I drove too fast.

When I was between 18 and 28, or maybe 38, I drove much too fast, nearly all the time, everywhere.

I can remember driving with my wife-to-be on a trip to western Massachusetts where I would drive the empty country roads as fast as I could go, only limited by whether the car would skid off the road into the trees, or roll over.

It was a mania, a stupid macho need to prove something. Looking back I am both rueful that I drove like that, but still have a little tinge of pride in some of my death defying driving stunts.

While driving a station wagon jammed with my college advisor’s stuff, delivering it to somewhere in New York City, we were barreling down route 95 and realized that we were about to miss the turn off to Manhattan and get stuck crossing the George Washington Bridge. This was a ten dollar and 40 minute error, so I cut across a few lanes of traffic and swerved into the exit ramp, avoiding an 18 wheeler by a few feet, or inches. It was great that we made it, but would have been a foolish way to die.

In high school we were driving to see the movie Grand Prix. I took a favorite short cut over a little-used dirt road and was tooling along at perhaps 60 when the road took a diving downhill right turn. The car, my father’s first ever new car, a Rambler American, went briefly airborn and then came to rest facing the way we had come. A car came up the road towards us a few moments later; had he been there sooner we would have landed on his hood resulting in damaged or dead teenagers, plus an innocent stranger or two. But as we sat facing the way we had come on the roadside the other car just continued along. They likely never saw us do the backroad 180. When I tried to drive away we were a bit stuck in the roadside ditch. My buddy got out to push and when I spun the back wheels gravel shot out and bloodied his leg. We got out of there and did not continue to the movies. I am sure I drove a lot more safely after that, for at least a week.

But the story that I recall with equal parts chagrin and also residual youthful pride was driving a group to another movie.

This was post college, which means I was about 22 years old. I was driving the $25 Ford Fairlane that Sal sold me. Like all the cars we drove back then it had a V8 engine and would go quite fast. We were visiting some friends somewhere in Belmont when the idea arose to all go to see a movie in Boston, probably as the big screen theater on Cambridge Street, past the Mass General complex.

There were probably 6 of us, three in the front, 3 in the back. In those days there were no seatbelts or airbags. So I drove with my typical display of reckless macho aggression.

We arrived at the theater and I parked the car and a woman passenger said, rather matter of factly, “That was the most frightening car ride i have ever been on.”

I took that statement as a badge of honor, and even now, over half a century later, I still harbor a smidgen of pride in having achieved something remarkable, something approaching historic, in a demented and unhinged way.