When I was first learning to drive, my father took me out to practice in a cemetery. St. Joseph's Cemetery in Leicester, Massachusetts. Cemeteries were, of course, a natural place to get comfortable behind the wheel. There weren't likely to be a lot of cars on the road, and if you went rogue, you weren't apt to hit anyone or do all that much harm. What's the worst that could happen? You knock over a headstone or two. And at St. Joseph's Cemetery, those headstones were likely to be someone related, as this is where quite a bit of the family on my grandmother Rogers side were buried. Now there are a lot more. (St. John's Cemetery was the main Catholic cemetery in Worcester. It was a lot larger than St. Joseph's, so more roads to drive on. But St. Joseph's was our cemetery, so there we went.)
When
my father was taking me out to St. Joseph's, my sister Margaret, who died in
infancy, was buried there. As were my great grandparents, Bridget and Matthew
Trainor, some of my father's aunts and uncles, a couple of cousins. They've been joined
over time by a lot more of the family.
Five
years after my father was showing me the car driving ropes, he was buried there
on a miserable January morning. Within a few years, my uncles Ralph and Charlie
had joined him. Then my grandmother. Then my Aunt Margaret. Then my mother. And
so it went.
A
few years back, Ned McKeon, the last of my father's first cousins, made his way
to St. Joseph's cemetery.
Anyway, whether you're related to half the bodies or not, cemeteries have always been a good place to learn to drive. Just be respectful.
Don't grind the gears when someone's being buried. Don't practice shifting on
the hills over Memorial Day weekend. And stay off the grass.
Which
seems like the least you should ask.
But
it was too much for a local (Melrose Mass.) 53 year old woman with a learner's permit who, a couple
of weeks ago, "lost control of her Range Rover and veered off the road,
plowing into a plot of graves."
No
one was injured, but "at least eight gravestones at the city's Wyoming Cemetery toppled."
What a mess!
She had been practicing her driving skills on the cemetery’s winding roads around 2:30 p.m. when she mistook the gas pedal for the brake and went crashing into the graves, said Lieutenant David Mackey.The white Range Rover she was driving appeared to have damage to its front panel on the driver’s side, and Mackey said the vehicle had to be towed from the scene. The vehicle’s front bumper appeared to be dislodged. (Source: Boston Globe)
Those Range Rovers sure our powerful. Mowing down eight gravestones!
Of course, even modest family cars in the mid-1960's probably weighed as much as a Range Rover. The car I learned to drive on was a 1965 Galaxy 500 that could seat about 10 people comfortably and got about 10 miles to the gallon. The car was named Black Beauty. (The car after that was the Green Hornet. After that, my father died and we no longer named cars.)
“No crime involved, just an unfortunate accident with a considerable amount of damage,” said Mackey. “It was an older woman who just never learned to drive, apparently just recently got her permit, and probably shouldn’t have.”
The woman with the learner's permit was 53. Some "older woman." One time, when I was somewhere in my forties, there was an article in The Globe about an "elderly woman" who was killed in a house fire. The woman was 47. I had seen the article, but just to make sure, my boss' wife sent it in with him with the words "elderly woman" underlined. (We were all roughly the same age.)
My mother learned to drive in her late forties, my Aunt Margaret in her mid-fifties. They were both of the era when half the women didn't drive. Husbands did. And no one schlepped their kids around to activities. (As if.) Sometimes you got a lift, but you were mostly on your own. Of course, there weren't as many organized activities for kids back then, either. We were all pretty free range.
But by the time she was in her forties, my mother saw the handwriting on the wall. My father was cycling in and out of bad spells with kidney disease. He wasn't going to last forever. And her kids, even though by then Kath and I were old enough to drive, she knew that, while she had a while before "the baby" left for college, and left her in the driving lurch, she'd better figure out how to get behind the wheel.
For my Aunt Margaret, it was pretty much the same. When she hit her mid-fifties, her kids were out the door. Her final chauffeur - my cousin Robert - was graduating from college and heading away from home. (He'd commuted to college at BC.)
Neither my mother or Margaret ever became particularly skilled or confident drivers. Fortunately, neither was ever in a serious accident. (My mother had a couple of fender-benders.)
When my mother got her learner's permit, my father at first took her out. To St. Joseph's Cemetery. It didn't go well. My mother, who completely and utterly adored my father - and the adoration was returned - couldn't stand even the mildest of criticism from him, and came home pretty upset. We never learned exactly what happened up in the cemetery, but that was the one and only time that Al tried to teach Liz to drive. After that one-off, her lessons were all from the pros.
Whatever happened on my parents' driver's ed outing, I'm pretty sure she didn't knock over any gravestones. Surely we'd have heard if she'd taken out the gravestone of Matthew and Bridget Trainor. Knocked over the Deignans marker. (The Deignans had been tenants in my grandmother's triple decker.)
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