Quotulatiousness

November 3, 2015

Learning to drive stickshift

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: — Nicholas @ 04:00

Sam Smith remembers learning how to drive with a manual transmission:

At first, I thought my dad was just teaching me to drive a stick. At 16 and a few months, I had already earned a license, already had my first accident. (Missed a stoplight in the family Volvo while changing CDs. I cannot remember being dumber.) Two weeks of lessons later, I suspected something was up.

We drove in 20-minute spurts. Before dinner on weeknights, after lunch on Sundays, whenever. Always the same route: leave driveway, around the subdivision, back. Practice, learning how to shift, long past the point where I thought I was good enough.

The truth soon came out: My father, a patient man, wasn’t going to let me drive a manual—which meant borrowing his car—until I met what seemed like an arbitrary standard of smoothness. He wasn’t mean, just firm about it: You will do this right. And I won’t feel it when you drop into second.

The neighborhood was perfect for it. A rolling, quiet patchwork of curves. Enough uphill starts to keep you thinking. Or at least keep 16-year-old me thinking, because the first time you shift a manual gearbox, you’re a bag of elbows. This gear? That one? Then you screw it up again.

No Comments

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.

Powered by WordPress