A Commonplace Glossary, vol. 1

A man stands at the edge of the parking garage and looks down at the city. It is a warm summer day and the sun is nearly done with it. It's a little past five. The office workers are returning back to their cars and the shop owners are pulling the metal barriers down over their storefronts. He is dressed in painter's clothes, plain white overalls and a baseball cap flecked with mild insitutional tones of paint. There are no cars in the spaces beside him, no sign of how he arrived here. He doesn't shuffle his feet the way I do when I'm waiting for someone, and he doesn't turn around when I pass him in my car. He leans over the edge. I never see his face.

A young woman, less than twenty-one but more than eighteen, holds a silent baby in a plastic carrier. She wears a simple t-shirt and shorts, and has her reddish-blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail. A man maybe fifteen years older than her, blonde hair and a beard, is talking to her. Their words are inaudible. They stand on a sidewalk in front of an apartment building and the connection between them is unreadable. There is no energy in the gestures they use when they speak. It's as though they're acting out a pantomime they borrowed from someone else, a narrative they no longer believe in.

The man takes the baby from her and walks to a large blue truck with an enclosed bed. If they say goodbye, they do it too quickly to be noticed. He places the baby carrier in the passenger seat. He seems to know his way with it, that he's done this many times before. He climbs into the truck and starts the engine. The girls turns and walks not into the building, but around it, and then behind it, like she is hiding from someone.

At a bus stop, two deaf women are arguing with each other. The signs they throw in each other's direction are like spells carved in mid-air. And then the argument rises another octave and they start to moan at each other. Their voices are like babies' cries, no meaning but anger and frustration. The other people waiting at the stop watch them dispassionately. This won't be the last argument they see today.

Twenty feet away, another deaf man is signing slowly at a brick wall.

There was no question who would teach me to drive. My mother is anxious by nature and putting her in the passenger seat of a literal ton of metal with a hormonal eighteen-year-old was not a good idea. I learned late, like so many other things in my life. I never felt any push to learn to drive until I developed a crush on a girl who lived on the opposite side of the Beltway, and I knew she would be less than impressed if I arrived with my parents in tow.

And so, after earning my learner's permit (I almost aced the written exam, but I wondered what the computer would do if I chose a wrong answer) and two introductory driver's lessons at a summer driver's ed course, my father and I began several months of on-the-road experience. This wasn't a requirement for the license at that point. It just seemed surreal to me that I should be able to get a driver's license with only a few afternoons' experience. I would take the bus after school to Woodlawn High and my father would pick me up at the library; we switched places and I drove the winding back roads that led to Randallstown. The left turn off Woodlawn Drive was always difficult, even at 4 pm, before rush hour really set in. My father taught me how to edge into an intersection and then complete the turn once the light turned yellow; you have to be careful, because there are always people who will try to beat the light, and you have to be able to judge that quickly without ever seeing the person, only how they drive their car. And then we would go up and down the steep dip on Windsor Mill Road: here I learned that if no one was on the road in front of me, I could let the car go as fast as it wanted down the hill because it would just burn that speed up on the return. It felt funny at first, how a car moves without you pushing a pedal.

The hardest lesson was one Sunday afternoon where we drove to the elementary school, and my father set up two buckets and mops along one of its roads, and I practiced parallel parking. I had done it once with the driver's ed instructor before then; I figured it out almost immediately but a week later, with my father watching, it became much more difficult. It took a long time, but I kept in my mind the idea of taking that girl out on a date, a real date. I thought of what I would say when I knocked on her door when I arrived. I thought of where we could go, what kind of food to eat, all the small details that seem to matter so much when you plan these things. And eventually I got it. My father taught me how to drive precisely, and you need to know that, more than anything else, when you're first learning.

(I almost failed the road test, though. I didn't look both ways at any of the stop signs, but then we were on a closed course, and I didn't think to check for imaginary cars. And I went on the date, too -- but that is a wholly separate story.)

When I met Stephanie in college, she owned a Camaro with T-tops. I didn't even know what the phrase meant until she showed me the car and had me hop in the passenger seat. I don't remember where we went, I barely knew any of the towns around the school we went to and surely none of the roads. But I remembered how she drove, how utterly unlike my father. She drove as fast as the road would let her, and often a little faster. The number on the speedometer meant pretty much nothing and neither did the numbers on the speed limit signs. She turned up the stereo and we rolled down the windows so we could feel the night wind, the both of us. She listened to Counting Crows, who I loved in high school, and we sang "Recovering the Satellites" together. The words meant something they had never before. I felt a new kind of freedom I hadn't ever discovered before, one built out of speed and sound and stars.

The next time, she asked me to drive instead. I had never driven anyone else's car before, and the Camaro was as far away as my father's boxy Dodge Omni as you could imagine. I confessed: I don't have my glasses with me. They were a secret I kept then. I didn't like my glasses, how they made me look. I didn't like how they made me admit I wasn't perfect.

But the next next time, I did bring them, and Stephanie kindly said nothing bad about them. And then I drove. I learned so much from that about how cars and people are meant to work. I drove the way she taught me to as often as I could -- and there were plenty of chances.

It ended six years ago, when a state trooper pulled me over on 695. The ticket he wrote had me going 72, but I think he was doing me a favor. If I had been going 75 instead, it would have meant 5 points on my license, not 2. But as Stephanie advised me over e-mail -- we hadn't seen each other face-to-face in a few years -- it didn't really matter. As a first-time offender, I was almost certain to get probation before judgment. I stood before a judge one morning and said "guilty" when he asked how I would plead. When he asked if I had anything to add, I said: "It was a stupid thing to do and I'm sorry I did it." He said, "Thank you for your honesty," in the same monotone he used when anyone pled guilty that morning, no matter how stupid or threadbare their explanation was. He pronounced probation before judgment but didn't name a term of how long it would run and I didn't want to chance anything by asking. I pretended it was the worst one I could have gotten, two years, and kept out of the left lane on the highway entirely.

It took me time after that, all by myself, to learn that sometimes you should take my father's approach and sometimes you should take Stephanie's. With just one you don't really have a complete sort of life. And wisdom, the hard kind to come by, is knowing which you need when you set out from a friend's house at 10 o'clock on a Monday night, when the air is warm enough to roll all the windows down, when the highway has space enough to drive it however you would like.