My father taught me a lot. One time when I was sixteen years old, after returning home and parking my father's car, I walked into the house and had some silly argument with my mother. I was probably having one of those I'm-mad-at-the-world teenage tantrums. My mother, choosing a really bad moment, asked me to get in her car, which was in the driveway, and go to the store to get milk or something.
I didn't want to. I had something better to do, like call my friend Amy Wallace and plan revenge on the nuns in our school. Anyway, I argued, yelled, and then stomped out of the house to go to the store.
Well, my mother's car was parked in our driveway. My father's car was in the street where I had parked it, behind my mother's car.
I got into the car, slammed the door, muttered, put the key in the ignition, threw the car into reverse, and roared out of the driveway. Crash! I plowed my mother's car directly into my father's. Needless to say, the fenders of both my mother's and father's cars were significantly reorganized. We are talking very twisted metal here.
Slowly I walked back into the house. My father was on the phone and hadn't heard the crash, and he waved at me to wait a minute till he hung up. I stood there in the den for what seemed three years. Then he hung up.
"What is it, baby?" (I was the youngest of three and always his baby.)
"Uh, I had a little accident."
"Hmmm. Which car?" he said.
"Um … kind of both of them."
We walked outside. My father and I stood there looking at the wreckage. He had his arm on my shoulder.
"Well," he said slowly, "it is sort of good this happened."
I thought, What, is he crazy? Both cars were wrecked and looked horrible!
He turned to me and continued: "You just got your license a month ago and you lost your temper. That could have been a child you hit, and it was just a car. Cars can be fixed. That's why we have insurance. Children can't be fixed. I know there will be times again in your life when you lose your temper, but you will never forget the sound of that crash, and because of that sound, you will never again lose your temper and then get behind the wheel of a car."
He was right. I'll never forget that sound. And I have gotten angry, but never behind the wheel. He taught me a huge lesson that day —and it wasn't a bad way to raise a kid.
