Driving Lessons

My mother does not approve of off-color language. But she is going to tell the story, the whole story and nothing but the story, even if she must reference her own hind parts.

“Have I told you about Mr. Warble? George Warble?” she asks my sister and me. We are on a conference line. She has called this meeting, not a good sign.

“No, don’t think so Mama.”

“Well, I won’t tell you everything ‘cause it’s too long, but I will tell you the important things.”

We settle in for everything.

“There is one part I shouldn’t say. But I guess I have to.”

Her voice is an ominous mix of confidence, defiance and joy. We brace ourselves for what we know we are about to learn. At seventy-nine years of age and facing a range of forces aligned in lockstep against her – her four daughters among them – she has secured her freedom. Central to her tale of triumph must be this Mr. Warble. George Warble.

“Did I tell you he’s with the Bellevue Driving School? You know we drove around together for two weeks. Amy, you set up the lessons.”

“Mmmhmm,” my sister says, “that’s right.”

“Well, Mr. Warble is a Black man and a driving teacher, and we drove around Monday, Wednesday, Friday for two weeks, and of course we talked. And he did give me lessons.”

“Mama,” I say, “why does it matter that Mr. Warble is Black?”

“It does, just listen. So, when what’s-her-name came today. Amy, what’s her name? The lady from Vanderbilt?”

“You mean Nancy? The one scheduled to give you the driving test?”

“Yes, she’s the one. She came over, ‘bout 1 o’clock. She gave me what she called a pre-test. It was a written test, and she said I failed it. Said I was having memory issues. Said she wouldn’t take me on the road. And I said, ‘Listen here…’ Amy, what’s her name?”

“Nancy.”

“I said, ‘Listen here Nancy, you call Mr. Warble. George Warble. At the Bellevue Driving School. Where I took lessons for two weeks Monday, Wednesday, Friday. He will tell you I am a good driver.’ Well, she did it. Called Mr. Warble. And Mr. Warble said, ‘She is fine on the road, take her out.’ So, the woman from Vanderbilt, the one who said I was having memory issues, says to me, ‘Ok, but if I have to hit the brake for you one time, you fail.’

“Are you all still there?”

“Uh huh. We’re here.”

“So I thought, ‘Well, shoot on you. Let’s go.’ Didn’t say it, but that’s what I thought. So, we get in the car. She gets in on the passenger side, and I get in on the driver’s side. And we start up. We turned right out of the driveway down toward Harding Road. She wanted to get onto Harding –“

“Mama, do you need to tell us exactly where you went to tell the story?” I am wasting my breath. Our mother is making a point. She is as intimately familiar with the streets, corners, and intersections of her hometown as she ever was. She remembers every square inch of Nashville and aims to prove it.

“Yes I do. Because, listen.”

She raises her volume and slows down her sentences, as if speaking to a rally.

“She wanted to get into traffic and there’s always all that traffic on Harding. So that’s why we got on Harding. And I said to this woman, ‘Mr. Warble says don’t follow the car in front of you too close. Be sure you can see the rear wheels at all times.’ And she said, ‘Yes, that’s true,’ like she was surprised. Then we come to one lane over on Woodmont, with the double yellow lines. Are you all listening?”

“Yes. The double yellow lines.”

“And I said, ‘Mr. Warble says stay away from the double yellow lines, you’re crossing over them, keep to the left.’ And she said, ‘Yes, that’s right too.’ And then we came to a stop sign – four-way, over on Woodmont and Bowling – and I said, ‘Mr. Warble says don’t roll through the stop sign and if you get there the same time somebody else does, yield to the driver on the right.’ Did you all know this?”

“Uh huh.”

“Well, nobody ever told me.”

“Except Mr. Warble.”

“Yes! Thank God for Mr. Warble. So, then we go over to Hillsboro Road, back to two lanes. And I told Nancy from Vanderbilt whose name I re-mem-ber, ‘Mr. Warble says slow traffic stays to the right, in the slow lane, and faster traffic passes on the left. That’s why it’s called the fast lane. Slow, right. Fast, left.’ And Nancy says, ‘Yes, that’s exactly right.’”

“And girls, I went on and on like this until, finally, do you know what she said to me?”

“What?”

“I really shouldn’t say it, but it’s what she said.”

“What did she say?”

“She said, ‘Mr. Warble has saved your butt!’”

Our mother lands hard on “butt,” counting on us to bust a gut. We oblige. It’s a good story, well told.

