I was born in the New York City borough of the Bronx and my early childhood and schooling were there, but my family moved just over the city line to the adjacent city of Yonkers when I was in the fifth grade.
A great advantage to the move for a teenager was the age for getting a driver’s license. In Yonkers, a 16-year-old could apply for a Junior Driver License, but New York City had no such thing. There you had to wait till you were 18 to apply for a driver license.
Probably the first thing I did after my sixteenth birthday was to apply for a Junior Learner Permit. Driving was a big deal for a teenager, and I could hardly wait to learn to drive and get my license.
Challenge number one: how? Much to my surprise, my father said he would teach me to drive. It surprised me, because he didn’t usually make time to do things like that.
I got my Junior permit, and one morning I got into the car with my father and sat in the driver’s position for the first time. The car was parked in the short driveway of our house.
My father told me to turn the car on and back out! That’s right, he just told me to do it, not how to do it. (He knew, very well, that I knew what to do even if I never had a personal experience of doing it!)
Our car didn’t have the then modern features for automatic shifting—the driver had to use a clutch pedal with his left foot and a gear shift lever with his right hand.
I managed to back up out of the driveway, with lurches and bumps as I got my first experience of driving (backwards) and shifting!
My father surprised me. He kept his cool, didn’t seem the least bit upset, and just let me keep trying to get it right. (Again, he knew that I knew what to do—but had no previous experience doing it. Only by trial and error would I learn.)
I ended up driving the car slowly along the up and down streets of our neighborhood, and by the end of this first driving lesson I was managing to shift fairly smoothly.
In hindsight, I realized that, also to my surprise, my father was a good teacher. He knew how to teach: he didn’t get upset, didn’t raise his voice, and didn’t constantly tell me what to do. He let me learn from my mistakes, but, of course, he was there to prevent any drastic ones!
The other aspect to his methodology was that he was confident that I could and would learn to drive. So, I wasn’t ashamed by my mistakes, but realized that I was learning from them.
My father, generally, had a lot of confidence in me. He would ask my opinion of some things, even though I was a kid—even to the point of debating with me.
He had high expectations for me when it came to education. Whatever my grades in school (usually high), he always wanted to know was anyone else in my class better—and, if so, what was I going to do about it?
Also, in hindsight, I realize that was another lesson for me: always to do the best you can, and always strive to do even better!
Growing up, I was always thought of as favoring my mother and being shaped mostly by her. I was being raised in her religion and mostly in her immediate care.
I didn’t spend a lot of time with my busy father, but he was no less proud of me and concerned about the course of my life.
Growing up, my mother’s love was obvious, affectionate, patient, and ever-present. But my father not only gave me driving lessons, but lessons in how to think, strive, work hard, and achieve.
4 November 2022