6 Cents on Driving Stick

I've never been much into cars.  That I drove a grandma-mobile in high school bothered me only slightly.  When I finally graduated to a cooler, younger car after college, I was certainly pleased, but I cared more about the fact that it was new and clean and had a CD player than I did about the make or model.  As for the engine, or anything else operating under the hood, I still couldn't tell you what any of that is about, even after 8 years and 100,000 miles together.

But, I'd always wanted to drive a stick shift.

I'm not sure why, exactly, other than I had this vague notion that it would confer some coolness on me.  And everyone in my family knew how, so when I started driving, I begged to be allowed to drive one of the stick shifts.  At my best, I was … ok.  I drove a cute blue Volkswagen Beetle around our neighborhood, usually without incident.  The real roads were the problem.  One time, with my father in the passenger seat, I was turning left into a general store parking lot when the clutch popped and the car stalled in the oncoming lane.  It was a lightly traveled country road after dark, but of course a line of headlights was suddenly coming straight at us.  I can still hear my dad yelling at me to turn the car back on and drive, as if I had made a conscious decision to cut the engine and have us sit in the middle of the road.  Flustered and panicky, I somehow did turn the car back on - and lurched into the grassy field adjacent to the parking lot, which elicited more yelling about why I chose to drive on the grass.

After that, my passion for the stick shift waned a bit, and I was happy to drive around in my automatic grandma-mobile.  Until college, when I met Jill and then Heather.  Jill was intelligently funny, wore long, flowing skirts, and was active in the feminist groups on campus.  Heather had fantastically curly blonde hair, was never without a boyfriend, and somehow managed to be really good at math.  This English nerd-cum-feminist with bland fashion sense and mousy brown hair was jealous of both, and each one drove a stick shift.  Hmmm … if I learn to drive a stick, would I become an awesome feminist mathematician with a curly yellow coiffure and lots of boyfriends?

Back at home, my family was leery of getting into the car with me again.  Any manual driving skills I had acquired in high school were gone from disuse.  I would need to start from scratch with a lesson on the basics.  This time, though, I got a lot of polite put-offs: some other day, dear.  A few times, they offered to let me ride around by myself, which they were sure from the onset was never going to happen because everyone knew I had no idea what I was doing.

So, I let is pass.  My life was full of other things.

The third flare-up of this strange desire happened a few years later when my sister started driving.  For her sixteenth birthday she received not a grandma-mobile, but a red, sporty, sleek two-door - with a stick shift.  This really was too much.  I'd been shut out of the exclusive family stick shift driving club, but my sister was recruited for membership?  You've got to be kidding me! I wailed.

I wailed for a bit, but everyone ignored me and soon that passed.  If anyone had offered to teach me manual driving again - which, for the record, no one did - I'd probably have gone along for the ride, but was I really going to go through those headaches again?  Reluctantly, I admit my heart was never really in it, and I haven't made any half-hearted attempts at learning in years.  I'm just not a stick shift sort of girl: I'm more the automatic-everything type.  And I kind of like my mousy brown hair anyway.