My Mother's Driver's License at Seventy

My mother never learned to drive. She grew up in Manhattan, then married my father, who drove her everywhere for forty-five years. When he decided he was done driving at night, she announced, at seventy, that she was getting her license.

I taught her in the parking lot of a closed-down furniture store on Sunday mornings. She drove at exactly eleven miles per hour. She narrated every action out loud: "Signaling. Checking mirror. Turning. Oh, there's a pigeon." She apologized to traffic cones.

She failed her first road test for rolling through a stop sign "just a little." She cried in the car, then bought us both milkshakes and booked another test.

The second time she passed. She came out of the DMV holding the paper over her head like a trophy. The examiner, a stern-looking man, was smiling behind her.

Now she drives my father to his doctor's appointments, to church and, on Fridays, to the diner for pie. She still narrates. My father says it's the best entertainment he's had in years.