By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

My dad always drove — even if we were only going six miles to the grocery store. I colluded with him in the fiction that I was fifteen years old and happy to be buckled into the passenger seat — of my own car. The truth is, even at 50 I liked being driven. Dare I say chauffeured? If my dad was behind the wheel, everything felt safe.

Fortunately for him, my dad got to stay on active dad duty longer than most. When my husband died at 39, my father took up the paternal mantle as if he’d never relinquished it. He began changing lightbulbs in my house. He played with my boys in the pool. He sat on the sidelines at Little League and for my younger son’s brief sojourn in football. Eventually he taught the boys to drive.

With his paternal care came my dad’s finely curated brand of craziness. At a distance, what he does looks like simple overprotection. But it’s overprotection to the power of 10 thousand.

Into his 70s, he persisted in an especially insane behavior; if he and my mom traveled somewhere, they always flew separately (as he had done throughout my childhood). This way if the plane went down, one of them would stay alive to help serve as caretaker to my children. Obviously he considered me a useful accessory but not really a main player in this parenting thing. In retrospect, it is a little disconcerting.

Even though we are obviously related, my father’s version of parenting was, at heart, radically different from mine. I am grateful for all he did. But his help came with his foibles. Among his edicts for a safe and healthy life? Don’t put a cardboard pizza box in a warm oven.

“Are you crazy?” he said when I did it. “You’re going to start a fire.”Really? Because of a cardboard box in an oven set on warm?

If my dad was going to be the driver of my car, I would be the navigator of my kitchen.

I reminded him my husband was already dead. How could anything worse possibly happen? I should have just smiled and taken the damn pizza box out of the oven.

I can tell myself a lot of myths about what fatherhood meant to my dad. But I do know whatever he did was wrapped up in the need for prodigious safe keeping of those he loved. Last weekend at my 40th high school reunion, a boy — now a man — who lived in my neighborhood reminded me that my parents had a heated driveway — in 1968. Apparently my mom always turned the neighborhood kids away when they wanted to make money shoveling snow. I didn’t remember the heated driveway coils. But it was a really steep driveway, and installing coils to ward off falls and skidding — well, that sounds a lot like my dad.

In fatherhood, my dad found the role of a lifetime. Why cede authority to me or to anyone else? He never wanted to be a supporting player.

About six years ago, my father drove me to the city to see an investment advisor; he did it every year. As he got out of the car, about 5 years past brisk and purposeful, he fumbled in his coat pocket to turn over his keys to the parking attendant. The guy in the parking lot promptly ignored him. “Will you be staying long, Miss?” the attendant asked me. At 81, my father was as good as invisible.

At first I pretended it hadn’t happened. But then as we made our way onto the sidewalk, I tried to talk to my dad about how it felt to have his whole persona kind of sideswiped by the young parking attendant.

My father just shrugged his shoulders. He was never one for those “how did it make you feel” kinds of questions. God knows it’s hard to be gazing at your navel when you’re behind the wheel of a car.

I, too, would have liked to shape the world into a less dangerous place for my children. But I never quite figured out how to do it — or whether I should. Incidentally, I don’t drive for my children. Whenever my boys come to visit, I do what I always did. I step aside and buckle myself into the passenger seat of my car.