Humor

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My mother, being from Vietnam and having to learn a new culture, was always timid and insecure. She is a tiny woman and has forgotten some of her Vietnamese language and has only learned a little English lives her life by improvising. She has to always "make due" and do things by assuming and improvising her own version. Take driving, for instance. My dad taught her how to place her foot on the gas pedal when wanting to make the car go faster and to place her foot on the brakes when needing to slow down. However, due to her fear of the car going too fast, she has improvised all these years by tapping on the gas lightly with her right foot then immediately tapping on the brakes with her left foot. Stop. Go. Stop. Go. Stop. This is how she drives. I'm surprised she doesn't have a mild case of whiplash by now! My children laugh at her driving style but I explained to them where Grandma is coming from.

Being scared of just about everything in this strange country, her maximum driving speed is about 40 m.p.h. I kid you not, we were stopped by a state trooper one time when she was going TOO SLOW! He thought something was wrong! When riding with my mother, you can count on a one-hour trip taking about twice as long or even longer.

This past February was my brother's wedding. After the wedding, we were invited to go to the home of our childhood friends. They live two hours from my brother's town and it was very late so we told Mom that she could ride with us. She didn't want to leave her car at the hotel parking lot for the weekend and yet she didn't want to drive on the interstate in the dark so we stood in the lot discussing what to do with her car.

My sister and I were deeply involved in our discussion when I looked up and noticed all of our friends pulling out of the parking lot including my mom's car! They were leaving us! We jumped in my sister's car and took off in hopes that we wouldn't lose them. We couldn't figure out why they were leaving us. Perhaps they assumed that we knew that they were heading out. It took my sister everything she had to catch up with the string of cars!

It started to blizzard and the large snowflakes made it almost impossible to see the car in front of us. Mom's car was two cars ahead and we kept trying to figure out who was driving it for her vehicle was going over 80 m.p.h. in the driving blizzard! We knew our friends were in the first two sports cars way ahead of us but WHO WAS DRIVING MOM'S CAR? Whoever it was should have been driving for Nascar for he or she was weaving in and out of cars in the blizzard like it was on rails! Our young friends in their sports car were going extremely fast and Mom's car was keeping right up with them. Her car even cut off some other vehicles with the greatest of ease. It was like watching one of those car scenes on a movie!

After one hour of wondering, laughing, and being shocked at the maneuvers, we came to the conclusion of how sweet it was for one of our friends to take over and drive Mom's car for her. We thought that it was so nice that someone cared so much about Mom's concern of driving on the interstate in snowy weather that he or she just took the initiative to take over the wheel. Then we started to worry about Mom having to drive with this maniac! Our discussion turned to how scared Mom must be, gripping her fingers on to the hood while this crazed friend put her life in danger! We started feeling sorry for her.

Another hour went by and as we pulled up to the Holiday Inn, we could hardly stand the anticipation of finding out WHO was driving the car! We pulled up and THERE SAT MOM IN THE DRIVER SEAT WITH A GREAT BIG SMILE ON HER FACE! We laughed so hard that we couldn't even answer Mom's question of what was so funny! Finally, after breaking a rib and wetting our pants, we told Mom the story and she said in her broken English, "No, I drive fass now!" and away she went squealing her wheels! Like I said, "She ain't what she used to be!"

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