William loves to drive. He learned to ride a bike at four–right across our front yard, careening past trees. I remember him grinning and clinging to the handlebars, sheer will squeezing out tears as he tried to keep the bike aright. The intention could have powered the SpaceX Shuttle. Took about ten tries and we were off! He’d cut his teeth long before that, “steering” a Craftsman riding mower seated on his dad’s lap. He used to fuss and howl so much as a toddler when he heard the engine start that we would have to wait for a nap or factor in the extra time it took mow the lawn with a koala bear at the wheel, ear protection clamped on either side of his chubby cheeks, same eyes of determination and delight. By age seven (I’m sure this is an exaggeration yet when I count backward I can get to this point) he had taken over. If he sat forward he could just reach the gas and the brakes, so he started mowing for us. Half his life he’s been behind the wheel. Now, in quarantine, he sometimes cuts the grass twice a week, just for something to do, and he takes his time because that’s what the day is handing out in spades.

I’ve already told you about moving the cars. That’s a real job at our house. He knows where the keys are to all three vehicles, and he knows how to drive stick. So he moves the cars around our driveway, parking and re-parking. Heaven forbid someone suggest she is going to unload groceries or load suitcases for a trip or wash a vehicle right where it sits. What?! Call the car mover! Yesterday he asked to hook the trailer up to the lawn tractor and drive it through the woods. No mention of picking up sticks or clearing brush/debris or really anything that would warrant the gas. Just for practice, mom.

The vehicle with the highest mileage on the property is Manco 400 go-kart, which boy will describe to you with love in his voice: “6.5 horsepower engine, no suspension, 4″ off the ground and very small.” What it lacks in size it makes up for in might. Take note of that “no” suspension. This means (a) you and I are not hopping on for a ride any time soon and (b) we may save on orthodontics after the teeth are rattled clear out of his head. This little red tubular beauty came from the neighbors when they moved away. Hauled (another) non-working item onto our property knowing our boy would one day love it. Understatement on turbocharge. In third grade we let him skip for a “homeschool day” unit study on small engine repair. He and Bill took apart the engine, bit by bolt, cleaned it, and put it back together. They took pictures so they could get it right. Will was fascinated, that “anatomy of parts” thing right up his alley even then. Carburetor, gas can, spark plug, clutch. The name of each part uttered in the same breath with what it does, identity and function one and the same. They set up two card tables side by side on the driveway and carefully laid out each part, naming it, studying it, wiping, cleaning. I remember his hands, still chubby with boyhood and more used to Legos, learning by automotive Braille. Handling each part with the reverence as if it was a live organ. Because it was.

But after hours of it, the kart still did not run. Turns out you can have all your bits in the right place and still not go. Then does your teacher turn from speed to patience, from consternation to contemplation and from frustration to final good. We ordered a new engine, billed him the next six months of his lawn mowing money and this time waited for a weekend to put it in. It was the first setback of so many. They ought to measure MPH not in in terms of time driving, but in time poured into keeping an engine running. Hours of tinkering, trying, testing, tempering the driver while the vehicle sat idle. That Will’s wheels have spent more time on the trails than in the shop is a testament only to boy’s staying power and not to any reliability of this ol’ lemon. All that week he waited for the new Briggs Stratton “Predator” special. What I remember along with the grease to his elbows on the day it came was the electrified hope and anticipation barely containable, like Christmas in the garage. I would go to put the trash out and find him just sitting on his machine, dreaming of the day when horsepower would meet metal frame and explode into freedom.

Ellie — fun fact from Instagram — “The first ever speeding ticket was issued to Walter Arnold on the 28th of January 1896 in Kent England, where he was blitzing through the town at 8 mph (four times the legal limit). He was chased for five miles by a police officer on a bicycle and was fined one shilling when he was finally caught.”

Like most boys, Will is obsessed with speed and has been since he was high-tailing it away from me as a toddler. Even riding along in his car seat he was tracking. Half-pint backseat driver, he used to ask me if I was “going unner the speed woman.” (See Christmas blog of same name, 2009). I would assure him that I was. Who would break the law with a baby on board? Even though everywhere I went in those days was on the fly, totally rushed and harried, the question served to slow me down and make me think. The speed woman? Of course. “Yes, William.” He would proceed to tell me that’s good, because if you don’t drive under the speed woman “then the poe-weese will pull you down.” Where is getting this stuff? I remember thinking. Not the last time I would ask that question, to be sure.

They got the go-kart running, and Will spent his weeks learning a new language of speed and turns, and how to lose the ground beneath him. Little rattler ripping though our woods, giving him that gas powered high as he drifts around trees and along the wooded paths he blazed. It’s been seven or eight years now and three engines later. Like I say, half his life as an unlicensed driver. By now we have thousands of hours, tens of thousands of runs speeding through the back 40, in all seasons, in all weather, in all stages of boy. It is a grand teacher, starting with that first yank of the pull cord. Sometimes it starts, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it runs, sometimes it stalls, or sputters to a half-hearted and exasperating end. It always seems to need an adjustment of some sort and like life, all manner of things can go wrong. The chain can fall off. A friend can drive it into a tree and bend the frame, so one axle doesn’t hold a tire straight. This can ruin your sprocket. When your mom goes on her morning walk she can find, along the roadside the bolts, and nuts and washers, scattered up and down the street like parade candy.  From time to time the carburetor will clog, or the clutch will slip, or the engine will flood and then you’re done for the day. On good days it puts back into the universe everything it has taken and hums like the fine automobile that he imagines it to be. Low to the ground it soars over the trees, this little boy-machine.

