Paul Richardson: Once on auto pilot

It is the same twelve-mile journey it has always been. The road has never been altered, or at least in my lifetime. It has never been relocated to bypass some main street, as there are not any Main Streets, and has only been subjected to a variety of maintenance procedures.

As a small child, it was the route for regular journeys to my maternal grandparents. As a pre-teen -and teenager, it was the road to town, traversing the twelve-mile gap between the small village where I lived and the commercial center where the grocery and commodity shopping was completed. 

When I reached the age of thirteen, Dad said, “You’re old enough to go to work, so beginning this season, you will go to work with me each day during your summer break.” He had spoken, so, thus it was through the summer following my seventeenth birthday.

I was on this route that I got to practice my driving skills. First in a pickup with a “three-on-the-tree” and then in a two-ton dump truck with a five-speed, capped with a granny gear and a two-speed rear end. 

If those terms do not ring a bell with you, then, they were both variations of trucks with standard transmissions. One with the shifter on the column and the other with a stick on the floor. Either way, this was the beginning of driving lessons with my dad. My mother took on the task of teaching me to drive an automatic transmission prior to my sixteenth birthday. The other lessons began much earlier.

The two summers following my eighteenth birthday, I worked for Southwestern Bell Telephone. The Mayfair exchange for the local Baby Bell, since the Federal Government had broken Ma Bell into fragments in order to dispel the thoughts of anyone having a monopoly. 

It was during those two summers that I would transverse this route every morning and evening alone, as I was taking up residence at my parents' home during my college days. 

As the good wife and I were driving over a portion of this route the other day, I recalled a memory of some random day nearing fifty years ago, when I found myself at the destination that was populated by one of the points at either end, wondering how I got there. 

This wasn’t just a one-time occurrence, as there were numerous days that I would go on auto pilot and simply leave at one end of the route and then find myself at the destination, with no memory of the trip that had taken place between the two points.

Knowing that I wasn’t a “Navigator” plucked from the sci-fi fantasy of “Dune”, and did not have the capabilities to fold space, nor could I beam myself and my vehicle anywhere, this lack of memory was a little bit unsettling. Surely if I had done something stupid or lacked proper control, or if there had been a close encounter, I would have been instantly aware and in the present. I hope that this would have been the case.

Unfortunately, I left a point at the beginning of a journey when I was in my twenties, and just suddenly became aware that I can’t recall a lot of the path along the way. It was just moments ago that I began this journey, and while we are always closer to the end with no possibility of returning to the starting point, I know that the halfway point has also been passed. While I have a lot of stories, because I have lead a full life, I can always wish that I could tell you what happened when I was on auto pilot.