Getting on the Stick
September 18, 2003

Tigers jumping through fiery hoops. Elephants standing on hind legs. Dolphins retrieving watches from the bottoms of pools. It’s amazing, the things that man can train animals to do. But nothing can match the greatest training feat of all: teaching your teenage daughter how to drive a stick shift.

Earlier in the day, my wife had attempted to teach our daughter how to drive my son’s pickup, which had standard transmission. But everyone knows that it’s a man’s job to tell other people how to do things. And I was there to answer the call.

On my way out the door, my wife admonished me, “Don’t make her cry!” I reassured her that I am a professional; I have trained many people at many tasks; I have the patience of Job; and that upsetting my little girl was the furthest thing from my mind.

So as I’m climbing into the pickup, I find my daughter sitting in the driver’s seat, already crying. “I can’t do this!” she sobbed. --Not a good start. I feared that soon we would both be crying.

I took the pressure off by telling her that if she didn’t feel confident whenever we finished, that I would drop her off and pick her up at her job myself-- “Piggy-back” if I had to! It would be her decision. Reassured by this, she was ready to get down to business.

We began with a series of starts and stops in an abandoned parking lot. She then graduated to the side streets. We even sought out some hills where she practiced the delicate transition of releasing the clutch on an incline. (Now I know why they refer to hills as “rolling.”—Backwards, that is!)

I waxed eloquently on the principles of automatic transmission versus standard. (Which is truly amazing, if you only knew how little I know about cars!) I also described what it meant to “ride” the clutch and how it was not a good thing, or else you might “burn up” the clutch.

Occasionally I would take the wheel myself and demonstrate my prowess. She would ask for mechanical instructions like, “At what speed should I switch from second gear to third?” and “Is it OK to skip a gear whenever shifting down?” (For those of you wondering, there was no tachometer.)

I tried to switch her focus to the bigger philosophical aspects of it all. “Get the sense of it. Feel the vibrations from the car. Listen to the hum of the engine and let that be your guide. Use the force, Luke!” (OK-- I admit that I got a little carried away.)

After making a few high speed runs down the highway, she was now ready for the ultimate test: the drive-through line at the fast-food restaurant. If the car in front of her only knew what was behind them, I’m sure they would have elected to dine in. And it makes you wonder—Just how many times, as we trudge through our everyday lives, are we teetering on the brink of catastrophe and don’t even know it?!

It was a challenge, but eventually she made it. It was a bigger challenge for me to hold my soft drink steady throughout the turbulence. (I used several napkins to continuously wipe my wrist.) Luckily, we had ordered some fries to go with our “shake”.

That reminds me of when I first “got on the stick.” It was in high school, when I had a summer job, washing cars at a Ford Dealership. Some of those cars were Ford Mustangs with standard transmission. It was just like a rodeo. At first, those Mustangs kicked and bucked and did their best to discourage me. But I held on and eventually broke them by mastering the smooth operation of that clutch.

With her newfound confidence, my daughter was ready for her first solo. As part of her training, we had taken a joint dry run over her route to work and back. We both knew that she would be able to complete the round trip. It might not be pretty, but she could do it.

Late that night I got a phone call. It was my daughter. Apparently, all that time that I was worried about the clutch, I should have been more concerned with the fan belt. She didn’t quite make it all the way home, but it wasn’t her fault. Luckily she was within walking distance of our house.

As I was carrying her home piggy-back, we reminisced on the day’s events. She had come a long way, baby. I was so proud of her. She had pulled through in the clutch, (so to speak.)

© Copyright 2003 Glen Davis