MANY of us have a story or two about that rite of passage the driving test - either from our own white-knuckled experience or from something we've heard at second or third hand, writes Anthony Glavin.
Like the friend of mine who was stopped by gardaí and given a speeding ticket while en route to her test - which, not surprisingly, she failed. Or somebody else I heard of, whose nerves also understandably failed when, executing the mandatory reversal around a corner, she nearly executed a hapless dog lying in the road.
Or our younger daughter just last week, who en route to her driving test, was obliged, to her horror, to honk at a hearse reversing from a church car-park directly into the swiftly moving inside lane.
"Were you a road-sweeper once?" her Road Safety Authority examiner inquired after they got back to the test centre, alluding to the manner in which she unfailingly swung in to the kerb upon passing any parked cars. But to which he also, thankfully, added: "Well, Aoife, despite your best efforts. . . you passed!"
There are then, of course, those lucky souls who availed themselves of a general amnesty in 1979, when a backlog of provisionally licensed drivers were simply handed their full licence. That's right, without ever having to pass a driving test - as I like to remind my wife, one of those lucky ones, on those rare occasions she is moved to criticise my driving.
Her luck held too, when on a sweltering August afternoon three years later, we managed to talk Capt Jackson, an overworked African-American member of the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles, into waiving her test and, in light of her Irish licence, simply issuing her a Massachusetts licence that would allow her to drive on the right side of the road.
I, for my part, have successfully acquitted myself on both sides of the Atlantic - having secured my Massachusetts driver's licence back in the 1960s, and my full Irish licence in 1998. Like my four siblings, I learned to drive from our mother, who herself single-handedly drove a Model T Ford from New York to Indiana in 1930, picking up en route a young hitchhiker who happily showed her the counterfeit plates for the stacks of $10 bills he intended to print once he got to wherever he was going.
Our mother, a better driver than our father, who suffered from night-blindness, also gave my colour-blind brother a helping hand at his driving test, by coolly lifting the card of traffic signals off the desk when the examiner was called from the room, and quickly pointing out which circles were red, yellow and green.
I don't remember much about my Massachusetts driving test, but I'll never forget the test I took here in Dublin 10 years ago. I believe I too passed with some assistance from my mother, even though she'd moved on to that Great Freeway in the Sky the previous year. My mother had stopped driving herself by the time she came to live with us, but she never relinquished her independence or initiative - so much so that I had to learn to anticipate her whenever we approached steps or stairs, lest she take off down them at full speed.
Certainly old age and her growing dependence did not come easy to such a free spirit, and one morning as I was bringing her breakfast, she expressed her hope that she might be of more help to me "from the other side". I don't doubt I had something smart to say back, but I remembered her wish all the same a few years later on the anxious morning of my Irish driving test. Remembering how she had once helped out my colour-blind brother, I said aloud: "OK, Mam, let's see what you can do!" as I headed for my appointment.
I breezed through the rules of the road, and encountered no dogs as I reversed around a corner somewhere in Dublin 11. But then, approaching a green light at the main intersection in Finglas village, I suddenly spied an elderly woman, trailing one of those two-wheeled shopping bags, who was proceeding on foot in my direction against the red pedestrian light. "I'm anticipating!" I announced to the examiner, "I'm anticipating!" And rightly so, as I managed to brake just before the woman shot like a torpedo across my bow.
I felt fairly sure such a bravura performance would ensure I had passed my test, but I also knew whom I had to thank for that - who it was that had taught me to anticipate elderly women, and who "from the other side" had possibly sent me one to anticipate that morning. And who, now that I think of it, given her mordant sense of humour, may have also sent her granddaughter a hearse to honk at earlier this month.