cut off his ring and re-sized it — good as new — for a very reasonable fee.
I was just about to go when inspiration from an unexpected source intervened. On an evening when my entire arm had started to feel like it was tingling, my mother-in-law called me with jubilant news. Our niece, Jennifer, and her husband, Matt, had just had their baby, a 6-pound 11-ounce brown-haired blue-eyed beauty they named Hailey Lucille.
I was seized with a new determination: if she had spent 14 hours pushing that baby out into the world, surely, I could summon up the strength to pull that stubborn ring off my finger. I sat at the kitchen table as if prepared for an operation, with a spray bottle of Windex at the ready and a bowl of ice. I stuck my hand into the ice — the theory being that the cold would shrink my finger — and sprayed on Windex liberally. (I learned that tip from the Internet). I squeezed and I pulled; I twisted and I turned. I thought of the pain of childbirth — a veteran myself three times over, thank you very much — and reminded myself that if I could endure that, this was nothing.
And then, finally, after about 20 grueling minutes (I almost gave up several times), the engagement ring was off and the wedding band followed. My ring finger looks permanently dented; the skin did not bounce back. But it’s a small price to pay for liberation. Word of advice: don’t wait as long as I did. Every so often, try removing your rings and make sure that you actually can.
It feels strange not to be wearing my rings, but in truth, there’s no way I’m going to be able to get them back on. I have two choices: get them re-sized or get new jewelry. Or both. We celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary last October. Mother’s Day is coming. So is my birthday. Hmmmm; now that’s something very nice to think about.
