If you don't like the way I drive, get off the sidewalk.

I flunked Driver's Ed in high school.

My contribution to the school's literary journal that year was an essay about how I made my driving instructor cry. An exaggeration, of course, but hey, it got me published.

I drove for a while in high school, but after I put a hole in the gas tank -- backing out of the garage -- I had had enough.

So I drove less and less, and ended up not driving at all. By the time I stopped drinking, I was afraid to start the car, much less put it into drive.

I didn't start driving again until I had been sober for almost a year. I had moved to Albuquerque to take care of my mom, and it was either drive or starve. But then we moved to Boston, where it seemed wisest to let my husband take back the wheel. Because, you know, Boston. Eventually I did learn to drive, but my knack for fucking things up meant I didn't always have a car.

Now I have a better understanding of why learning to drive was such a nightmare,  and if my parents had known what I know now, I probably never would have learned to drive.

But drive I do. I've driven on a snowy mountain road at night in the middle of a blizzard. I've driven on I-285 during rush hour. I even drove in Boston once when I accidentally poked my husband's eye out and had to drive him to the hospital.  (Yeah, I really did that.)

Anyway, I drive, and after decades of practice, it's mostly second nature. And because I can drive, I don't have to wait for someone to pick me up from work. I can stay ten minutes late and my ride doesn't get pissed off. I can run to the store any time I want. I can take a drive down an inviting road just because.

After having spent so many years depending on others for rides, it's hard to overstate how liberating it is to drive.

Okay, so I occasionally try to put diesel in the gas tank, and sometimes I drive away with the gas pump still in the car, and if I get distracted I make mistakes, which is why you should drive when we go somewhere together.

But I drive. I drive.

And that right there is a bona fide fucking miracle of sobriety.