Driving Lessons

Dear Driving Instructor,

I'll miss the dips you called dead ground, and the mistletoe in the trees above that you always said you were going to pull down and make your fortune from. I'll miss King Rufus, Lord Mountbatten and the stone cat that sat on the roof. Sometimes when the driving seemed automatic, it was like I was the blind man in Amélie and you were telling me about your world, pointing out all the things that I would not have noticed normally.

You asked me so many times if I knew where I was and most of the time I didn't. You'd tell me we were in Bournemouth or Timbuktu, places that we would not have been able to drive to in one lunch-hour, or you'd tell that old driving instructor joke, that today we were going on the motorway. Sometimes, we'd drive out into picturesque countryside, zoom underneath passages of trees, see rabbits and pheasants, and go under tiny narrow bridges.

My driving was always clonky, and you held the wheel a lot, which didn't help my steering, but oh, you told me about all manner of random things, often interesting. It's that I'll miss, while you go on to your new career of taxi driver. I hope it goes well, and you do have more time to travel.

Jodi. (Or Heidi, as you used to call me sometimes.)