Becoming A Car Driver

My transition from childhood to adulthood began when I first started driving. By the time I was 15 and a half, my parents had been relentlessly pounding into my head that I would be driving soon, and with a car came much more responsibility than I had been accustomed to. Before I manned the wheel of a two-ton machine for the first time, I thought the task would be easy. However, when I drove my father's truck for the first time at an empty baseball field complex, I realized how wrong I had been. I had been driving ATVs my whole life, and had the idea in my head that driving a car would be the same thing. When I took the steering wheel in my hands for the first time I felt unsure if my previous theory would hold true. My father told me to "get a feel" for the gas pedal while it was in park, and I promptly pressed the accelerator to the floor.

When I shifted the gear into drive I knew in my mind that I shouldn't slam on the gas quite as hard now that we were moving. At first I was timid, but after a while I started feeling more comfortable behind the helm of the vehicle. As time passed I grew steadier and steadier behind the wheel as I learned how to switch lanes on the freeway and parallel park between the driving instructor's cones in the mall parking lot. Parallel parking was the hardest part of the learning process, albeit I was a pro by the end of my tenure at driver's ed. Finally the day came when I got to choose my very own car, a sleek 2010 Pontiac G6 my dad and I found at the car lot. I knew it was nothing special, but it was to me since it was mine. Less than a week later my final trial came and I headed to the local BMV to take my driver's license test. I remember being so nervous that I was shaking, but I knew then that it wasn't the time to fold under the