Driving Miss Julie

Whether for summer vacation or errands around town, there are few greater pleasures than hitting the road with a full tank of gas and something good on the stereo. Unless my husband is driving.

I can hear the Vaudeville Schtick in my mind: "Driving? Driving me CRAZY!" followed by a rim shot. But there is deeper stuff at play here.

My husband is not a bad driver. His foot is simply a touch leaden for my taste. He has a tendency to take turns faster than I do and he doesn't come to a rolling stop like me. And that is the crux of the biscuit: he is not me. And I... well, I am a bit of a control freak.

As a passenger, I often find myself reflexively pressing my foot into the car floor as if to brake the car myself. I had no idea I did this until my husband called me on it. "Stop braking," he hissed one day. I looked down and saw my right leg fully extended, muscles tighened. I can't control my driver's instinct.

One day as my husband was tearing through a roundabout, I grabbed the "oh shit" handle at the top of the door. (Editorial note: His version of the story might read "proceeding through a roundabout.") "Are you grabbing the handle?" he asked. "No," I lied. Did I really think he couldn't see plain as day? Did I really think the handle was going to make a difference? No and no. But that handle gave me something to hold onto when the discomfort of relinquishing control to another person seized me.

It's too bad there isn't a set of "oh shit" handles for life. They might not make a difference in the long run, but they can give us something to hold on to when the ride gets a little wild for our tastes.

I wish this were a story about how I learned to go with the passenger flow and my husband and I drove happily ever after. It's not. I still glance sideways at the speedometer and announce the speed limits as he's driving. ("It's 40 here," I'll say two blocks after we've blown by the sign. "I'm slowing down," he defensively asserts through gritted teeth.) Thankfully our new GPS has helped my cause. If you exceed the speed limit, the font turns red. "She's mad at you," I say now, referring to our computerized co-pilot and, clearly, not myself.

My husband may not be the best driver, but I am certainly not the best passenger. Sometimes we laugh about it. Sometimes we simply tolerate each other. And on the best of days, I get to drive