Dad does the driving

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It’s not unusual to see George behind the wheel of a big truck. He doesn’t look out of place behind the wheel of his GMC pickup truck. Hell, he even looks pretty normal driving the purple Impala our son has, but when he’s squeezed behind the wheel of our daughter’s teeny tiny Toyota, images of a clown car come to mind.

I don’t know about other trucking families, but in ours, Dad does the driving. Everywhere. He drives for a living, and you’d think he’d get sick of driving, but when he’s home, he’s the one who is tasked to drive everyone else anywhere they don’t want to drive themselves.

Our daughter had a medical procedure scheduled that prevented her from driving herself home, and it was taking place in Cincinnati, so she of course wanted her dad to take her. I wasn’t going to miss the fun, so it became a family affair that had too many people for a comfortable ride home in the pick-em-up truck, so he agreed to drive her car – a Toyota something-or-other that is about as big as a minute, blue as they make blue, and sports license plates that say, “1HOTNRS.”

1hotnrs-license-plate-ohioClearly, not her dad’s favorite thing to drive, but he loves her and will do anything to make her happy, so we set out for Cincinnati in the Hot Nurse Mobile.

Marcie and I were comfortably in the passenger and backseat when George made his first attempt at entry. It was like a 747 trying to land in the parking lot of a Dollar General.

“Do the seats go back any further?”

“No, dad.”

“Does the steering wheel move?”

“No, dad.”

After several attempts, he finally found the right angle and crammed himself into the driver’s seat.

“No telescoping wheel, hunh? How ’bout air in the seats? Any of that?”

We waited patiently while he mumbled to himself about the lack of buttons that do stuff.

“You’ve only got a little over a quarter tank of fuel. We’ll stop and top it off.”

“This car gets 40 miles to the gallon, dad. I don’t need fuel.”

“No reason to push it, you never know when you’ll get stuck in traffic.”

“I’d have to be stuck for like, three days, before I ran out of gas, dad.”

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He finally got the mirrors adjusted and everything to his liking and we took off. Kind of.

“Good Lord! What kind of horsepower does this thing have? Hamsters? It doesn’t go when you mash the pedal! I can’t get out of my own damn way!”

The professional driver in him kicked in the minute we hit the highway, and he had the tiny car thing going on … he even forgot about the license plate – so if you happened to see a big, burly trucker-looking guy driving a teeny tiny blue as blue can get Toyota down I-75 toward Cincinnati today, be advised that he isn’t really 1 HotNurse. He’s a dad who loves his girl enough to drive her around in her tiny car – even if he hates it.