Driver's Ed

My biggest, fondest memory of my Sophomore Year, was Driver's Ed. It created many, many memories for myself.

In Shelley, we had an annual break, Spud Harvest, the last week of September and first of October. Normally, those two weeks were spent hard at work in the spud fields, picking, sorting oh the back breaking hours- oh wait! I didn't work in the spuds! Those were usually the weeks we went on vacation! Ha!

Anyway, the spud harvest of my sophomore year was a quick, speedy class of driver's ed class everyday, followed several times a week by a drive. Things have changed now, and the kids are now required to drive for hours and hours of supervised hours before they can get their licenses. Back then, we only had three hours, our classroom time, and passing the final test. Then we could drive to our hearts content, in the daytime, and after we turned 16, then we could drive at night.

Well, since it was spud harvest, and there wasn't an extra soul in the school, we often found ourselves with extra hours to burn between class and our drives. What did we do with that time? Well, funny you should ask!

On more than one occasion:

• Checking out the boy's bathrooms to see what the big deal was.
• Swiping large pieces of construction paper from the big rolls that sat at the end of the hallway. We would draw strange pictures (monkeys, aliens, famous people, etc.) and hang them up in the hallway. When school started back up, we loved to see the reactions of people... "What the...?"
• Several mini stage productions of various sitcoms, our own personal lives, or shameless reenactments of other people's lives.
• Facing our fear of the "L" hall way. Without lights, windows, glowing computer screens or any the like, this hallway was as black as a black hole. I'm pretty sure one of got several black eyes as we found the same door jam with our faces...
• Several quick trips to Arctic Circle to get pumpkin shakes, or Huntsman's for whatever we were hankering (usually Snapple and donuts).

I saw my life flash before eyes several times during driver's ed. I am still eternally grateful for that little extra brake over on our teacher's side. One day my teacher told me to practice my diagonal parking in front of the Post Office, but to not park in front of the ally. In my nervous state, knowing that everyone is watching and what not, I parked in front of the ally. In my defense, it was a perfect parking job! Either way, by the time I did, my teacher was on the phone, involved in a very important conversation. She couldn't yell at me, only throw a pen or something in my direction. By the time she was off the phone, I had re-parked, and everything turned out fine. I was always in disgust because she always made me do extra backwards figure eights around the light posts in the church parking lot. Over and over! Nobody else had to do it as many times! My friend and I ended up being the only ones in our car, so we got our driving done early, thank goodness for that!

Since then, I've only got a couple of parking tickets, one speeding ticket, and an illegal move ticket. But you all know I'm an excellent driver, thank you very much.