His dad brought the John Deere to our house because the walls of his house weren't actually designed for crash testing, and because the block walls around his yard have inadequate re-rod, and the neighbors have said something about concrete avalanches and their kids playing in their yards when the walls come down.
Our yard is under construction, partly due to the mesquite tree that came crashing down during what Midwesterners like to call, "straight-line winds", which is something tornadic unwound and aimed at your mesquite tree.
And I am building a rondavel up in the extended yard, so there were 2X4s, and saw horses, tarps and plywood scraps, and most enticingly, a sand pile left over from the masons who put up the new back fence. Jao aimed his tractor at it because his John Deere has a lever-operated bucket in the front, which can be controlled if the three-year-old farmer has four hands and knows what to do with the On/Off foot pedal, and the forward/back lever, and the steering wheel and the lever for the bucket. Jao doesn't.
The tractor has a ground-clearance problem, since it was designed in a toy lab somewhere, and tested on the warehouse floor. Jao knows how to handle that: he gets off the John Deere, and drags it back, or sideways, or up out of the hole. And, I must say, with the kind of pride only a grandfather could have, that he shows proper fear of what happens when he steps on the On/Off pedal: it lurches from still and silent to Oh my god! in a single bound.
I looked up from my carpentry, from which I had been keeping a keen eye on the kid, to realize that Jao had gone back to the house, and left the John Deere and a number of other plastic push-arounds under the saw horses and the scrap lumber pile.
According to our agreement, I called to Mari that Jao was through playing outside, and had gone into the house where she was.
I learned to drive that way, too.
It was a long time ago, of course, and it was a simpler age. We didn't have miniature tractors with battery packs. We had an old car, and I had a father who had himself learned to drive after the fact. He put me into the car, put the car in first gear, and said I could drive around the field out back.
One of the advantages of having a father who drank too much is that he did not always understand how dangerous it is to let "the kid" learn to drive, possibly because he was focused on more unfocused things.
I learned to drive, and have driven in a similar manner ever since, by putting an old car in first gear, and driving around a field, with the advice that the low spot in the middle was too soft, or muddy, to drive across. That it was a field, and not a parking lot with cones, or a road with lanes, meant that there was usually time to make corrections.
For a time, Ralph and Lloyd, brothers, lived in a small house half a mile or so away, if one walked through the woods. One had to know the terrain better to drive there, it being the long way around. We drove there. Dad and Ralph and Lloyd settled down to discuss local politics and scorn stupidity, over a bottle or two or many more of beer. I asked if I could drive the car. Beer and bravado said I could, but not very far; just in the yard outside the house.
I did, and added reverse to my repertoire. I backed into the house. Repeatedly. I couldn't go forward because of the soft flower bed. Bump! Bump. Bump, bump. Bump. It caught the attention of the New Deal Democrats drinking in the kitchen, of course, with admonitions.
But it was a beginning, just as Jao is learning about mayhem on a more electric scale.
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