It didn’t take long for the yard and woods to grow small and for driving boy to yearn to for the open road. He takes a daring spin from time to time, ostensibly to “get the mail” but really just testing the asphalt. For weeks I’ve been fussing about it. That’s it’s so dangerous, even on our quiet subdivision street. Even in quarantine-time traffic, which is nil. He’s too low to the ground, cars can’t see him, he goes too fast, the road is too hard, too straight, the sky is too blue, he’ll put his eye out. That sort of thing. Mom jam. I never think boy is listening until later, when I discover that my fret has found its mark: boy with a brain and a helmet on his head protecting it. I watch the YouTube video he’s cut in our garage. “Yeah, so my mom wanted me to be safe so I got this great idea to put lights on my go-kart…” Over a week he’s spent reading and researching, looking up schematics, studying wiring configurations. To make it truly road worthy he’ll need brake lights and turn signals, because his mom wants him to be safe. Says that right in the clip. He said the word “mom” on YouTube. That’s me! My XO for this boy goes viral.

On last month’s laptop he looks up and researches dozens of lights, switches, wiring packages. The switch comes several days before the other components and he carries it around with him in his pocket, pulling it out every so often to admire it. “Look, mom, see…look at this cool switch…” In the meantime, this mama getting what she needs. Boy studies. Boy reads. Boy tinkers and solders and tests and tweaks. Then, because this is starting to look like a natural terminus for boy: he teaches. Don’t pass by our garage laboratory in the days such as these or you, too, will be fully versed in wiring after-market turn signals and brake lights to a circa 1997 go-kart. The tutorials are in direct proportion to his enthusiasm–over and over he hauls me into the garage for show and tell. He purchased two LED turn signals and a handsome red bar brake light. Those he wired to a blinker relay, so the turn signals would actually blink. Then he needed a power source, which he finds in an 18-volt cordless drill battery, which will work great if he can purchase and connect a step-down converter to 12 volts. The fistful of color coded wires and wire nuts he has stuffed into an old diaper wipes container, which he is busy mounting on the back of the cart with wood slats and some bungi cords. Did I know this much about electrical circuitry before? Did I want to? Did I know this much about inner workings of a boy? Ah…Did I want to.

Does it matter that the brake lights are not, in fact, engaged with the brake pedal? Instead they are operated manually, like the turn signal lights, by a fancy little toggle switch he all but sleeps with under his pillow when it arrives (if he even uses a pillow anymore). Reminds me of a fake video camera I’ve seen hanging in the upstairs bathroom or above his tent. Will ordered that online for April Fool’s day (see Master in Crime), and the virtual nature of its being doesn’t seem to faze him in the least. Let’s face it, quarantine friends, virtual is the new reality. And anyway, the intention was pure. The lights are an attempt to communicate with other drivers, half to strut his stuff and half to indicate his next move. He is eager for cars to come by, not so he can drag race them or get run over, but so he can participate in the dialog that goes on between vehicles of the open road: slowing, stopping, turning left. He wants to have a voice plucked from Amazon and his own garage so he can be part of that great conversation of things that go.

Then the test runs. After all this time at the workbench, you’d think he’s be bustin’ to burn a hole in something. Rip up the woods with the reward of his labors. But no. Will is uncharacteristically patient. And slow. Bill and I both think there’s something wrong with the engine, so slowly does he motor about the yard and house. Looks like he’s out for a Sunday drive. I am more accustomed to the little dust cloud that follows behind him as he screams through the woods full throttle, head back, grinning his silver smile and howling with joy. Then I realize, he is listening. His ears attuned to every pop, rattle, and sputter of that engine. Got the lights on and working fine but there’s other stuff giving him grief. The throttle. The choke. The clutch. So much to go wrong in such a sophisticated and interconnected little machine.

He spends a whole day working on it while Bill is away at church. Back and forth, from the shed to the garage. Back and forth. What could he possibly be working on? The mood sours as the day wears on. Finally I hear a terrific yell, not like a scream or cry of pain, but a deep burst of anger and frustration. The kind usually accompanied by slammed doors or flying hammers. I don’t know this until the next day, until the heat of anger has dissipated, but something went terribly wrong with the apparatus he and Bill constructed to hold the lights. The copper tubing, which was so perfect, slipped and rattled during his test run. Will detached them to cut a little brass bolt off the end. But he put the copper tubing in a vise to hold it and the copper crimped shut, as copper will do. Then he couldn’t slide the bars back on the go-kart. He tried to tap another rod into it and the copper bent. He shakes his head ruefully, remembering the anger that possessed him. “So there I was with that copper pipe and a hammer in my hand,” he says, giving me a sheepish smile. “You can guess what happened.” I know months from now we will find those little running bars twisted beyond recognition and pounded paper flat, but for now, Will is content with the replacement set. He even let his dad help him. More importantly, he has out-manned his anger. He has owned and surrendered it. “Mom, you can write about the go-kart,” says Will. “You can write about it, but you gotta let me read it so you get it right. Sometimes you don’t get it right.” Oh, really? Well I am writing about stuff I do know. The schematics of the heart.

