One of my least cherished memories involves a drivers'-ed instructor named Mr. Wilson and a set of Matchbox cars. It was 1975, and Mr. Wilson was trying to teach me to parallel park. At one point, keenly exasperated, he leaned over, opened the glove box and pulled out three toy cars. These he arranged on the seat between us, two of them parked against the seat back, the third waiting to pull into the space between. "This is how it works," he said, and he rolled the third car cleanly into the spa