It means freedom

Looking out the window, I smile at the familiar sight of my five-year- old son and three-year-old daughter playing in the parked car. Matthew " drives" with my husband's casual ease, hands resting lightly on the wheel, honking at regular intervals to signal another stop on the itiner­ary: McDonald's, Dunkin' Donuts, Toys R Us.

" We're playing Daddy and Mommy, " Karen announces when I come outside. " I'm sitting in your place, " she says, patting the front passenger seat. " Girls don't drive."

" No, no, sweetheart, " I say hastily, giving her my girls-can-do-any- thing lecture (" Your pediatrician, Dr. Beth, is a girl, and Jared's mom­my runs a big company and she's a girl"): " Girls do drive. It's just that I don't drive."

It isn't that I don't know how to drive. I'm not what an out-of-state friend refers to as " one of those neurotic non-driving New Yorkers." It's that I was born with a brand of nearsightedness that even glasses could never correct enough to let me pass the vision test at the DMV.

When my 16-year-old classmates were having their first big gulp of freedom, I was still buckled into the passenger seat. My friends Jill, Pam and Marilyn, rather than my mother and father, became my chauffeurs. I veered between feeling endlessly beholden and eternally babyish.

My parents did what they thought was helpful, suggesting — ophthal­mologist's report to the contrary — that it was nerves rather than near­sightedness that was grounding me. They arranged for private lessons, looked into the feasibility of a daylight-hours-only license, and researched

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what make of auto provided particularly good visibility When I got my learner's permit (no vision exam required), my mother even hustled me into her station wagon for a tutorial.

It was brief. Going at a speed of 25 miles per hour down a suburban road, I misjudged the distance between the car and a long queue of or­ange cones, knocking them down clean as a strike. " Out, " said Mom. A half-dozen road workers witnessed my humiliation as I dashed out the driver's side to my old seat.

Twenty years later, I have ample experience at being out of step with a large chunk (bulk) of the population. I often feel left behind when others take off, stuck when I'd like to be gone.

I'm constantly told by those who wish to be comforting that driving is mostly drudgery: car pools, traffic jams, self-service gas pumps, trips to the airport for an aunt you wish had stayed home. But there's no talk­ing to me. I'm caught up in the romance of the road, sitting behind the wheel of a convertible on — well, it just has to be the Pacific Coast High­way, the wind blowing through my hair, a Beach Boys song blasting on the radio. 1 view a set of car keys dangling casually from someone's hand in much the way, as an adolescent, I viewed a cigarette poised between someone's fingers: the height of worldliness and sophistication.

After college, I moved to New York, a city that made as much sense for my " condition" as for my career. Journalists sometimes have to go out of town, however, so my first order of business is always to check into the availability of public transportation (frequently nonexistent), car ser­vices (often unreliable) and cabs (always expensive). I'm convinced I'll lose work to colleagues with more dependable vision. On weekends in the country when my husband heads out alone for his cherished hard­ware store, I stand on the deck and watch the car become a dot in the distance, trying to shake my feeling of abandonment.

My husband is an unstinting and uncomplaining chauffeur, and my son, contemplating his own future as a motorist, has already pledged to take me to my beloved Starbucks. I have transportation. What I'm de­nied is that ineffable feeling of independence, the sweet awareness that without anyone's assistance I can light out for the territories or anywhere at all, far beyond what the eye can see.

By Joanne Kaufman

Unit 5. Travelling By Car