My dad taught me how to drive. Before any training class or instructional booklet could get to me first. It was the summer of 2017 and I was fourteen years old and the last time I’d sat behind the wheel was when I was too short to reach the pedals, so my dad had me perched on his lap and put me in charge of steering as we rolled from the sidestreet into our driveway. Even then I couldn’t help myself from running over the neighbor’s lawn. But that had been years ago when I was hardly smart enough to spell my own name, and I was older now and felt confident that driving couldn't be any harder than stepping on two pedals. I had been itching to get behind the wheel ever since my older sister had gotten her license earlier that year. I figured that if she could do it, so could I, then threw patience out the window. Up until this moment, I’d been counting down the days, minutes, seconds until my dad would finally take me out for our first drive the way he did with Anna when she was 14 and preparing for drivers training. It was a tradition.

I remember how from the passenger seat, he slid the gear shift into park and told me to gently tap the acceleration. I watched as the odometer spiked and he yelled at me that had our car been in drive, I would’ve gone through a tree. I laughed at him and with all the severity that dads pretend to have, he scolded me that it wasn’t funny. This was serious. Driving isn’t a joke. But for the first year that I was on the roads, driving under a permit and only when a parent was in the seat beside me, I hardly ever understood that unlike most things in my life, mistakes in driving could very possibly lead to a fiery explosion. And not just the metaphorical one. 

That first time I drove on a small dirt road in the woods of northern Michigan, without a yellow sign over the sunroof calling out my invincibility and no brake under the passenger’s foot to correct my mistakes, I had no idea how vulnerable I really was. For the first time, I was becoming an adult and yet even then I had no idea what that entailed. It would be ages before I claimed any sense of responsibility. I hadn’t even made it through freshman year yet. Summer was still young and life was jubilant and there, on the dirt roads in Oscoda, with Cook Pond just waiting to be swam through and the Ausable River calling my name, It was only me and my dad. Forever frozen in a second of the deepest act of selflessness any parent can offer- letting their youngest child grow up. 

The drive itself only lasted five minutes, and I never went over 15 miles per hour, but I remember rolling into camp, and from the front seat of my dad’s ford escape, waving to the other dads camping on our site, to their daughters smiling in encouragement, knowing I’d never before been behind the wheel. I remember thinking how easy it had been to operate 2000 lbs of american made steel- never imagining what it might feel like to crash into 2000 lbs of american made steel, and had my begging to drive been mild before, it became overbearing now. More than anything though, I remember the way my dad looked at me. That’s something you don’t forget. When a father is overcome with pride for his baby girl and the sense of love overcomes any dread that she’s growing up. I remember his smile. The enthusiastic “You did Great!” followed always shortly with “But here’s what you need to do better.” 

My dad has the kind of smile that you look at and wish he would never stop smiling. That if you could see one grin for the rest of your life it would most surely be his. When my dad smiles, it starts in his teeth and ends at his eyes, in a steep curve with a glitter of excitement, sparking fire behind each hazel globe. And when my dad smiles at you, you realize that you’d do anything to make him smile again. 

His smile graces my childhood in every conceivable way. It builds me from the ground up. From the first time he held me to the vaguest memories in which all I can recall is that I’d made him laugh. 

My childhood was filled with the happiest days I’ll ever have. That type of happy that you can only have when you’re a kid because when you’re a kid, you’ve still got some kind innocence left that makes you feel happiness so much more fully and heartily than you do when you’ve gone old. And I’m not saying you can’t be happy when you’re grown, because trust me, there’s days that I think I’ve never been happier and I never will be, but when you’re a kid, it’s different. Indescribably different. Like if your heart was a cup and happiness was filling it, childhood would offer sunshine and adulthood just water. Either way that cup is full, but the way it’s full is different. You can’t know it until you feel it and once you’ve felt it, you’ll want to feel it again to know for sure. And you’ll never know for sure. That’s just how happiness works. 

I remember the days when I would stand between my parents holding both of their hands and in place of every step they’d lift me off the ground where I’d swing back and forth, suspended for just a second until my feet dragged against the concrete once again. Then 13 years passed and I still find myself reaching for hands withdrawn a decade before- only the memory of clammy palms and infantile aerodynamics lingering above. 

 I remember the summers of my elementary school days’ youth where my sister and I would stay out in the humid heat of July evenings riding our scooters back and forth down the street and yet never crossing into it out of fear that my mom would be waiting in the window to spank us if we did. Days that we’d kick a soccer ball in the front yard or go to the park and all our parents had to say was “come back home when the streetlights come on.”

I remember the day my sister went soaring over the handlebars on her bike after skidding down a steep gravel hill on Michibay drive in Gulliver, Michigan. How the last thing I saw from my place at the top was a suffocating cloud of dust before she catapulted off the road and into the woods. And I’m clouded with the day Anna packed her boxes for college because somewhere between that bike and the ground, she grew up and graduated high school, and now she’s some sort of genuis, which I guess shows she never flew too far or too fast or too hard.

Days when I’d come home from school during lunch with my friends and my mom would be waiting with enough pizza for all of us and a trampoline in the back yard to jump on. When my parents were the fun ones instead of the strict ones and my house was the designated hangout spot instead of my car. 

My car. 

We remember moments. Short lapses in time where everything else vanishes into oblivion and all that’s left is the way you feel. In that very second. As if nothing else will ever matter. 

Like the first time you rode a bike with no training wheels and you’re screaming at your mom to not let go and she screams back in a completely different tone that she already has.

Or the first time you read a Doctor Suess book on your own. “Green Eggs and Ham” on your living room couch while your mom listens from the kitchen, preparing lunch and bubbling in pride when you finally finish. 

Or the first time you got a splinter. At a family barbeque in August when you’re somewhere between too young to remember and too old to forget. And the only person you’ll let pull the splinter out is your grandpa. For no particular reason and yet every reason in the world.

Or the first time you drove a car. Down a curvy, narrow, dirt road through the middle of the woods in Oscoda, Michigan. With your dad in the front seat and the radio off, the windows down, and hot June air flowing in and through your hair. In a fit of joy. Having never been giddier.

Or maybe you remember the first time you almost died- or maybe you should've died, but you’re glad that you didn’t because imagine all the other firsts that you would have missed if you had.