aleo just got his driver's permit and has begun learning to drive. as with bella he is learning on a manual and like bella i taught him how to do it when he was thirteen. this means his first time out instead of just teaching him how to drive a stick-shift we could get right into the rules of the road and other next-level skills.

i took him to the same place i took bella and where lots of drivers learn to drive in our town--the Muny theater parking lot. it is a picturesque location with lots of runway and the people who oversee the park usually leave tall orange pylons around to assist in driving drills, like parallel parking.

aleo was comfortably doing laps around the large lot within minutes so i started taking him through some more advanced paces, like teaching him to downshift to slow the car, or getting comfortable with higher speeds. after seeing some success and being impressed with how fast he was picking things up, i started combining the skills. on this one lap i had him get the car up to a pretty good speed and as he approached a turn around a garden bed, i told him to down-shift and then round the corner. in doing this he got the pedals mixed up and instead of hitting the brake to slow down, he pressed the gas. as you'd expect the car shot forward and given that we were coming into a turn we didn't have a lot of real estate to work with. things got quite frosty quite fast. as the speed grew and the amount of pavement shrank, i said, "brake! Brake! BRAKE!".

thanks to his video-game reflexes, alex's foot found the brake and assisted by his surging adrenaline, drove it hard to the floor causing us to lurch forward as the car's tires grated against the pavement. after all was still i turned to look at my son. his fingers gripped the steering wheel and he stared straight ahead as though things were still happening. other than that alert gaze and looking a shade lighter than he did coming into the turn, he appeared ok.

i got out to inspect where we ended up. the front tires were half on, half off the cement, hovering over the rock-bed that would have begun our descent down a grassy and tree-speckled hill. granted the four foot skid behind the front wheel possibly tells the story better than all of these words combined.