So What
Art takes many forms. This is one. . My daughter gets good grades, enjoys stunt bike tricks, rollerblading, basketball,watching X-Games, listening to and creating music on her guitar and drums, and she is kind and good hearted and misses her extended family.
She posed for fun for this picture when she was about 6. She mastered Marceau's rope illusion better than me, as she is at ease in front of a camera and I never was.
My daughter
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If you cannot guess, I like mosaics, looking at it and making it.
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NON-DRIVERS:
Barbara Ellen is a marvelous read. A talented columnist with The Observer. Look her up. Read her work here on driving:
Last-chance saloon
Barbara Ellen
Sunday December 30, 2001
The Observer
It's usually around this time of year, this traditional time of resolution to be a better, brighter person, that I remember I can't drive. It's a bit like those cruel birthday cards people send their thirtysomething career-girl friends. The one with the woman, her hand to her forehead, screaming: 'Oh God, I forgot to have children!' Well, I've forgotten to learn to drive. Which somehow seems to place me on the sociological food chain somewhere between people who can't read and people who can't eat their lunch without showing you what's in their mouth every few seconds.
'You can't drive?' people tend to say, staring at you mystified and even slightly disgusted, as if you've suddenly sprouted a face full of boils or announced that you enjoy flashing in public parks. For their benefit, maybe I should qualify my position. It's not that I can't drive (though I can't), rather that I won't drive (which sounds more stylish). Most pertinently, it's probably better for everyone concerned if I don't drive.
Over the years, I've lost count of the number of people who've kindly procured me one of those forms from the Post Office where, if you fill it in and send it off, you get a provisional licence. Whereupon you're suddenly allowed to start screeching around town in a tin killing machine, with nothing to protect yourself or your local community but some tatty little L-plates and a bored driving instructor in a Puffa jacket. I am appalled by this - I think there should be more stringent tests before you're actually allowed to sit behind a steering wheel. Maybe some sort of weekend retreat where you do arduous physical and mental tests, like a cross between the SAS and The Weakest Link .
One word of advice - if you decide to throw the form away, it's best to ensure that, when the friend who gave it to you next pops around, it isn't peeking cheekily out of the top of your kitchen bin. This happened to me once, and my friend was incensed. There was stern talk of hands being washed of me. People certainly seem to get annoyed when you show no interest in driving. Sometimes, it seems like the same sort of anger directed at men when they refuse to get married. With drivers, it's like they've found themselves a nice car, they've grown up and settled down, they've made the commitment, so when are non-drivers like me going to stop paddling in the shallows of life and jump in?
At this point of the lecture, you usually get 'the water's lovely' spiel. Endless lectures on the independence, the mobility, the fulfilment to be got from driving. You listen to it all, wondering if these happy-clappy motorists realise how much they sound like Moonies on a recruitment, erm, drive.
What drivers also fail to realise is that certain non-drivers were probably born this way - a very special kind of breech birth, with our hands up in the cab-hailing position. We are the types who actively enjoy being driven around, whether it be on buses, in cabs, or (the big time!) by a genuine chauffeur. People like me watch the movie Driving Miss Daisy and recognise it for what it is - a touching love story between one woman and her lifelong indolence. We kiss black cabs, and stroke their doors, before we get in them, appreciating their timeless chunky beauty and the fact that there's so much room we could spend the journey doing cart-wheels if we so wished. We even like minicabs and the witty-interesting/petulant-incompetent people who drive them. Every journey a documentary, every fare an insight into how the black economy ticks. You don't get this kind of thing sitting selfishly in your car, incubated from humanity.
Then, of course, there's the fact that sending people like me off in the driving seat is a bit like cheering a serial killer off on a murder spree. I'm the first to admit that I have no common sense, no spatial skills, and a long-held belief that the best course of action when confronted with a busy roundabout, or a big scary lorry coming up close alongside, is to take your hands off the steering wheel and scream. If people like me were to drive you would have to clear streets for us, and add a police escort. If this could be arranged, then I would be only too happy to start driving.
In the meantime, I'll stick to my mantra: can't drive, won't drive, really shouldn't drive - in the hope that all those bossy drivers out there will hear me. But they won't, not at this time of year - they'll be too busy arguing with their partners about who's going to drink and who's driving home. Which, come to think about it, is probably the best non-driving argument of all.
bravenet.com