Big Bro taught me how to drive, but what I remember most was his teaching me how to drive in the snow. We'd take the little VW Bug I had over to the empty high school parking lot where there were no people or light poles. There I learned all about braking, sliding, skidding, and the physics of stopping with a stalemate of snow and rubber. He'd teach me to recognize a skid, how to immediately pick out a distant visual target and keep my eyes focused on that target, while I steered out of it as he issued commands to keep me pointed in the right direction like a border collie directs cattle, his tone fast and quick and light, words darting in and out of my field of vision.
I put his teachings to test on hill and valley, letting that little car run like it was a little horse, leaning forward with a yell as we got into fourth gear, as if by doing so I could somehow outpace it as we both fled the sheer inertia of earth. That car and I ran free of the fence lines, free of ourselves, racing with a quality of movement in our motion totally separate from the imaginary pound of hooves or the whoop of joy as I discovered flight in four wheeled form. I put mile after mile on that car, the land stretching out until only darkness stopped me, the heavy scent of pines laying across the road for my trusty stead to disperse, as if the scent were tangled skeins of smoke.
I also knew when to rein it in, slowing it down on slippery turns, downshifting through those sharp corners that are judgement and sentence and execution. I knew to stay behind the clusters of bright shiny cars, artificial flowers to which the restless bees of the law would be drawn. I also knew when to drive away, coasting out of a driveway when I arrived at a high school crush's to find him with someone else, that long slow tearing that leaves no scar of tire, but only an internal lament that is the tearing of raw silk.
When that happens you don't even know what the cause - speed, black ice, or the force of mother nature that's as distant to indictment as God. All you know is for a moment, your useless hands were clasped tight to a useless steering wheel, and by only muscle memory, you try and keep the pointy end forward, the headlights revealing not your safety, but the now empty roads' abiding, unmitigable denial. When you finally stop, all you can hear is your heart and the tick of a watch, that curved turmoil of faltering light and shadow in mathematical miniature, reminding you how close you came to running out of time.
I hear Big Bro's voice in my head on these drives, echoes of the phone calls we make while we still can. Sometimes he just wants to rant a bit, everything he's worked for now at risk, due to decisions made by others for political gain, his defense job gone, his military retirement cut, his health and the insurance that guarded it, turned into a house of cards foundationed on an abyss. But I let him talk without interruption, for one thing he taught me, other than slips and skids, was that there are things we should never stop refusing to accept, be it injustice and dishonor and outrage, not for cash for a better car, not for accolades, not for anything, there are things one must continue to be outraged over, to fight for, hands firmly on the wheel of where you want your life to go. His words in my ears to this day, you will have regrets but never let yourself be shamed.
"focus on the target, you can do this. . ."