The finishing touch comes in the mail, from his grandmother who lives in New England and has a project for boy. Hearing of all the wiring and soldering work and his new degree in electrical engineering, she wants to know if Will can solder some wire clips back onto the motherboard of a little garden cart she has owned for about as long as boy has been alive. It’s a one of a kind cart, and according to her as she carefully packages the broken bits and calls her grandson, the ONLY one like it on the PLANET! The stress slides right off Teflon boy and clings to me. You don’t get going 35 mph in a densely wooded residential lot by spending your day in pointless worry. Sure, Mamie, I can do that for you. No problem. Does he know what a diode is? Does he really know how to solder? One of our soldering irons, I’m told, gets to 900 degrees Fahrenheit. Put this next sentence in CAPS: Is there no end to the potential for disaster in a single five-minute span around here??? Nevertheless, I get out of the way. I figure my own mother well knows his “Yup,” because she would have heard it before. Many years ago. Close to 40, in fact, when she would have had a similar garage-dwelling creature. She once let my brother take apart a clothes dryer that needed fixing–and quietly went drip dry for months afterward. I seem to remember her also letting him take a stab at her car, but perhaps that’s an exaggeration. Though we did have a rental for a while.

Tucked in the box is an odd gadget Will does not recognize at all. But heck, it’s a device, so its name is less important than the delicious fact it comes with cords, wires and buttons and a tiny tantalizing screen. It’s a radar detector, circa 1982. Boy is fascinated. What is it? once again so closely linked to What does it do? And onto this age-old question Will’s new generational spin: What can it do beyond what it is supposed to?  For his dad and me, it’s perfectly heartwarming to have a few terms my post-millennial kid doesn’t know, to have a few random bits of info he deems useful. “Fuzz buster.” His eyes widen as he hears ancient tales of his parents as teen drivers. Within 30 minutes he’s looked it up on Google, determined its value on Ebay, read the print manual cover to cover, and gone through the house finding radio-transmitting items to test out the radar strength and get the thing to go bleep. I now have an APB out on our TV remote.

Also in the box is some little bicycle gadget, like a clip to hold a water bottle and a pump to the frame of your bike. Clearly mom was cleaning out the garage and everything has found its way into the same box, like carrier parasites. This Trojan Horse gifting–coming in looking like a Christmas or birthday present and containing the purge of her hall closet or some other shelf she’s stripped–is classic Mamie. Here, have the entire contents of my Goodwill bags. My mom doesn’t actually bother with the Goodwill. She just drives it up to the Post Office addressed to us. Will studies this other gadget, too, turning it in his hands. It’s how I know he is growing up. That, besides the stretched frame and clothes that fit funny these days, his paddle hands that appear suited for a larger man. Plus his analysis of parts is finally giving way to a causal curiosity: From what? to how? and why? evolving into a study of how individual parts relate and the relationships between things–there grows a boy to man. I stand back to watch the process and give it the full welcome of a mother’s heart, which is something. Analysis must mature into synthesis for a man to be made whole. Then I realize he is not quite tracking; for all his techno-smarts and internet savvy, his “what-if” mind has gotten ahead of itself and made a crazy connection. His eyes light up and his delightful boyish innocence is back. He studies the radar detector again in one hand and the waterbottle-clip-bicycle-attachment thingy in the other. A synapse misfires. “Oh so, you could use this on a bike?”

I think life with any child makes you travel faster than you like. As his mom, maybe I will always be nudging him into the middle lane, trying to keep him at a sane travelling speed. Maybe. The middle lane, son. That’s where you find moderation and contentment, two more words for your budding vocabulary and two more ways of being you haven’t learned yet. It’s where you drive to be adaptable, ready for anything that can happen on the open road. I’d like to teach him that being safe is more than being seen and heard in darkness, but I think life will do that. It’s a start of wisdom, anyway. For now, I will be walking along the same road, picking up the bits and parts that have fallen off and carrying them home in a pocket like loose change. I will be there for the show and tell, and for the failures. I will duck when the hammers fly (or was it a mallet?). I want him to know that, unlike engine parts, your identity is so much more than your function. And that, like engine parts, you can have it all together and still not run. Life if like that sometimes. I am grateful for the time spent in Will’s Tire and Auto. All that industry, disappointment, wild joy and drive. And, in a strange way I am grateful for this time, the quarantine, for slowing us down, and for grounding us in more ways than one.