I loved my Mother. She was the best mom anyone could ever ask for. She had her quirks. She was stubborn beyond reason and she was very set in her ways. These things are not necessarily bad, but when I look back it is easier to accept some of her idiosyncrasies. The subject of today’s story deals with my mother and her driving. I honestly don’t know how she got a driver’s license, but she had one. She was an Avon Representative, and in that job, she needed transportation to make sales calls on customers and potential customers. Also, to make deliveries to her customers. My dad bought my mother the ugliest car ever made, that may be a bit of an exaggeration but it was pretty ugly. It was a Rambler with an indescribable green color… It had a stick shift with 3 on the column. Most cars today have automatic transmissions. Stick shifts are almost dinosaurs anymore unless you have a sports car and then the stick is on the floor. I don’t even want to mention a sports car with 4 on the floor in the same sentence with my mother’s ugly Rambler.
So, she is pretty excited about the new car. She takes the car for a little test drive after my dad brought it home. Dad showed her how to use the clutch and shift gears. Remember there are three gears 1st, 2nd and 3rd and of course Reverse. My mother for some reason, that to this day, I cannot explain, refused to recognize 2nd gear. I guess it was too confusing to go from 1st to 2nd and then to 3rd. Frankly, that complexity eludes me. So here is how my mother operated her car. She would start in 1st gear, rev the motor in first and push the car almost to its limit in 1st gear and then put in the clutch and in one quick motion move the gear shift from 1st to 3rd. Normally what would happen is that the engine wasn’t going fast enough to handle that move so the car would “ping”. I am not sure what pinging is doing to the car internally, but to my dad it was like fingernails on a blackboard. It bothered him that she wouldn’t use 2nd gear. No amount of hassle from me, my dad and my sister had any impact on my mother starting to use 2nd gear. It was not part of the process of her daily operation of the vehicle. I think if she could have, she would have, left the car in first gear all the time, but even she recognized the flaw in that approach. My sister Mary and I would have fun talking about the fear of 2nd gear. We would sarcastically say to each other and our friends that they might rethink the idea of moving from 1st to 2nd and then to 3rd… when to simplify things you could bypass 2nd altogether, and only have to deal with a little pinging. In the grand scheme of things is a little pinging all that bad … really? If you ask my dad, he would say… emphatically… yes. He knew how bad that was on the car. It probably shaved years off the life of that vehicle. I know the car had a 2nd gear because on occasion I would drive it and, low and behold, I could get it to operate in 2nd and then move to 3rd. If the car had a personality, I am sure that it would have been happier if the operator had consistently used 2nd gear. And letting the operator know how unhappy it is and using pinging as the simple notification clearly wasn’t enough to make Mom stop. Most of the time my mom was in the car by herself so she wasn’t being hassled. I do have one question. The other gear was Reverse and I wonder if she actually ever used it. When she was in the driveway, she could have released the brake, rolled into the street in neutral and then started the car (this car usually started on the first try) and begin her day in 1st gear. If she was careful, she wouldn’t need to use reverse at all if she chose her parking places carefully. Now that I am thinking about it the added complexity of that additional gear could have presented a reason to avoid using it.
