Mom’s Driving: A Confession
I'm David Grow and I founded Howling Music in 1999 in Los Angeles. Technically, I lived in L.A. on two separate occasions. The first is when I was twelve years old and my parents pulled a geographic from Michigan to try to save their marriage. The second was years later when I embarked on what would become my music career. But when I was twelve, L.A. seemed like a scary place, especially with my mom at the wheel.
Here's the deal: my mother is not a good driver. She's not exactly a bad driver; she doesn't speed or road rage, but driving was never her strong suit. She has a poor sense of direction and doesn't recognize landmarks (like our house), so she would sometimes take a long time to return from the grocery store--less than a mile away--often due to getting lost. "All the one-way streets!" she would exclaim. Our neighborhood had exactly zero one-way streets.
I remember one incident where Mom was heading straight for a pedestrian making his way in a crosswalk. In California the pedestrian always has the right of way but Mom wasn't slowing down. "Mom, watch out!" I shouted. She slammed on both the brake and the gas, (she usually drove with one foot on each), causing the car to come to a bucking, revving stop only inches from the trembling, ashen-faced pedestrian who might have succumbed to death from sheer fright.
One Christmas she announced she wanted to drive 500 miles to visit my grandparents. "I think we can do it!" She said. My brother and I did not think she could do it and tried our best to dissuade her, but on the appointed day, we left at 4:00 AM in the pitch dark "to beat the traffic." There was no traffic at that hour, so we drove around on deserted, dark freeways for a couple of hours until we eventually got lost.
When we arrived at my grandparent's house eleven hours later, shaken and exhausted, my grandparents asked how the drive went. "Just fine!" Said mother. In actuality, the car had broken down, she had gotten a speeding ticket, we were lost most of the time, the bird almost escaped, (we were traveling with a bird--one weird story at a time), plus we had a number of other close calls. But to my mom, this was a success.
What I began to realize is that my mom liked doing uncomfortable or difficult things. She was not a natural driver, but this fact did not deter her from driving. Spoiler alert: she never became a good driver and the world is a safer place since without her on the roads, but she was on to something.
When we started Howling Music, we thought we would probably end up in a ditch or worse since we had no idea how to build a music company. We may have been better musicians than Mom was a driver, but that wasn’t saying much. We didn't like the feeling of not knowing how to do fundamental things, but we may have felt a bit of my mom's elation at the possibility of successfully doing something hard. We left early to beat traffic, we used our maps, and we took some calculated chances. Granted, building a music company is not a destination, but we figured it out and have learned to enjoy the ride.
Even on the non-existent one-way streets.