There's something about this time of year--graduation parties, butterflies hatching out of their chrysalides, the first swim in the lake--that sparks a feeling of rebirth and transformation.

Tomorrow I will be going to, and taking part in, a coming-of-age ceremony of a sort: a truck-driving test. Sure, it's not the same as watching a baby lamb being born, but it's transformation nonetheless. It's especially important to me because I'm the one who taught my friend Margaret how to drive the 33,000-pound box truck.

Margaret is a dyed-in-the-wool badass. She's a welder and carpenter and rides one of those big, tall bicycles that she welded herself. She had driven a truck once before--in the desert at Burning Man, which doesn't really count. But she wanted to learn, and I had the knowledge, so off we went.

As you die-hard Rev-ers may remember, it was last year around this time that I was studying my driver's manual, parallel-parking a big rig and freaking out about my truck-driving test. Just as my mentor at the time, a fella named Bill, had taught me, now it was my chance to pass it on.

The first thing, as any parent who has taught her 16-year-old how to drive, is to go to a safe place where no collisions can take place. For some parents, this means a farm or an abandoned airstrip. For us, this meant a weird industrial area where a building used to be. There, among the graffiti and broken glass, we learned first gear through fifth gear and reverse. Not having safety cones, I set up fake stages for parallel parking with abandoned shopping carts and discarded tires. Margaret learned the delicate art of backing around a corner. The truck died more times than a Grand Theft Auto avatar.

We met like this once a week for a month, and only then did we venture into traffic. Right before we did this, I had to instruct Margaret on the proper behavior while driving a rig. Number one: Wear one of those puffy trucker's hats. Even though they're passÈ according to hipster style hounds, one needs a bad hat in order to drive properly. Number two: Chew gum. Loudly. Number three: You must show the truck who's boss. Really shove that thing into gear. This is part of the whole art of trucking. I mean, we're in a really big vehicle, so of course we can't treat it like a Cabriolet. Number four: Drive tall. Be assertive, I kept telling Margaret. And she was.

We trucked through the city streets, did right-hand turns without taking out telephone poles, left-hands without killing someone. Lane changes, merging, downgrade shifting, highway driving and underpass calculating. I'm proud to say I never once did that "step on the brake" pantomime that my mom did when I was learning how to drive a car. I don't believe I yelled once, except to say, "Rev it, rev it!" to prevent her killing the engine.

Oh, it wasn't all roses and sunshine. There's the time she thought the truck was in reverse when it wasn't, and so rolled into a wall, which shattered the right headlight. Then there was the heart-stopping situation of pulling over at the on-ramp to get the truck into proper gear. Accidents will happen, Elvis Costello sang. As long as no one died at my pupil's hands, I was fine with accidents; they indicate experience.

But toward the end of our weeks-long training session, there passed a moment when I found myself relaxing and thinking, "Oh, Margaret knows what she's doing, I don't need to keep checking the mirrors and reaching over to put the truck in the proper gear." At that moment, the power migrated in a way that I could feel viscerally. Margaret seemed bolstered, and I felt less strong, but peaceful.

I'll probably never have kids, but it's during these times that I understand why people want to have babies. Teaching someone something is a great opportunity. It made me feel like a better person, part of a larger community, an old sage full of wisdom.

Of course, Margaret had better pass or I'm going to kill her.

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