Creeva’s World 2.0

Image from here

I’m going to go out on a limb and call out ages here, I could be wrong.   The first time my brother oper­ated a vehi­cle he was four years old, which would make me around nine at the time.  The loca­tion — my grandparent’s house.  My grandparent’s dri­ve­way used to be on a hill.   I always enjoyed just speed­ing a bike down that hill — if I had to guess it was prob­a­bly about five cars deep.  So it was about fifty feet long with about twenty of that being mostly flat.

We were get­ting ready to leave my grandparent’s house and my mother sent my brother and myself out to the car.   Now since this was along time ago (in a galaxy far far away?) some details on which fam­ily car this was has been lost in the ages.  I remem­ber one car and dif­fer­ent par­ents remem­ber oth­ers.   I’m fairly sure at the age my brother was he doesn’t remem­ber which car it was at all.   What I can tell you is that it was a stick shift.

I was sit­ting in the back seat of the car and my brother was climb­ing around the front of the car.   I was read­ing a book or comic book in the back seat of the car and I noticed my mother com­ing out of my grandparent’s garage and walk­ing towards the car.   At some point in this my brother had removed the park­ing break and man­aged to get the car into neu­tral.  The car started rolling down the hill.   My mother saw this and started run­ning towards the car.  She made it to the driver’s side car door, but she couldn’t open it.  Some­how my brother had man­aged to lock the car door.  I was in the back seat frozen in fear (shock?) at what was going on.   My mother was yelling at me to jump in the front seat and stop the car or unlock the door.   I just couldn’t move.

Down and down the hill we went, I know that it took less then a minute or so , but at the time look­ing back it felt a lot longer.   We passed the end of the dri­ve­way and were mov­ing into the street.   We crossed the street and ended up in the yard of the house across the street (luck­ily my grand­mother lived in a cul-de-sac and there was no cross traf­fic).  In the yard across the street my brother man­aged to scratch the side of the car across a tele­phone pole, just miss­ing hit­ting it by inches.

Since he didn’t hit the pole I guess you could say his first expe­ri­ence was a suc­cess.   That isn’t what it felt like for me sit­ting in the back seat.