Fifty-seven years ago, a nervous high school student was taking a driver’s test in a rural Montana town. The examiner was a local officer of the Montana Highway Patrol. Part of the test was parallel parking. The high schooler backed into the parking space and went just a little too far, tapping the bumper of the car behind it. It was the patrol officer’s state highway patrol vehicle. The tap probably didn’t cause damage, but it unnerved the student, who immediately put the car into drive and accelerated too hard, running into the vehicle in front. The contact was bumper-to-bumper and not very hard, resulting in minimal damage. The officer calmly instructed the student to put the car in park and turn off the engine. After doing so, the student apologized for contacting the patrol car and said to the officer, “At least I wasn’t parking between two state vehicles,” to which the officer replied that the car in front was his personal vehicle.

It was a long time ago, and I’ve told the story so many times that the details are a bit hazy. Researchers have found that the stories we tell most often are the ones that are most likely to be embellished. I’m fairly certain that the remembered classmate failed the driver’s test on the first attempt due to difficulties with parallel parking. I also know that the story was retold immediately and repeatedly in our town. Farmers told each other about it at the feed store. Downtown business owners shared the story over coffee at the cafe. And the story was told at every gathering of high school students for several years. It wouldn’t surprise me if students in that town, preparing for their driver’s examinations today, know the story.

I’ve lost touch with the student who was at the center of the story. My hunch is that the story became such an issue that the person moved away from our small town. I don’t know. I did move away from that town, and I passed my driver’s license test without a problem on my first try in a vehicle with a manual transmission. I know, however, that my memories of that time are incomplete. For years, I’ve said that I earned my driver’s license on my fifteenth birthday, but that can’t be the case because my birthday fell on a Saturday that year. I’m sure driver’s license tests were administered only on weekdays, and probably not every weekday in our small town. The real story is that I earned my driver’s license on the first day after my 15th birthday when tests were administered in our small town. Stories are like that.

I’ve thought of the incident multiple times over the years. When my wife’s grandmother was in her nineties, she was involved in a fender-bender accident in her small town in North Dakota. We were living in North Dakota at the time and were aware that it was nearing time for Grandma to stop driving, but none of us had brought up the subject with her. Because she was issued a ticket for failure to yield the right of way, and due to her age, she was required to take the driving portion of the license test to retain her license. To my surprise, she passed. I don’t know what happened on that exam, but I’ve always believed that she must have intimidated the examiner. She wasn’t a very good driver. She would back up her car without looking. It made me nervous to ride when she was driving. But she continued to drive for a couple of years beyond that accident.

It was years ago, and I’ve told the story over and over again, so I’ve probably embellished it quite a bit.

Both stories came to mind this morning when I saw a photograph on the CBC news website of the back end of a bright red Ford Bronco, barely visible among the rubble of a smashed building entrance. The story accompanying the photo reported that an elderly woman was attempting to park, but her foot slipped off the brake and onto the gas pedal, causing the vehicle to accelerate into the building. The story also reported that no one was seriously hurt in the accident. A witness to the aftermath of the crash posted a photo on social media. Clearly visible in the photo was the sign on the building, announcing in both English and French that it is a Driver Examination Center licensed by the Government of Ontario.

That photo has already launched thousands of stories. Online conversations debated whether the driver had passed the examination. The news article I read stated that it was unknown if the driver was parking to take a driver’s test, but the photo is dramatic enough to stir stories in our imaginations.

I’ve often told the story of my brother, who was driving one of our family’s cars, failed to yield at an open intersection, and hit another car. The car he hit was another of our family’s cars, driven by our mother. No one was injured, but my version of the story is that our father made my brother place the call to the insurance company reporting the accident. It seems plausible, but I doubt if my brother remembers the story the same way as I do. He had a lot of accidents in the first years of his driving career. Shortly before my wedding, he slid into a guardrail while delivering my car to me from the body shop. It had been in the shop to have a dent in the fender repaired after I slid into a tree. It returned with the same fender, the door, and the rear fender all dented from the guardrail. The car barely made it to our wedding following a second repair. The paint was so fresh that the brother who had been driving it when it hit the guardrail had to defend it from my other brothers’ attempts to decorate it.

Some accidents, when no one is hurt, become favorite stories. And favorite stories tend to be embellished. Knowing that doesn’t keep me from telling them.