When Should I Stop Driving

 I didn't expect to be addressing this topic so soon.  My chats so far have been on the bright side of aging, but I had an incident a couple of days ago that has been keeping me up at night.  I had an incident on my way home from picking my granddaughter from school Friday afternoon, and in all honesty, I see a pattern.

On our way home, there's a place where I have to turn right off a quiet street onto a busy highway -- but just for a hundred-or-so feet, and then I have to turn left onto another street.  I got to the intersection, looked both ways, saw a distant semi off to my right and a reasonably distant car off to my left.  So I turned right, then realized that the truck was coming faster than I thought, so I had to put on my left-turn signal and wait for it to pass to turn left.  The car coming up behind me wasn't expecting someone to pull out in front of them and then stop, so they almost hit me, but instead passed me off the road on the right, horn blasting.  

This situation alone possibly isn't enough for me to be concerned about my driving judgment skills, but it's one of several recent incidents where I've put not only myself and my car's occupant(s) but the occupants of vehicles surrounding me -- or even maybe pedestrians -- at grave risk.    It frightens me and even kept me awake last night worrying about it and whether it's maybe time to relinquish my car key.

Of course, I looked online asking something like at what age is it time to quit driving.  And sadly but not unexpectedly, I got a lot of responses such as when to take the keys away from your parent!  Not when should "I" decide but when should someone decide for me!!!  (I'll cover THIS topic in much greater detail in the future.)

I have no answer to my own personal dilemma at this point, but I do intend to give it a lot more thought and drive a lot more carefully until I make my decision.  I also may ask my daughter and son-in-law to take over driving my granddaughter to and from school until I've made a definitive decision, too.  

Driving has for almost all my adult life been something that I absolutely adore.  I have driven cross-country  (literally from "sea to shining sea" - actually, ocean, but I'm "like that.")  more times than I can name, not because it's cheaper than flying (which it's not) but because I love the excitement of going around curves to see what's around them, staying in off-the-freeway motels and relaxing until I start the next day's adventure of seeing unknown, or pleasantly familiar, roadways.  

So what do I do?  I do not know.  But I feel a day of reckoning is near.  I do know one thing:  It will be MY decision, and I won't hang on until someone else has to make the decision for me.  Maybe it's my perfectionism looming.  I have always had to be perfect (or a total failure) at every single thing I've ever done.  Maybe other people, younger and old, have made similarly bad judgment decisions when driving.  I don't know, but it is something I need to address.