My driving instructor raced cars in Germany four decades ago. He teaches a very precision-oriented, methodical, and engineering-friendly approach to vehicle maneuvering known as reference point driving. Rather than be at the mercy of the optical illusions associated with gauging distance by looking at objects through windows and in mirrors, reference point driving uses the intersection of road/curb lines with well-defined locations on the car to complete accurate turns, stay centered in lane, parallel park 5″ from curb, etc.

I almost always find the obliteration of ambiguity attractive and, from an engineering point of view, I’m very glad to have been taught how to drive in this way. I passed my driving exam with a comfortable buffer of points to spare. After the exam, he went into the Anchorage Driver Training office and then returned to the car, sitting once again in the passenger seat, with the paperwork I would need to present to the DMV for my license. I was still behind the wheel, but asked if instead he would drive us there. Though getting in an accident while on my way to the DMV for a license after having minutes earlier passed my driving exam was an amusing possibility, I was by this point both hungry and thirsty and was not interested in doing anything to put quenching these biological demands at risk, no matter the richness of the action’s potential irony.

I’ve failed in my short-lived attempt to sever communication with my family.

My sister’s last week in Boston was marked by the arrival of our parents there for the occasion of a relative’s wedding anniversary and altogether large family gathering. Recently, she visited three colleges in the area: Williams, Bennington, and Middlebury, liking the latter the most. The beyond-words enthusiasm she expresses when trying to describe its campus induces smiles. She called me for help finding the email address of the professor of a class for which she is currently enrolled at UAF, to let them know she’ll miss the first day on account of not arriving from Boston until the weekend. When I got off work and was back at my apt. I called her, ready to relay the information, but it was a bad time to talk. The three of them were in a car on the freeway, my dad driving and growing more irate as he didn’t know which exit to take to get to the restaurant where they were supposed to have shown up to dine with relatives some time ago. His agitation was not helped by my sister laughing in the back seat.

I was to blame for some of her outbursts. When you spell out something letter by letter over a phone, it’s unlikely the person on the receiving end will accurately reproduce the series. To further avoid miscommunication, I made a condition that all the words representing letters would be animals. Thus, mzhou@uaf.edu became monkey-zebra-horse-otter-underdog @uaf.edu. She retaliated that the ‘u’ should be unicorn. My dad’s frustration culminated with his shouting from the front seat “Goodbye, Aram!” Shortly after, my sister said, concerned, “I have to hang up, he’s going to get in an accident.”