January 18, 2021

Turning Left

We have run out of parmesan and pasta is on the menu. I offer to make a grocery run since my only dinner contribution so far has been to complain that we have run out of parmesan. Rena, my niece, asks if I want company. I would ordinarily view this as a sweet gesture but I know it is a ruse. You see, Rena is about to take her driving exam and she wants to log in as much practice as she can. I really, really don’t like to take the kids driving. It stresses me out. But I also don’t like to say no. Rena sees my gloomy face and says “C’mon. It’ll be fun. I’m a really good driver.”

Rena was right. She is a good driver. Slow but steady speed. Constant mirror and shoulder checks. She navigates the bumpy and windy cottage dirt road like a pro. All in all, very solid. We drive to the grocery store without incident - my blood pressure only rises marginally - and pick up a huge slab of parmesan plus the olives my brother likes. On the way back, I relax enough to even allow us to blast some tunes. When we drive by the high school, which indicates the three-quarter mark in our journey, I turn to Rena with the identical instructions my father had passed on to me. The music is playing loudly so she doesn’t hear me when I say “You are going to want to move over to the left lane now.” So I turn down the music and repeat it. “You are going to want to move over to the left lane now.”

She says “Why?”

“Because you are going to have to turn left soon.”

And she says “Not for a while.”

I say “Soon.”

She says “Not yet.”

And I say “You always want to get ready.”

And she says “But the turn is still far away.”

Then I say “Be that as it may.” Although I might have used different words.

I live on a street which does not have a stop sign or traffic light at the end of the block before crossing or turning onto the main intersection. I have lived here for nearly twenty years and can count on one hand the number of times I have turned left against traffic. I say I can count the number of times but the truth is, at this moment, I can think of no times. Instead, I drive counterintuitively away from the intersection and navigate two side streets which then lead me to a street which does indeed, afford me the luxury and ease of a traffic light.

On my street, a right turn, which I take often, will bring me to midtown or, if I am being uncharacteristically ambitious, all the way downtown, while a left turn leads to the ramp for the highway. I like being the driver most of the time so I am rarely a passenger but on occasion a friend will pick me up on the way to the golf course, or sometimes, an Uber will take me to the airport. Without exception, every single one of those rides resulted in the driver going to the end of my traffic light-less street, carefully, sometimes not so carefully, inching across the median, and then making a screeching dash to the other side. I’m sure there have been times when there has been no traffic on either side and the journey across was uneventful and unencumbered but if there were, they do not come to mind. It is a pretty major street and there is quite a lot of traffic. I will sometimes propose that there might be a less stressful and perhaps safer avenue but those suggestions have been met with nothing short of abject derision. From men and women alike. Why, they scoff, would we double back and take a longer route when the road we want is right here?

I of course think they are crazy. That my position is pure and unimpeachable.

But I guess that is what those ‘earth is flat’ guys think too.

There is no question I come to this predilection honestly. My father never met a left hand turn worth taking. The mathematician in him knew there were no two distant points which could not be connected by a series of right-hand turns. He didn’t speak in vernacular but if he had, of left hand turns into traffic he would have said “Nothing good can come of that.”

That’s not to say he had any love for right hand turns or driving straight. I don’t think he liked to drive at all or had any interest in cars. It was a utility, a necessity, an obligation. I have trouble reconciling the fact we once undertook a 1200 km trip to Prince Edward Island.

My father drove slowly and carefully. Google tells me it is a 7-hour trip from Montreal to Atlantic City, New Jersey, where for years we took our annual summer vacations, but my memory refuses to allow me to believe it ever took less than 12. Every time he slipped into the front seat he went through the same checklist we are taught for our driver’s test; including checking the side mirrors. Mirrors which had never been moved because he was the only one to ever drive the car. He never got a speeding ticket, a moving violation, or even a parking ticket. My sister-in-law insists he was once cautioned for driving too slowly. The gas gauge never ever went under half. He could not hide his disdain for people who ran out of gas. He likened them to criminals and imbeciles. To this day I am convinced he only told me he too failed his first driving test in Canada in order to make me feel better. Following a large moving van through a yellow light he had said but it sounded concocted and unfathomable. Although I had a driving instructor my father did take me out a few times and it was pretty nerve wracking for the both of us. I once made a turn without signalling and it was as if I hadn’t washed my hands after going to the bathroom.

His first car in Canada was a red Plymouth Fury he bought for $2995. Then a succession of Chevy Impalas. He showed me how to check the oil. He kept diligent records, stored every gas receipt in a folder, and put on winter tires long before the first snowfall. I wish I had a better memory of those cars and the trips we took but the only vivid recollection I have is of a car wash we went to in Chomedy when we would visit our cousins. In those days, maybe still, you could stay in the car as it traversed the tracks through the different stages of the wash. The veritable monsoon jet stream followed by the wondrous beading of water as it was hit by the piercing heat of the dryer. My sister insists that once, on her birthday, we went through it twice. But that’s just crazy talk.

