The Drive to Nowhere
Newsletter 2026-02-27
I’m supposed to be teaching my fifteen-year-old, Betsy, how to drive. You might wonder how that’s going. I haven’t written about it in weeks. My silence on the subject could mean that I’ve died, either from a crash or a heart attack associated with a near-crash. My lack of cardio has to catch up with me eventually. Perhaps I pre-wrote a bunch of newsletters about other disasters (there’s never a shortage in this house) and scheduled them to publish in the future, hiding my demise from the masses for weeks or months. Or maybe literally no one thought that and I’ve just been too busy with other things to get back to documenting the most important challenge in my life. Betsy and I are both alive and well, but our road training could be going better. The problem is me. Well, me and the weather. I could never take total accountability. Or any accountability at all.
Betsy needs fifty hours of driving time with me and her mom plus six hours in class with an instructor. I’m not sure of our exact tally without checking her sheet, but it’s not much. I took her out for an hour the day she got her learner’s permit. After months of delays while I waited for her to finish the online portion of driver’s ed, it was suddenly imperative that we get started on her hours right then. Rushing to make up for lost time seemed like a good lesson to teach an aspiring driver. I was hit or miss with getting her on the road after that. Lola had Betsy take the wheel on the way to school on mornings when Betsy needed to be there early for extra curricular activities. Those same activities slowed us down. Betsy was busy most nights and weekends. Then the weather turned. I’ve done many reckless things in my life, but teaching a fifteen-year-old to drive in the ice and snow isn’t one of them. I’d like us both to survive until she’s old enough to get her license. To add insult to injury, the old van in which she’s learning to drive died in the cold. It sat lifeless on our back parking slab for many frigid weeks. If I wanted to take Betsy out to practice driving in the most treacherous conditions imaginable, I’d have to do it in one of our two more valuable vehicles. That idea got a hard pass from me.
The old van just needed a new battery. I assured Lola that I would take care of it when the weather warmed up and the snow melted. I didn’t want to mess with electrical items while standing in frozen water. I don’t do well in the cold in general or with tools in particular. My frozen fingers would have certainly dropped a wrench or bolt or the entire battery in the snow. The smartest thing I could do was defer to my own incompetence and procrastinate, which has always been my strong suit. After a few weeks, Indiana hit us with one of its many infamous false springs. Temperatures changed from the single digits to the sixties overnight. The only logical explanation was that Mother Nature accidentally bumped the thermostat. The snow that seemed like it would never go away vanished in an instant. So did my best excuses. I suddenly had no reason to put off fixing the van to get Betsy back on the road. Lucky me.
I pride myself on my total helplessness when it comes to car repairs, but swapping out batteries is one of the few fixes I can actually do. I was forced to learn how in college when my car died in the campus parking lot. Someone must have jumped my car (for the life of me, I have absolutely no memory of that part of the process), which gave my vehicle just enough juice to get it across the street to the auto parts store, where it died again. This wasn’t one of the places that installed the battery for you. The person behind the counter said I could either put in the battery myself or leave it there until the business sold the car for scrap in the spring. At least they loaned me some tools. I was unlikely to succeed at turning the bolts with my teeth. This might not be entirely accurate, but I remember it as being the coldest day in the history of the world. The sun actually turned off. Someone had to relight it the next day with matches. This was before there were video tutorials on the internet for everything. YouTube didn’t exist yet, but even if it had been around, my phone didn’t have the internet. It could barely make calls. It was a prepaid phone that I left in my car and was supposed to use in case of emergencies. I can’t say for sure that it was ever actually charged. Contrast that with my phone today, which never leaves my direct line of sight, even when I’m in the shower. I’m regressing hard. Back on that fateful, frozen day, I either had to figure out how to change out the car battery on my own or give up driving. I figured it out, and I didn’t even lose any fingers in the process. At least not any that I remember. I think I’ve always had nine.
Back in the present day, replacing the van battery went much more smoothly. I watched a YouTube video, which seemed oddly familiar. I might have replaced this battery recently, as in within the lifetime of the warranty. That warranty was, of course, unenforceable because I didn’t have a receipt. A lot of companies are getting rich off my poor record keeping. I also might be mistakenly thinking of when I replaced the battery on our other van, which was the same make and model but from a different year and which suffered mysterious electrical problems until the day we sold it. I didn’t want to risk digging through old records and accidentally awakening the mechanical demon that had long since forgotten about us. I went ahead and bought a new battery from the cheapest place in town, just like the previous time. I’m sure that’s completely unrelated to why it didn’t last.
I drove to the store in a working vehicle to retrieve the cheap battery and installed it back at my house. I decided to push my luck. I needed to go back to the store to return the old battery to be properly disposed of and receive a ten dollar rebate. I figured Betsy could drive me. It was a Sunday afternoon on a three-day weekend, so traffic was light. The only problem was that Betsy was sick. She had a nasty cough that had been lingering for days. If I drove around with her, I was sure to catch it. Then again, just by living with her, I was sure to get it, too. When you become a parent, you resign yourself to coming down with every disease known to man and a few known only to reptiles. I’m still waiting for the day that my kids accidentally give me turtle power.
Betsy drove us to the store without incident. Despite being sick and not having driven a vehicle in a while, she handled the van like a pro. Perhaps the fifty hours would be redundant. That would be par for the course. If I have something I can teach the kids, it’s always unnecessary. We dropped off the old battery and returned to the van. She pushed the button to fire up the engine. It wouldn’t start. The battery I’d been patting myself on the back for installing had lasted all of ten minutes. Perhaps even thinking about our previous defective van had summoned its demon from beyond.
