HOW I LEARNED A DRIVER'S LICENSE MEANS MORE THAN GETTING AROUND -
IT MEANS FREEDOM
Looking out the window, I smile at the familiar sight of my five-year- old son and three-year-old daughter playing in the parked car. Matthew "drives" with my husband's casual ease, hands resting lightly on the wheel, honking at regular intervals to signal another stop on the itinerary: McDonald's, Dunkin' Donuts, Toys R Us.
"We're playing Daddy and Mommy," Karen announces when I come outside. "I'm sitting in your place," she says, patting the front passenger seat. "Girls don't drive."
"No, no, sweetheart," I say hastily, giving her my girls-can-do-any- thing lecture ("Your pediatrician, Dr. Beth, is a girl, and Jared's mommy runs a big company and she's a girl"): "Girls do drive. It's just that I don't drive."
It isn't that I don't know how to drive. I'm not what an out-of-state friend refers to as "one of those neurotic non-driving New Yorkers." It's that I was born with a brand of nearsightedness that even glasses could never correct enough to let me pass the vision test at the DMV.
When my 16-year-old classmates were having their first big gulp of freedom, I was still buckled into the passenger seat. My friends Jill, Pam and Marilyn, rather than my mother and father, became my chauffeurs. I veered between feeling endlessly beholden and eternally babyish.
My parents did what they thought was helpful, suggesting — ophthalmologist's report to the contrary — that it was nerves rather than nearsightedness that was grounding me. They arranged for private lessons, looked into the feasibility of a daylight-hours-only license, and researched
Английский язык для турбизнеса и сервиса
what make of auto provided particularly good visibility When I got my learner's permit (no vision exam required), my mother even hustled me into her station wagon for a tutorial.
It was brief. Going at a speed of 25 miles per hour down a suburban road, I misjudged the distance between the car and a long queue of orange cones, knocking them down clean as a strike. "Out," said Mom. A half-dozen road workers witnessed my humiliation as I dashed out the driver's side to my old seat.
Twenty years later, I have ample experience at being out of step with a large chunk (bulk) of the population. I often feel left behind when others take off, stuck when I'd like to be gone.
I'm constantly told by those who wish to be comforting that driving is mostly drudgery: car pools, traffic jams, self-service gas pumps, trips to the airport for an aunt you wish had stayed home. But there's no talking to me. I'm caught up in the romance of the road, sitting behind the wheel of a convertible on — well, it just has to be the Pacific Coast Highway, the wind blowing through my hair, a Beach Boys song blasting on the radio. 1 view a set of car keys dangling casually from someone's hand in much the way, as an adolescent, I viewed a cigarette poised between someone's fingers: the height of worldliness and sophistication.
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After college, I moved to New York, a city that made as much sense for my "condition" as for my career. Journalists sometimes have to go out of town, however, so my first order of business is always to check into the availability of public transportation (frequently nonexistent), car services (often unreliable) and cabs (always expensive). I'm convinced I'll lose work to colleagues with more dependable vision. On weekends in the country when my husband heads out alone for his cherished hardware store, I stand on the deck and watch the car become a dot in the distance, trying to shake my feeling of abandonment.
My husband is an unstinting and uncomplaining chauffeur, and my son, contemplating his own future as a motorist, has already pledged to take me to my beloved Starbucks. I have transportation. What I'm denied is that ineffable feeling of independence, the sweet awareness that without anyone's assistance I can light out for the territories or anywhere at all, far beyond what the eye can see.
By Joanne Kaufman
Unit 5. Travelling By Car
TEXT WORK
1. Pronounce correctly and transcribe. Consult the dictionary if necessary.
Familiar, daughter, ease, casual, lightly, wheel, sweetheart, lecture, know, neurotic, nearsightedness, glasses, enough, vision, buckled, chauffeur, eternally, nerves, feasibility, license, daylight, hours, research, learner's permit, required, hustle, suburban, station, misjudge, queue, knock, witness, humiliation, experience, drudgery, caught, view, adolescent, height, sophistication, career, however, availability, frequently, unreliable, colleagues, hardware, future, pledged, beloved, denied, awareness, beyond, eye.
2. Compare and mind the difference:
| AmE Gas |
| BrE Petrol Petrol station Kilometre |
| Gas pump Kilometer |
Answer the questions.
1. What are children playing and how?
2. Why does the author give her daughter her girl-can-do-anything lecture?
3. Why doesn't the author drive?
4. Why her classmates were having their first gulp of freedom at 16?
5. What about her at the age of 16?
6. What did her parents do to help?
7. What did her mother do when the author got her learner's permit?
8. What happened at the first tutorial?
9. How does the author feel twenty years later?
10. What do people say about driving? Why?
11. What does the author dream about?
12. What is author's profession?
13. What did she do after college to have a career?
14. What is her first order of business when she goes out of town?
15. What usually happens on the weekends?
16. How does the author feel about that?
17. What has her son promised her?
18. What is the author denied?