When I was thirteen, I was breaking the law on a regular basis. It didn't really register that I was breaking the law because I thought that having to be sixteen to drive a car was a stupid, societal law and I was a very mature thirteen-year-old hanging out with a sixteen-year-old. I was a good girl. I wasn't having sex, I wasn't getting drunk, I wasn't doing drugs, I got straight As, respected my parents and teachers loved me. But I was breaking the law every time Andy and I got together and he would offer to let me drive his mother's Sprint. Andy was a great driving teacher. We laughed when I broke too hard. I was very careful with the gas pedal and he was very patient as I practiced. We started out in parking lots. But we got bolder as I got better. We took to the streets.
Andy let me drive to Bay City, a high way jaunt, twenty minutes from our town of Saginaw. We would just drive around, listening to the radio, our favorite songs. Gas was cheap in the late eighties and Saginaw was home of the hashers with bands like Bad English singing “When I see you smile, I can face the world.” We were going through the drive thru and the man in the window said, "there's a song by Stevie Nicks I wonder what Greta would say" when he heard my name. He sang, “She wants to live by the ocean.” I didn't know the song.
One day we had gone to Butman Fish Library and Andy had offered to let me take the driver's seat. There we were on the side street, I at the wheel so Andy could read the latest biography of Diana Ross. We didn’t see his mother driving the navy Caprice behind us. Had we, we would have ducked or driven away, or done something…but as it was we were oblivious until she pulled us over.
It’s better to be pulled over by a cop than your best friend’s mother when you are breaking the law…or is it? I don’t think I had really thought through the repercussions of this rush of adrenaline, this sheer joy of being behind the wheel. Sex you can get pregnant, disease, they had classes to teach you about that, but driving seemed like such a harmless sin. Back in Jesus’ day, they didn’t even have driving licenses. I had to get behind the wheel because Jesus never did! But Andy’s mother wasn’t seeing it that way. She talked about me hitting a child crossing the street, the insurance company coming after me…things I had never even thought of with my thirteen-year-old vision.
We begged her not to tell my parents. Andy told her my strict parents would surely take me out of theatre, or never let me see him again, should they be told. I don’t know if it was because his mother loved me, or because she had been through breast cancer, but somehow she decided that taking away Andy’s Diana Ross concert was enough. It was tragic, but together, we could dramatically sing:
“There was so much you gave me
To my heart
To my soul
There was so much of your dreams
That were never told
You had so much hope
For a brighter day
Why were you my flower
Plucked away”
I was driving the other day in my usual mundane way, wondering why I have to live day after day trying to find a parking space. Realizing that I do live by the ocean just like Stevie Nicks prophesized, and for that, who can complain, even when searching for a parking space. I thought about how thrilling those first driving days with Andy were. “Sometimes I want to give up, I want to give in, I want to quit the fight.” Andy has passed on. But when I hear our music, I see him smile. “And then I see you baby, and everything’s alright.”
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