But ours is the hollow laughter of the vanquished and the terrified. Our mother, never a good driver to begin with, has just been handed her license back after barely surviving, nine months prior, a fall from her attic that took a few inches off her diminutive stature, precious seconds from her reaction time, and a chunk out of her once-formidable memory.

Yet as soon as she could get around After The Fall, she insisted on driving again. Her doctor demanded a driving test, to be administered by Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s experts in such assessments. She failed the test spectacularly, blithely ignoring pedestrians in crosswalks, stop signs, and oncoming traffic, according to a harrowing written report of her fifty minutes on the road. Furious, she demanded a do-over. Okay, said the experts at Vanderbilt. But if you fail a second time, we’ll report you to the state, and your license will be revoked for good.

This was the point at which we, her daughters, outsmarted ourselves. We recommended driving lessons, a calculated attempt to appear helpful while emphatically proving the point: that the time had come for our mother to hand over her keys. Six days of lessons, we reasoned, could not possibly erase a lifetime of bad driving habits, exacerbated by The Fall. We failed to factor into our calculations Mr. Warble. George Warble.

Our mother continues to talk at us. There’s more to the Mr. Warble story, apparently. But we have stopped listening to launch into a text train that begins with rows of Edvard Munch emojis.

“Who the hell’s going to save the rest of our butts????”

“last resort – an all-points bulletin”

“yeah – then at least we can swear under oath that we tried”

“after the pileup you mean”

“uh huh – the one coming soon to an interstate near you”

As we wear out our thumbs, we hear, in the distance, more shouting from the rally stage. “Your Grandma took pictures…wedding at Assumption…drove out to the Whites...”

But we are distracted now, too busy crushing our smartphone keys to follow along.

“Girls! Are you all listening?!” My sisters and I are in our 50s now. Yet girls we will always be to our pint-sized overlord.

“Sorry Mama. We’ve gotta get back to work. Can we call you later?”

“Well. Ok. But do you remember the Whites?”

“Ummm. Maybe. Let us call you back.”

“Well. Ok. Call me back. And Amy, I’ll be over later with some soup.”

“That’s ok, Mama. You don’t have to.”

“Yes, I do. It’s good, and you need soup.”

“Why don’t I come get it?”

“No. I’m bringing it.”

***

Several weeks later, I fly from my home in Chicago to Nashville for a visit. I stay with Mama, hunkering down among her memories and her shredder.

“I’ve been shredding like a fool,” she tells me.

We’re in her family room on my last evening in town – Mama with her detritus and me with a bowl of soup. She is sitting in a straight-back chair wearing sweatpants and an extra-extra-large sweatshirt, once my father’s. He’s been gone fourteen years now. She wears his clothes to keep him close. The sweatshirt hangs past her knees. She’s cinched it around her waist with a back brace, essential to her wardrobe since she tumbled from the attic. As she sits, she methodically extracts old photos, letters, bills, receipts, invitations, clippings, solicitations, holy cards, Mass bulletins, and the like from tired cardboard boxes. Then she either places each item into a new pile or feeds it into the shredder. One of the new piles is for me. I eat my soup, which helps me keep my mouth shut as I watch it grow.

Public safety concerns notwithstanding, I’m happy Mama seems in better spirits since the driving test. She tells me the nine months After The Fall and Before Mr. Warble were “the worst.” Her only consolation during those awful days was “going through stuff,” painstakingly organizing and culling the extensive archive of her life. Now, even with her driving privileges restored, she is sticking to the task. She likes to finish what she starts.

“Look, look.” She waves a clipping in front of my face. It’s the obituary of someone who died sometime between my last visit and this one. “That’s Janie Watson’s brother’s wife.”

I draw a blank. “I don’t remember Janie or Janie’s brother or Janie’s brother’s wife,” I say.

“Well. You should.”

“How do you know her?”

“Janie was in your first-grade class. Do you want it?”

“Why would I want it? Why would you want it?”

“I keep up with the dead.”

***

We leave for the airport early the next morning so I can catch my flight back to Chicago. I offer to drive, she accepts. With nothing left to prove, she’d just as soon not worry about the road. I head down Lynwood Boulevard in the February dark, merge onto Lynwood Terrace, then make for Harding Road, virtually devoid of cars at this hour.

“Have I told you about Mr. Warble? George Warble?” she asks.

“Uh huh.”

“Mr. Warble says don’t roll through stop signs.”

“Uh huh. I know.”

