My father was my life-long hero, so it was an excruciating loss for me when he died shortly before my twenty-fifth birthday.

True to his ever-responsible way, though, he has never-but-never missed "visiting" me on my birthday and bestowing an earthbound gift.

One year, it came in the form of a large, blaze-colored (his favorite) rose on the miniature RED rose bush in my kitchen. Another time, it took the form of a blind date with the man who went on to become my husband.

The most memorable of his posthumous gifts, however, came in the form of a driving lesson.

At a roadside fruit stand on my birthday, I chose to defy my father's number one rule about not ever, ever, EVER leaving a vehicle running when I was not behind its wheel.

I put her into neutral, yanked up the emergency brake, and left to drop THE most succulent-looking berries into paper bags provided by the farmer. After stuffing money into the Honesty Box, I turned back toward my car.

....Except she was gone.

Eyes agape, scanning the perimeter, I whirled around with the hysteria of a ballerina whose tutu is engulfed in flames. Seeing nothing, I tried to comprehend how this was even possible. I had been standing just PACES from where I'd parked her; how could I have not heard--or felt--her move?

I don't understand why I looked at the ground right then, but, when I did, I saw skid marks where my car had been just moments before. Like Inspector Clouseau, I followed them in a crouch-walk and saw how they'd backed their way across the narrow road, across the farmer's side yard and through the unbelievably narrow space between his tree and a utility pole. They then looped back around, tattooing the width of the man's entire front lawn.

I watched patches of rubber growing closer together as the topography of the land began to slope toward a drop-off where the forest below was so dense and vast, it looked like a huge, rectangular sink hole.

Inexplicably, defying all laws of Physics, once the skid marks crossed the gravel driveway, mere inches from the drop-off, they made a sharp U-turn and re-routed themselves back onto the crest of the downward-slanting driveway. There, micro-millimeters from the grill of the farmer's shiny new pick-up truck, sat my car. She was unscathed, facing toward the road and idling in a way that sounded like suppressed, self-satisfied snickering.

That was twenty-five years ago. Since then, birthday or no birthday, never once have I left the driver's seat of an idling vehicle again.