Trying To Be A Person

Procuring a Car, Teaching People to Drive, Dylan Mulvaney, Father Famine, Be a Man, Song of the Week

File: The Chariot of Aurora MET DT4170.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

Sorry for not posting yesterday in the usual way, and a huge thank you to those who prayed. A friend and her two kids have had their lives upended, and it’s going to be many days before they find life come into pleasant and discernible order.

I wrote most of this post on Wednesday evening. It starts out on a light and breezy note that I do not, currently, feel, but it ends about right, as per my current frame of mind. And this is probably correct, for life is full of joys and sorrows, and it is sometimes necessary to go from one to the other and then back again in a 48-hour period. I’m canibalizing what I had and turning it into takes. Enjoy!

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Alongside the glorious marriage of my son to his sweetheart, I hate to say, the thing that has preoccupied me to an almost equal and sometimes greater degree over the last month is that a dear friend decided to sell her car, and thought she would like to sell it to me.

Let me explain. First of all, I have six children, as you know. Their father, Matt Kennedy, to whom I have been married for almost 24 years, entered into the marital contract with me without Divulging All. This was due, as it so often is, to a lack of self-knowledge on his part, so I can’t really blame him, though I try to often.

Oh sure, I knew he only became a Christian at 25 and had a bit of a sordid past. And I knew he didn’t try very hard in High School and was the Cheerleader “Manager,” which meant that he hung out with all the pretty girls and carried their stuff. I knew that he was excessively charming—else why would I have married him? What I didn’t know is that he would refuse to teach any of our children to drive. Seriously, if I had known this…

What I’m trying to say is that everyone knows that it is the man’s responsibility to teach the children to drive, especially if the mother is homeschooling them. Think about it. You pour yourself out teaching the wretched suckers to spell and do math, which they steadfastly refuse to do, and everyone congratulates you all the time for being brave and clever—even your husband—but then the awful day arrives. They turn 16 and, in the state of New York, become eligible to get a driving permit. They have to take a test on the internet, and then go to the DMV, and there they are granted a permit allowing them to get behind the wheel, and then someone has to teach them all that the honor and responsibility portend.

This should be the Father. The Father should teach them to drive. I believe in the patriarchy. I therefore watched happily as my dear husband and his eldest daughter set off in the car to go about this essential task. Two hours later, they came back, harried and appalled. And since then, it has been my job to teach every single one of these difficult children to drive.

I don’t blame my dear husband. He’s a good man. He refuses to crush his recalcitrant offspring under his booted heel, which is, manifestly, a good thing. And I’m a good driver, so it’s fine.

Anyway, I have, to date, taught three children to drive. I go a certain distance, and then they earn enough money to pay the local driving school for a few lessons that guarantee them a license. I am about to embark on the fourth child.

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Here’s where it gets complicated. All of the cars worthy of being driven by an incompetent novice are occupied. They, the cars, divide their time between the shop where they are constantly being repaired and being actually driven by the people who have to go to work and school. So the reason that our children learn to drive at such advanced ages (like 17, 18, and 19) is because there is never a car available to teach them.

But then my friend got it into her mind that I should buy her car, and this is very glorious to me, for not only do I have a car, but I have a car with a standard transmission. The Ford Focus last made a stick in 2015, and that’s the make of this car. So, get this, I am buzzing around town in the funnest car experience ever. Except that Matt, to save money, has put these awful sensors in that track how we all drive in order to save himself insurance money. Have I mentioned that he is a complete killjoy?

What I’m saying is, I have a car of my own, which means I can teach the next kid to drive, but it’s a stick, so now I have to teach a kid to drive a stick.

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That, my dears, is the introduction to what was a single coherent post that will now devolve spectacularly. Yesterday, I read everything I could find about Jean Paul Gaultier and his brand’s peculiar decision to send Dylan Mulvaney to Morocco to sit atop a camel and haphazardly wave a bottle of the perfume, Divine, in the air.