Moving to the suburbs came with a lot of firsts for me.
It was my first time being responsible for trees and whether they were too close to power lines — or whether they were dying, or just in need of a good trim. It was my first time shopping at Target and buying groceries that I didn’t need to pack into an Uppababy that splintered under the weight of an extra gallon of milk as I lugged it down Atlantic Avenue. It was my first time fastening my garbage can with a bungee cord and dragging it out onto my own street.
And it was my first time driving.
Yes, driving.
That last one throws a lot of people for a loop.
I grew up in Brooklyn Heights and like many of my friends, never bothered to get a driver’s license. Who needs one? we thought, as we bounded through the city with our school-issued metro cards, going from the Guggenheim to Tasti D-Lite with nothing more than the swipe of our wrists? There was nowhere we couldn’t go, no dodgy party we couldn’t attend, so long as we could glide under the electric pulse of Manhattan, never stopping for traffic or gas or any of the other inconveniences that come with needing a car. People talk about the open road, but they must have never met the underground, with its lost souls and subway car dancers and endless possibilities that stretch out before you like veins through a leaf.
But life sometimes demands practicality, and I finally agreed to try for my license at the age of 30 — only at the insistence of my husband, who found it remarkable, if not outrageous, that I had come this far in life without having one. I tried to explain to him that it was not necessary — that I had the subway and could hail a cab faster than he could find his car keys — but it was no use. “What if you don’t live in a city forever?” he asked.
With this impossibility looming, I agreed to ride the subway (naturally) out to Queens to take driving lessons with Juan. I had heard the test was easier out there and the traffic more bearable. Remarkably I passed. My colleagues at Citigroup bought me a card, no doubt intended for a teenager, that read: “You’ve passed your driving test!” We all had a good laugh and pink frosted cupcakes to celebrate. I swapped my learners permit for a license and that was the end of that. The license sat comfortably in my wallet for five more years until we moved to Rye.
Even once we moved here I was hesitant to get behind the wheel, and for the first few weeks I walked in the stubborn September heat from Milton Point all the way to my children’s nursery school on the edge of town. Most people were polite about it, but some laughed out loud when they heard I had walked over a mile to school or Uber’d to a kid’s birthday party. “That’s hilarious,” they would remark, boldly.
It was difficult, and occasionally embarrassing, to articulate to other parents why I was terrified of driving, and so mostly I laughed along with them. For me, driving was like having to pick up a new language that everyone else was fluent in — except that pronouncing a word wrong could result in sudden death. It was operating a vehicle while your children wrestled and shrieked in the back. It was wanting to cry when someone beeped at you because you were going too slow and it was cursing at the GPS when she told you to take a left in 200 feet, because you had measured your whole life in transfers and stops and you knew nothing of this “feet” business.
It took the mention of wandering coyotes and a third pregnancy, combined with an aching back, to convince me to get behind the wheel. But I did it, eventually. I have now been driving for five years and consider myself a fairly competent driver, though I still have my google settings on “highways off” and still get sweaty palms if my GPS takes me too close to I-95.
Sometimes I imagine what it would have been like to have started driving as a teenager, before fear and responsibility built a tidy little home in my brain. But then I remember I would not have been able to sneak out of my house onto the subway at night with my teenage sister to watch the ball drop in Times Square so we could feel like tourists. I probably would not know what Coney Island looks like in winter, or where you can buy a dozen roses for $7 (back then at least!).
But I definitely would not have known the humility required in learning a new skill that nearly everyone around me already had mastered. I would not know how much self-discovery sits before me even in adulthood and how life altering it can be to take on new challenges as we age. By learning to drive in my 30’s, I discovered the importance of honoring my own journey — and the value of imparting kindness on others who are embracing challenges, and ourselves for doing the same.
Rye Perspectives
By Cassandra Spiss