I can’t say I have matched my father’s record keeping or untarnished driving history. I have had more than my share of parking and speeding tickets. Hell, I once had so many moving violations I almost had my license suspended. But as different a driver as I was from him, I was also the same. Whether by rote, by habit, by memory, or by osmosis, some of it just stuck with me. He hated left-hand turns, but, if forced to, he would plan it with the discipline of a field marshal. He knew the turn was coming and he would prepare for it. My father’s preparedness would put the Boy Scouts to shame. He would signal and change lanes into the turning lane blocks and blocks, in my mind it was miles and miles, before he had to turn. Sometimes, often, incurring the wrath of the drivers behind him. But he was never going to get caught in the wrong lane when it was too late to move across. He was going to be ready. I do that too.

“You’re going to want to signal and move over to the left lane.” That’s what I tell people.

Rena of course gets over to the left lane in plenty of time to make the turn and makes it seamlessly and effortlessly.

“OK, good talk,” she says with a smile. Which is what my nieces say to me after I go on one of my rants or extended soliloquies.

“How’d it go?” Asks my brother when I walk in with the parmesan and olives. “Isn’t she a good driver?”

“Yes,” I agree, “very solid.”

“Reens, how was Uncle Ronnie?” Asks Sammy. “How many times did he scream at you?”

“No screaming,” replies Rena, rolling her eyes, “only a slightly elevated voice and a very interesting lecture about the history of left hand turns by Marco and Aaron Zevy.”

I feel bad about lecturing Rena and also worried about instilling her with my own inherited neuroses, so the next day, when she announces she badly needs help with her parallel parking, I volunteer to take her out. Although I should come clean and say this is a bit of revisionist history. I first spend thirty minutes arguing that practicing parallel parking with a car you aren’t going to take your test with is not only unhelpful but could actually be detrimental. But the consensus is I am just making excuses. So off we go to the mall.

I am quite proud for having written so many sentences in a nostalgic piece without having invoked the line ‘back in the day’ but now I am forced to. Back in the day, shopping malls would be closed on Sundays thereby allowing fathers and nascent drivers the opportunity to practice driving and parking with relatively few Built-in-Detroit impediments. Today is Sunday but the mall, and its parking lot, is packed. We drive around the entire lot before finding a spot in the far-right corner that is relatively free of cars. It also has an extra bonus because it is adjacent to a small construction site, and I avail myself of two orange plastic cones.

“We aren’t going to practice in between real cars?” Asks Rena.

“Not yet,” I reply. “First we are going to practice with these cones.”

‘Real cars,’ I think to myself. Kids these days.

My father, orange cones procured from god knows where in the trunk, took me to an empty shopping mall four Sundays in a row after I failed my first driving test because I hit a car during the parallel parking portion. We practiced parking in his Toyota Camry. Parallel parking is all about geometry. My father was very good at it. He showed me how to check in the mirror and look for the exact marking on the car when I could begin to spin the wheel. He taught me the precise amount of revolutions of the steering wheel when first backing in and then the precise amount when then straightening out. He was taller than me so every single time he would take the wheel to demonstrate, he would adjust the seat and the mirrors. There was a lever under the seat you could pull and then you would have to thrust your hips in order to move the seat carriage to the right spot. Then we would switch places and I would adjust them back. This would sometimes happen four or five times. I once made the mistake of asking him if we could just leave the settings as they were and he gave me a look very much like the look he had when first told one of our cousins, who shall remain nameless, had just run out of gas for the second time in a month. It was a combination of pity and disgust. The irony of course is my father never ever parallel parked in real life. In fact, in a habit I would later emulate, he would choose parking spots as far removed from other cars as physically possible. It meant we did a lot of walking. Sometimes we would have to take a bus. But I got very good at parallel parking. With my father’s Toyota Camry.

The day of my test I felt sick to my stomach. Driving test nausea is in a class by itself. If you are nodding your head as you read this then you know what I mean. And just when I thought I couldn’t feel any sicker, my driving instructor, Tony, explained that I would have to take the test in his car - I think it might have been a Chevy Nova - and not in the Camry. I was near tears but my father, who had accompanied me, walked over, had a word with him and the next thing I knew, I was taking the test, and ultimately passing, with our Camry. To this day, I have no idea what he said. I suspect it was a discourse about Euclid and the foundations of modern geometry. Tony must have relented just to get him to shut up.

Rena failed her test. She said she drove perfectly and aced her parking but had an unpleasant and unfair examiner. She might have used different words. The examiner had the reputation of failing first timers.

She was angry and upset. For a day or two she was inconsolable. Most of her friends had failed the first time too and Rena would go on to pass, just like me, on her second go around. But that week she was pretty miserable.

I tried to cheer her up.

“I failed my first time too,” I said.

“Thanks Uncle Ronnie,” she said. “It just really sucks. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Even Zaida failed his first driving test in Canada,” I said. Rena, being the youngest, had barely known my father. But his reputation had certainly preceded him.

She looked up and smiled. “Nice try Uncle Ronnie,” she said, “you, I can believe. But there is no way Zaida ever failed. He was way too smart.”

Rena continued, “You are just saying that to make me feel better.”

Yeah, I thought.

She was probably right.

It turns out that in 2017, UPS changed its navigation system in order to have their drivers avoid as many left-hand turns as possible. Left hand turns into traffic, they had determined, cause more traffic accidents and actually increase fuel consumption. Nothing good could come of them.

Of course, my father already knew that.

The end.