My feet were so cold on that warm September morning that I was hardly aware of the perspiration on my forehead. The car I was driving seemed to be 20 feet long. The rise on the road looked like a mountain. The roadside ditch looked like an abyss. The ten miles I had to travel might have been a cross country trip.
I was not yet seventeen and this was the first time I had taken the family car alone. I barely knew how to drive. I had received my driver's license the year before, when I was fifteen, the legal age in Minnesota. No driver's test at all. Didn't even have to know how to drive! And I most certainly didn't! My driving lessons didn't materialize until the following August.
One day my father drew a capital H on the back of an envelope and explained how to shift. He then rode with me for a very short drive as I practiced using the clutch and shifting. The first few times I tried, the engine died and I had to start again. Finally I got the hang of it and was able to drive to the farm about a half mile away. This driving practice was repeated three or four more times and I was then pronounced ready to drive. I have never figured out whether this was because of great confidence in me or because he was extremely busy and just didn't have the time to repeat the lesson.
There was some urgency about driving because I was about to begin my first year of teaching in a rural school ten miles from home. Even now I think I was more nervous about the driving than I was about the teaching. The Normal school I had attended the previous year emphasized the practical aspects of teaching and I had been doing student teaching throughout that year. The week before school was to begin I had readied my classroom and supplies but I had not met any of the students, nor did I know how many there would be.
The first day of school arrived and I was to get myself there and back. Although I had to drive round the schoolyard several times in the process I got the car parked. I got out, carrying my lunch and my books, and unlocked the schoolhouse door. It was about an hour before classes were to begin so once I fought off the impulse to hide under my desk I began to feel more confident and began writing on the front blackboard.
While I was busy with my task an overalls- clad boy about 14 came in carrying a pail of cold water. He was just as shy as I was, but we introduced ourselves and he explained that his family, who lived just across the road, would be supplying water each day to fill the bubbler fountain we used for drinking water, as well as the pail which would supply water for the handwashing before lunch. He left the water and went back home, probably anxious to describe the new teacher to the rest of his family.
Gradually, the rest of the students arrived, several of them just a year or so younger than I, and so my teaching career began. The day went well until my feet began to chill again when it was time to drive home. There is no doubt in my mind that the driving was the most difficult part of that day. We hear about teenage stress these days but I believe my story could out-stress most of the current ones. Throughout my life I have faced other similar situations knowing that I could probably get through them, cold feet or not, by doing as my mother had said that morning, "Take your courage in your hands and DO it!"
pam_25f
bigack
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