Laika. Why I took all those insane risks?

What nobody reckons is that there’s order and purpose independent of chronology. Pretty sure Laika is alive today because of what I taught her about cars and driving. Which I wouldn’t have known if there weren’t real force behind my dad-style admonitions and training regimens.

She was a teenager. She didn’t like the car you automatically get these days when you turn sixteen. 

OK. I wouldn’t have liked it either. But I had to buy my first car.

She didn’t have a driver’s license yet. Her mother set out to teach her when she got her permit. One day later, mother resigned. Then her grandfather tried. Three days later he handed in his reluctant car keys.

Which left me. A familiar role. Went through the same sequence with my sister. Mother and dad both gave up trying to teach her how to drive a VW Beetle stick shift. I, possessed of superhuman patience, taught her how to do this thing. And now I had the same challenge with Laika, on a mere automatic. Cool. Except that my sister was a mouse who didn’t want to drive in the first place. Laika was a force of nature. She wanted to go, now, fast.

The moment I told her she could go she went. Pedal to the metal. “Whoa, child,” I said. “You can die in cars. I’m here to make sure you don’t.”

We pulled over to the side of the road on a strip of tarmac I had once called the Greenwich Salt Flats. While she fretted and fumed, I told her stories. Including these:

And another thing. The flipping XKE, And a bunch of other near misses. Read them. I was a time bomb who never went off.

She did, though. 

I was the only one who could possibly have leashed her drive to drive. Why she was, in every possible other than biological paternity, my daughter. 

The first day she got her license she crashed and took out some guy’s front garden at the end of the Salt Flats. She was trembling. I said Tsk tsk.

We went through the death-defying stories again. I taught her again how to drive. She seemed to learn. Then she blew up the Grand Am, or said she did, though I suspected a boyfriend, and I helped buy her a new one. She was my daughter, don’t you know.

VW V6. A real screamer. She had to have it. Dads are indulgent.

Then I learned despite our Grand Am lessons, all on automatic transmissions, I had just bought her a hot car she didn’t know how to drive. Stick shift. 

So we went to a vacant parking lot where there used to be a supermarket. We “learned her” how to shift gears, experience understeer and oversteer, how to stay in charge of the car under all conditions.

She still gets tickets and accidents. But she’s still alive. We’ve had our differences for other reasons. But in this one arena, I think I’ve helped keep her alive. Is that a good enough raison d’être for a step-step-step father who also paid for college? 

Nah. I was there but I wasn’t enough there. She’s alive. All I can claim.

What I can suppose. God saved me so I could save her. You know. Later on.