It was a perfect old-time Adirondack summer’s morn — cool and clear, with a bright sun in a cloudless sky.

I’d just graduated from high school and the world was my oyster — or at least it should have been. But on that day it was anything but.

I was driving around town, my mother riding shotgun, getting in some last-minute practice for my driver’s license road test, which I’d take in a couple of hours.

Every guy I knew couldn’t wait to get his license. It represented adulthood, freedom, and low and/or high-level risk-taking. Get your license and you could go to Lake Clear beach parties, the fleshpots of Lake Placid, or even that premier rock and roll roadhouse, Brodi’s, in Plattsburgh.

In short, a driver’s license was like being handed The Keys to the Kingdom. And no real, 100% USDA-inspected all-beefcake guy would’ve turned down the chance to get one.

Which showed that I was not a “real” guy. I cared more that my dog had a license than I did. This was due to one painful and inevitable truth — there was no way I could pass the road test. So the day of the test my mood was better suited to me riding in a tumbrel to the Place de la Concorde than driving around the streets of My Home Town.

So what guaranteed I’d fail the test?

I mentioned this in last week’s column and my readers’ answers split into two camps.

One bunch was sure my appointment in Samarra would be hitting a red light while going up Church Street Extension hill. Granted that was a newbie’s stuff of nightmares, I’d actually learned how to do it — and with a standard transmission, no less — because my mother had demanded it. But just for the record, while I’d eventually become competent at it, I’d gone through a lot of clean skivs in the process.

The other bunch of readers figured my nemesis was parallel parking, and they were right.

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Doomed from the get-go

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I wasn’t merely deficient at parallel parking — I was completely hopeless.

In truth, it wasn’t my fault. Quite simply, no one had ever taught me how to do it.

I took Driver’s Ed my senior year, but aside from giving me the unbounded joy of legally missing school for a couple hours a week, I didn’t learn much … and certainly not how to parallel park.

First, we had four students in the car, so each of us got to drive maybe 20 minutes a week. Second, when it came to parallel parking, the “lessons” were a farce.

The teacher, Mr. Warner, was a nice guy — low-key, patient and supportive — but he was also no fool. The Driver’s Ed Car was a ’63 Chevy Bel Air, which was about as small and maneuverable as a Greyhound bus. Parallel parking in it downtown would’ve caused lifelong trauma, as well as a world of dents, scrapes and scratches to both it and to whatever schlimazel’s ride we were supposed to park behind.

So, wisely, he had us practice parallel parking on Riverside Drive, always with a car that had no car behind it for at least a couple hundred yards. That way, we ended up parking within the required foot from the curb … but we were also at least 50 feet behind the car when we did. In short, I still had no idea how to back into a parking space between two cars, which was what parallel parking was all about in the first place.

My second source of driving instruction was my mother. While she was an excellent teacher in the classroom, she fell short of the mark in the car. I didn’t understand that phenomenon then, but after 40 years as a classroom teacher, I now do: It’s far easier to be patient and explain things endlessly and thoroughly to other people’s kids than it is to your own.

By any measure, my mother was an excellent driver. But when it came explaining the process in enough clear and understandable detail, she didn’t do it. Consequently, I learned to drive by trial and error — mostly error.

For example, learning to take off from a stop with a standard transmission. To her, having driven for 30 years, it was intuitive, and the most detail she’d get into was to say, “Just let out the clutch and give it more gas.” Which I already knew. But how much gas, how slowly to let out the clutch and how to feel the transmission engage eluded me completely. So till I finally figured it out, the car either stalled, left a patch, or bucked like it had the dry heaves.

And it was the same with parallel parking.

She’d say, “You turn the wheel to the right while you’re backing up, then when you start to go in the space, you turn the wheel to the left.”

For all I could figure out from that, she might as well have said, “Gezorgeen hapshlo, hup hup, gluteus maximus frangelshmeck.”

And thus on the morning of my road test, I drove around town practicing parallel parking, with the usual results: Either I ended up about three feet from curb, or with one wheel on the sidewalk, or maybe just jammed against the curb at a 45 degree angle.

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Instant enlightenment

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Finally, with an hour till the test, we were parked on Church Street as I was trying to dispel some of my gloom, when on a whim I did something I’d never done: I got the New York state manual for the driver’s test out of the glove compartment and actually looked in the thing. Mostly, I was hoping some totemic juju contained therein would magically bestow upon me the gift of parallel parking.

Of course, it didn’t.

But what it did was this: It showed perfectly-explained and illustrated step-by-step instructions on how to parallel park. It was a formula as foolproof as the Pythagorean Theorem, though with a lot fewer steps, thank Zeus.

I pored over the instructions, read and reread them a bunch, committed them to memory, and then decided give them the good ole high school try.

I pulled up to a car, then backed into the space behind it perfectly!

Was it a fluke? Only one way to find out.

And so I took off, pulled beside another car, did my thing, and again ended up exactly where I should’ve been. I did it a bunch more times with cars of various sizes, and did a textbook job with each.

By the time I showed up for my test, all doubts I’d had about parallel parking had vanished like the mist o’er the moor. As a result, the test itself was almost anti-climactic and I breezed through it and passed with flying colors.

But in addition to passing the test, I learned some vital life lessons, which were far more important than just getting a driver’s license.

First, if I want to learn how to do something, I can. Odds are it’ll be a lot harder than parallel parking, because parallel parking is very simple … if you have the proper instruction. So the first lesson is, before you start, be sure to get the clearest, simplest directions.

Second, once you have good instructions, you have to study them, and then practice them, step by step by step, rechecking them, and following them to a T.

Third, it always helps to get advice from someone already skilled in that field. But keep in mind, just because someone is an expert in a field, it doesn’t mean they can explain it clearly. So if they can’t do it, find someone who can.

Fourth, be patient, don’t sweat your mistakes, and whatever else you do, do not compare yourself and your work with anyone else’s.

And finally, rather than worry about where you’re going with this new venture, keep in mind where you started. For example, writing well is a difficult craft with a lifelong learning curve. I’ll never become a great writer, nor do I care about it. Instead, I just keep on keeping on.

And most important, I remind myself where I started, which was not by writing anything, but by learning how to hold a pencil.