I Wear My Gray Proudly

When I was a school teacher my students often remarked that I should dye my hair and beard.

“You’d look so much younger,” they’d say.

They couldn’t understand that I was proud of my gray hair. Gray hair is like a badge of honor, earned for performance above and beyond the call of duty on the battlefield of life.

I’m reminded of the time eldest son passed on some information to me that caused me severe mental anguish—he told me that within a few months he would be old enough to apply for a driver’s permit.

I wasn’t sure he was ready for that, and I knew I wasn’t. I was still experiencing post tramatic stress syndrom from the first driving lesson I ever gave him.

On a Saturday afternoon we drove to an empty high school parking lot where I commenced to teach eldest son how to drive. At first, things went rather smooth, but upon reaching the end of the parking lot he tried to turn the truck around at much too high of speed and almost rolled my new pickup truck.

So I decided to take my son to a long, straight stretch of road, where he could drive a far piece without being forced to attempt a “U” turn. My plan was a good one except I had forgotten one important fact—there was a fifteen m.p.h. hairpin turn at one end of the road, the end we were driving toward.

When within one hundred yards of the turn, I suggested to eldest son that he start slowing the truck down in preparation for the turn. Eldest son insisted that was what he was trying to do. But when nearing seventy-five yards from the turn he still hadn’t slowed the thing down.

“You’d better slow down,” I said with a touch of tension in my voice.

At fifty yards from the hairpin turn we were still approaching it much too fast.

“SLOW DOWN!” I exclaimed. By now, I was beginning to panic.

“I have the brake pushed all the way to the floor but nothing’s happening,” was his reply.

Finally, when we were just twenty-five yards from the turn, it dawned on me why eldest son couldn’t get the truck to slow down even though he was pushing the break pedal all of the way down to the floor. What he thought was the foot brake was, in actuality, the clutch. I quickly moved my left foot to the driver’s side of the truck and pressed the brake pedal to the floor, bringing our vehicle to a hasty halt.

Without a word spoken between us, we exchanged places in the cab of the truck, and I drove us directly home, where I hastily when into my bedroom and changed my underwear.

"When can we go driving again?" Eldest son inquired the next morning.

"Just as soon as we buy a vehicle with an automatic transmission," I answered.

"When will that be?"

"When the truck wears out," I said.

And believe you me, I took great care of that truck. I planned on it running for a very long time.

2 comments:
Hale McKay said...
Whew! Sounds like an experience I had when I took my daughter out driving a few times. I still feel sorry for that piles of bagged leaves she run over. I was glad we pulled away before the poor person who had toiled so long raking and bagging them didn't see us. My ears were burning later when he must have been cleaning up the mess.