Julie Taylor

Complacent vs. Capable

My daughter Sarah drives a 2000 dark green Tacoma pick-up truck bequeathed to her by her brother Jake. Years back, they had driven it cross-country together. The cabin has room for a dog or groceries or a squished passenger behind its bucket seats and the rear bed is capped by a mismatched electric green hard shell.

Jake named the truck Julie Taylor after a character on the show Friday Night Lights. Julie Taylor was sweet and confused and cried a lot, so I don’t see the connection, but Julie gets Sarah where she needs to go, and Sarah loves her. So, when I was visiting Carrboro, North Carolina this past week, I kept asking Sarah for rides, and Sarah suggested I could drive Julie myself.

“I can’t,” I told her. “I don’t know how to drive a truck.”

“If you could drive us kids around in the old Suburban, you can drive Julie,” Sarah says. “She’s not weird or cumbersome. She handles like a regular car.”

“But I’m used to my car,” I tell her. I mean, it’s brand-new and has a back-up camera.

Sarah shrugs. “I get it if you don’t want to drive the truck. I’m happy to drive you places. But you’re fully capable.”

There’s something about being stuck and dependent that I find relaxing until restlessness sets in, a process that generally takes a little under three hours. So, when my daughter Rachael and her husband Will invited me to join them and baby Henry for dinner and Sarah had other plans, my choices were to bum another ride or drive myself.

So there I was, an old lady with my hair in a sloppy braid behind the wheel of a two-toned dust-crusted truck. To be honest, in Carrboro, I fit right in. And it had taken some prodding, but doing what we assume we can’t is how we get ourselves where we want to go, in this case, a mile and a half away, for burritos. No tears, no confusion, just fully capable me along with Julie for one sweet ride.