“Then why did you just roll through that stop sign?”

“I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did. Back there at Lynwood and Lynwood.”

I realize she’s not only right, but she’s acquired an entirely new set of policing skills. Then I do what I’ve done since childhood under the glare of her certainty. I ask for a story.

“Tell me again about Mr. Warble.”

“About George Warble? Well, he’s with the Bellevue Driving School. Came to the house Monday, Wednesday, Friday for two weeks.”

I settle in for a familiar ride. But then Mama surprises me. She starts to tell me a part of the tale I haven’t heard before. Or, more accurately, didn’t pay attention to.

“We talked a lot while we were driving around, Mr. Warble and I. You know how you do. And one day he said to me, ‘You might know my next-door neighbors, they’re Catholic people, just like you.’ And, Katie, would you believe his neighbors are the Whites? Clara and Joe White. Do you remember the Whites?”

“I think so…”

“The White twins, Terry and Sherry? I’m pretty sure they were your age. They had a brother who was killed in an automobile accident, years ago.”

I track her as best I can, vaguely recalling this family and the terrible accident. “It’s coming back to me,” I say.

“Well, after the lesson, Mr. Warble dropped me at home, and I got back to shredding. You know I’ve been shredding like a fool.

“I was going through a bunch of old pictures, and I saw some of a young couple, taken years ago at the Assumption, and I realized it was Clara and Joe White! They were standing in front of the altar. They were wearing street clothes, but she was holding a bouquet.”

Mama is an expert at interpreting archival flotsam and jetsam. The Whites, she discerned from the pictures, must have just gotten married at The Church of the Assumption in North Nashville, located down the street from the two-bedroom bungalow where Mama grew up. She surmised her own mother had photographed the Whites after serving as a witness to their wedding. This was common back in the day, Mama tells me. Couples in a rush to get married, for whatever reason, would take any witness they could get. Grandma, who lived a stone’s throw from the church, was always happy to oblige. She was known to record every occasion she ever attended and save every picture she ever took. That’s how Mama wound up, decades later, with a stack of random wedding pictures. Including some of Joe and Clara White.

“There’s more,” Mama says. “The next time Mr. Warble came to pick me up for a lesson, I showed him the pictures, and he said, ‘Let’s take them out to the White’s house.’ So, we did. Drove out to Mr. Warble’s neighborhood to visit the Whites. When we got there, he got out of the car and knocked on the door and Clara came out and he said to her, “Ms. White, I’ve got Veronica Strobel out in the car, and she’s got something she wants to give you.’

“Clara came out to the car, and I handed her the pictures…”

Mama’s voice breaks, an unfamiliar sound. I reach across to the passenger seat and grab the top of her hand. Her knuckles are soft marbles, warm in my palm.

“Well, Clara burst into tears. I told her how I came to have the pictures, and she said, ‘I didn’t have a single photograph of our wedding. Not one. All this time. And, oh, Joe looks just like our son in these pictures.’”

“Good for you, Mama,” I say, my own voice catching. “That’s a wonderful story.”

“There’s more,” she says.

“Tell me more,” I say.

“A few weeks after the lessons were over, I made Mr. Warble a loaf of pumpkin bread to thank him for helping me get my license back. I asked him to come by and pick it up, you know he drives around all day, giving lessons. Well, when he came by, he said, ‘Ms. Strobel, I want to tell you that Ms. White knocked on my door the other day and asked me if I could come quick to her house to help Joe.’

“Turns out Joe White is an invalid and was about to fall out of bed. And Clara White needed George Warble to save Joe White from falling. Mr. Warble hurried over to the White’s house with Clara, lifted Joe back into bed, and helped him get comfortable.

“Mr. Warble told me that Clara was just so appreciative. And she said to him, ‘Mr. Warble, if there’s ever anything I can do for you, please let me know.’

“Mr. Warble said to me, ‘Ms. White has never asked me for anything. We’ve always been on speaking terms, but not close neighbors. But now I think we will be. Because of you and your pictures.’”

“That’s great, Mama,” I say. “That’s really something.”

We arrive at the airport departures lane and stop the car. Then my mother – born into the depths of a whites-only world, fluent in its insidious unspoken language – speaks again. “There’s never been too much mixing of the races around here. Not really.

“Maybe,” she says, her voice wavering just above a whisper. “Maybe I helped that a little bit.”

I plant a kiss on her damp cheek and get out of the car. She gets out, too, and walks around to the driver’s side.