Third Time, Charmed I'm Sure

Life churned on. Yes there was a first day of senior year.

 

 

Yes, there were dogs.

This post is about a young man who's picture isn't here tonight. Once again I was too busy living it to take a picture of it. Levi moves out tomorrow to start the next chapter in his life of serving humanity. So we had dinner. But through the day I got to spend precious time with him, and that included him buying his first stock with his own money. One share of Amazon at $261.65. he closed two more deals later in the day.

He drove us home after dinner. At an intersection, while waiting to turn right on to a four lane road he waited for the person coming even though they were in the far left lane. He explained, unprompted, to the occupants of the car in general, his reasoning for waiting. You see, shortly after turning right he would need to quickly get over to the left lane in order to turn left. So he waited until the car passed so he could go directly over to the left lane, without having to slow down or negotiate the lane merge. 

As I processed this it occurred to me that it was exactly what I would have done.  Of course he waited. At first I thought this was something he learned from me while he was practicing for his license. And then it made me sad because I'd been thinking recently about how people 3-4 generations removed from someone have zero memory or real knowledge of them. But as I thought about the driving thing I thought, oh, this is one of those things that DOES get passed down forever. I thought about what my great-great-great-great grandfather would have thought as he was waiting to merge his horse and wagon on to a four lane road. "I'll wait," he thought, "since I have to merge over to the left very quickly in order to make that left turn." And here we are today. You may think, that's happy, so why did you get sad? It's because I quickly realized that even this one passage through time wound soon be closed with autonomous driving. Anyway, very quickly again moved on to realize it was much deeper. He's been learning to think like me since the day we met. And it's all locked in over the past few weeks. This guy is ready.