There always seems to be a scary thing in my life, and these days one can count on driving. But one can’t count on driving. That is why it’s scary.

I know that I avoid driving, and that only compounds the fear level. Daily exposure is part of the solution. So yesterday, Sunday morning, I took advantage of the quietude to drive myself over to Noe Valley and…well, drive myself back. I didn’t stop. This saved on parking. Not that there’s any money involved in parking on 24th St. No, it saved on the psychic stress of parking. What is the psychic stress? Fear of running over an infant, essentially. Are these fears exaggerated? I don’t know. Probably. In truth, I don’t want to find out.

Today’s drive started with an unpleasant surprise or two. The first involved the Irish workers in front of my parked car. Not that I foresaw any problem. In fact, knowing them to be affable and almost certainly eloquent, I told them about the Jez Butterworth play I had just seen in London. Both men were baffled. Never mind that Butterworth is British, not Irish. Our interaction calmed me and helped pass the time. The short amount of time involved in driving my car forward and around their electric saw. There was nothing to it, in reality. An even mildly experience driver wouldn’t flinch.

I seem to have gotten into the inexperienced category. I got there by sort of fluke, or a sort of negligence. Returned from London, it was easy to avoid driving. Nowhere I really had to go. Occasional rain, enough to make one stay indoors. No sense in risking the wet roads, I always say.

Now I am paying for this long day’s journey into automotive night. Today I got behind the wheel, started things up…and soon discovered that my foot just wasn’t responding properly. I mean, on Sunday it had cleared the pedals nicely. Now it wasn’t.

But note that I’m making some degree of psychic progress here. My general response is that when my my body doesn’t respond the way it should, I am facing the neuromuscular end. And I was thinking just that sort of thought, gingerly driving down the streets of San Francisco’s Mission District. Plus a few others. One, there is a surprising amount of traffic these days. After all, this is a fairly small provincial city…that is also an international business center. Okay, so I haven’t quite gotten used to this new reality. I tend to think that I’m an old guy. And that’s the problem. Which it is, and isn’t. Where was I?

There was a time when I easily parked in front of the Mission library. But that time was a while ago. The space was free, so I parked there today, but not so easily. Not without a fair amount of worry and apprehension. That’s what I mean about the fear factor. Nothing to worry about, not really. And in fact, I was out and on the street in no time at all.

Yet no time really isn’t what I had. It took a surprising amount of it to get some foot cream at Walgreens. Take some money out of Bank of the West. And then roll into the deeper Mission to an eccentric jewelry store that, among other things, handles watch battery replacements. Turns out that the battery was fine, but the watch wasn’t. I left it there for repair. Meanwhile I had a pleasant chat with the proprietor, practicing my pathetic Spanish.

And then homeward. Which involved one of my least favorite maneuvers. Our street has a junction that is both on a hill and a curve. Entering from the minor cross street…no one can see anyone. That’s why there is a convex mirror mounted across the intersection. It’s the sort of touch I associate with mountain driving. Thus, San Francisco. There was a space right in front of the house. I parked there. But I was stuck. It was a rubbish collection day, and everyone’s wheeled bins had been rolled out to the curb. The wheelchair ramp unfolds right where someone had left a bin. So I waited. Rolling down the window at the approach of a pedestrian, I asked for help. Bin moved, ramp extended, my day progressed. With a little help from my friends.