I took as active a role as possible in my children’s lives. Here are a couple of memories from that part of my life where I was not working overtime:
When my kids were younger the second and third oldest, PJ and Sean, were playing “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” in the backyard. They were jumping around on the playhouse, climbing in and out of the windows, jumping off the roof (about five feet high) and battling to the death in every sort of way. The boys used hangers as ninja weapons and fought valiantly.
I was busy with household chores but remembered we had borrowed a video camera from my brother-in-law for a different project. I couldn’t let this moment go unrecorded!
I headed to the boys second floor bedroom window where I would have the best vantage point to record this memorable event. As I drew closer to their door, I heard noises coming from their room. Both boys were outside battling, so their room should have been quiet. I stealthily approached their door, with camera in hand.
But what to my wandering eyes should appear (My apologies to Clement Moore for stealing his line from “THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS”) but my daughter Bridget in the process of stealing the change from the boys’ piggy banks. I kept the camera running and asked, “What are you doing?” Bridget innocently replied, “I’m taking PJ and Sean’s money.” I asked why and she said, “Because I want money and I don’t have any!”
I got such good memories of Bridget and the boys saved forever that I seriously considered buying a video camera of our own. It was not within the budget though.
As the kids grew older we had a lot of sports experiences. Jaime played middle school basketball, PJ and Sean wrestled, played baseball and football. Kelly, Danny and Erin played soccer and Erin played softball through college. There were a lot of other sports, but I think it’s enough to say that we kept busy chauffeuring, coaching and cheering.
Here is one of the many stories that come from those days.
Having limited funds as a large family on a policeman’s salary, I was driving a beater Ford Taurus I had bought from a friend who owned a repair shop near where I worked. It was an eyesore “rust bucket” that I bought to get me to and from work while we tried to save enough money to own a “real car.” I had put the word out that I needed such a car. He repaired automatic transmissions and said he had a client that chose to leave the car rather than fix it. When I went to check the car out my friend, Frankie, asked if I could drive stick shift, I thought he was joking, but I told him I could. He said he had an early 90’s (This was about1998) Ford Taurus with a three-speed manual transmission.
I took it.
This car burned oil and had an electrical problem that caused it to die out at times. I was embarrassed to drive it, and PJ was embarrassed to drive in it. I drove PJ to one of his games and, as we approached the field, he asked, “Dad, would you mind letting me out here?”- Where his friends couldn’t see hm get out of the car. I was heartbroken, but I saw where he was coming from and dropped him off.
Maybe guys and girls have different views on this subject?
When I was growing up, I started thinking about driving when I stopped dreaming of having my own horse like the cowboys I watched on TV every weekend morning. That was probably around ten years old. My sisters started thinking about driving when they were asked to fill out the paperwork for their permits as sophomores in high school.
That might explain why I had this experience with the third daughter I taught to drive. I was in the habit of quizzing the kids when they were driving me around on their permits. This might be a residual result of being a field training officer in my job as a police officer, I don’t know.
I was driving with Kelly on route 52 near my home. We passed the speed limit sign and I looked at the speedometer. The speed limit was 45 mph and our speed was just below 40. I said, “What’s the speed limit here?” She hesitated as we approached the Route 52 sign and then responded, “Oh, it’s 52, I’ll speed up.”
Another experience I had with the kids learning to drive was with Danny. He was a very nervous driver the first several times we went out. On this particular “lesson” he was more relaxed and so, I relaxed. We were going about 45 on a rural road with very light traffic. Danny was drifting towards the shoulder of the road and I said, “Just try to bring the car closer to the center, we’re pretty close to the shoulder here.” He started to correct, but there was a truck coming in the opposite direction that made him nervous, so he corrected, back towards the shoulder.
Dan’s correction went a little too far and both right tires both went onto the gravel shoulder. I started to say, in as calm a voice as I have, “This isn’t a problem, just steer slightly to the left to bring us back onto the road.” But I don’t think Danny heard a thing I was saying. He cranked the wheel to the left and seemed to accelerate. We had, almost, turned left, where there was no road to turn onto, we were across the center line heading for a ditch on the opposite side of the road. I took hold of the wheel to help Danny bring the car back into our lane.
Long story short, we swerved back and forth a bit and the car finally rolled off of the road to the right. When we came to a stop, I asked Danny if he was ok- he was. I was ok also.
A kid who had been following us ran up to the car and yelled, “That was the coolest thing! I could see the bottom of your car, WOW!” Dan and I went out again, within weeks and he did fine. He became a very good driver and made me proud.
I’m sure that incident was more my fault than Dan’s, In my efforts to keep him calm, I had probably let him get too close to the edge. Anyway, no matter whose fault it was, it was quite an experience! As Launchpad McQuack, the pilot in Disney’s “Duck Tales” cartoon series says, “Any landing you can walk away from is a good one!”
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