Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

Clutch!Clutch!Clutch!

Nearly all my adult life, I’ve driven stick. I know how to shift gears.

My wife brought the first manual transmission into my life–a Mercury Capri, which we called “the Crappy.” It was It was a pop-eyed old beater with one headlight bigger than the other so it always looked like it was giving you the stink-eye. It had a fender fashioned of aluminum held on with sheet metal screws, the hood was held down with wing nuts, and the silver paint job had been destroyed by repeated malathion dousings during the med-fly outbreak. Her engine was a powerhouse, though, and despite the fact that it drank a quart of oil a week it leapt off the line like a panther. The engine also had the unfortunate tendency to shear off its mounting bolts and have a lie-down on the rack-and-pinion. We kept her smoking hulk running for an age, finally selling her for junk when we moved up to Seattle.

We also had a Triumph Spitfire (named Cricket), and I adored that car. I worked diligently to keep her in running trim, but eventually her ’70s era British workmanship got the better of me and we sold her to a younger, more able man. After Cricket, there was Jezebel, the Ford Pinto whose body was made of New York Lace held together by a dozen daily prayers. She lived up to her name and we traded her in for a Chevy Nova saloon car that we named “Nova,” which should tell you how emotionally invested we were in owning her. The fact that she also drove like Grandpa’s cabin cruiser didn’t make her any more attractive.

Soon, though, Nova began to falter, and she was replaced by Eva, a 1993 Geo Storm. After driving in Nova’s Automatic Transmission Desert, I was back in a stick-shift car, and loved it. We’ve had that car for 20 years, and she’s still great (though a new paint job wouldn’t hurt.)

So, like I said, I know how to shift gears. In cars, anyway.

Shifting gears in writing…I sometimes have trouble. (more…)

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