Dad as a driving force

My father taught me how to drive - three separate times. I took driver's ed in high school like everyone else, but I was an appalling driver of unparalleled caliber - the guy who was sharing the car with me during my after-school lessons agreed. I knocked over a lot of garbage cans belonging to the city of Raleigh. I, I vowed, was never going to drive - ever.

In the interim, my father, Lord King of Worrying Excessively, was completely silent on the subject, expressing no opinion but steadfast support. "If you ever want to learn, just let me know," he always said.

So when I asked for lessons, about two years later, he woke me up early on a weekend morning and we went out to a nearby parking lot and began the entire painful process: Which one is the brake? Gas? This car has power steering, there's no need to use your body weight against the wheel.

And a year after that, we repeated the process, picking up where we'd last left off -- after I'd vetoed a lesson two or three -- this time incorporating parallel parking, an endeavor known to have destroyed parent-child relationships for eons. My father didn't raise his voice even once.

And this is a guy who once flew off the handle because I was applying to the University of Maryland.

It took me one more try, but I did get around to becoming independently mobile; and excepting my hereditary case of lead foot, I'm a good driver. It's 100 percent my father's work.

My father and I, it is important to note, speak different languages -- sometimes literally. He grew up during the Cultural Revolution in China, and in his teens, my father was sent to the countryside for "re-education." He stayed there years until the Chinese university examination system was reinstated, and then he studied by candlelight, by moonlight, in secret at night after a day in the fields to take the tests and get into school -- and in an extraordinary combination of luck, bitterly hard work and chutzpah, my father went to college. More than a role model to me, my father was the "do better" in the back of my head.

As a kid, I resented it. I was never extraordinary: I got average grades and did so-so in sports. (I excelled at talking during class.) Although my father was always "proud" of me, he never seemed proud of me, and it led to some spectacular fights in my teens.

But it was strange to reconcile the quiet man who sat -- soothing and fearless -- in the passenger seat as I took us on suicide lunge after another down Jones Franklin Road with Dad, who pitched fits at me over how I addressed envelopes.

I've wondered about this disparity for years now, and all I know is that as he was teaching me to drive -- over and over and over again -- my father was a great source of comfort to me. And maybe it's all a matter of knowing exactly when to push and when to pull your punches, because for all the yelling he and I have done at each other in our lifetimes, my father remains the higher standard to which I hold myself: Have I planned enough? Do I want it enough? But most of all: Don't you dare quit. It all comes from a common source -- because sometimes it will take years to take you where you were always meant to go, whether it be college or the DMV.

It's June and another Father's Day has come and gone, and just like the last four years, I was far from home -- white-knuckled in an ocean of Seattle drivers who drive in a steady zoom-jerk-to-a-stop pattern. There's no way for me to give him a singing card or a lame new tie, and saying "Happy Father's Day" seems kind of hollow across a telephone line when you've done it four years in a row.

So I'm saying it late and I'm saying it in print: Happy Father's Day, Daddy -- thanks for not flipping out that time I totally almost steered us into a highway median.