Teenage Driver

Teenage Driver

I had friends when I was growing up who was very tall for his age. His parents bought an unregistered car from Canada and he decided to take it out for a test drive when he was only about 12 years old so I went along for the ride. We lived on a dead-end street so we went up and down the street until he got his sea legs. At one point he decided to backup at high speed like the neighbor often did; much to his surprise, it was far more difficult than he realized, as he looked in the side view mirror he got quite scared as he seen a telephone pole approaching rather quickly, he cut the wheel and swerved the car nearly clipping the telephone pole and ended up in a vacant lot. We jumped out of his would be rocket ship to examine what had just gone wrong with our first blast off. We found tire tracks within two inches of it the curb and the telephone pole and less than 6 inches from another parked car. He was so shook up he parked the car for the rest of the afternoon. I wasn't facing backward so I didn't see the devastation headed our way he saw it through the rearview mirror which must have made it seem. But he soon regained his confidence, as the day wore on he decided to get back behind the wheel and try his hand again; I wasn't in the car so he got more courageous and decided to go down the main street, after a few trips up and down the street he became downright cocky and began to burn rubber. It was during one of these times that he was racing down the street that he saw a flash of blue as the hood popped up and within an instant it was torn free from the car and flew up into the telephone wires and it crashed into the neighbor’s yard nearly striking one of their kids. A friend happened to be passing by and saw the whole thing; he stopped and helped him put that good back on the car. Once again he realized the risks involved in driving a car when you're inexperienced so he parked the car and decided he would ride his bike for a while. As we passed by the house where the hood had “crash landed” the owners came out and stopped to ask us if we knew who the driver was because they wanted to take action. Mark (the driver) was there and he pretended to be someone else, all the while he defended himself by saying, “I know Mark Stansbury very well and I know for a fact he never done it.” We were all in disbelief at the audacity he displayed, but soon the daughter came out, whom was nearly struck by the car hood, and began pointing fingers and yelling that's him, that's him. So he beat a hasty retreat and we followed shortly behind.
The moral of the story if you're not old enough to drive don't get behind the wheel, terrible things can happen that are completely out of your control and they seem to happen under just those circumstances.