My First Car

A while back my work spouse and I decided to head off-site for lunch, and uncharacteristically, I offered to drive. She took one look at my 5-speed shifter-thingy and said, “You drive a stick? I’ve never been more attracted to you than I am right now.”

“I know,” I said, full of prunes as usual. “That sound that it makes when I go in reverse is so cool, isn’t it?”

Anyway, that reminded me of the first car I ever bought: a 1992 Honda Accord 4-door, 5-speed maroon sedan. I’d graduated from college, set up house-keeping with my friend Tina, went to work and become great friends with Danny and Julie, who just happened to own their own taupe Honda Accord, 4-door, 5-speed sedan.

I needed a car and had zero idea of how to acquire one. Danny kindly perused the classifieds and found a dealership in Kilgore, Texas with the aforementioned maroon sedan. “It’s a good car and a great deal,” he assured me. Driving over there for a test drive in their identical car, Danny eagerly (and adorably) outlined some of the finer features of the vehicle I would be purchasing. “See how it’s easy to surf the radio channels when you’re in fifth gear?” he asked, his palm resting on the gear shift and punching the different station buttons while barely lifting a finger. It was such a strong selling point that I still remember it 25 years later.

I’ll skip ahead in this story and just say that, having no idea of how to drive a standard transmission, I then proceeded to take out a multi-thousand-dollar loan for a car with a standard transmission and was now on the hook to drive it 25 miles back to Big Sandy, insured, thank God. It took me close to 90 minutes, and traffic in rural East Texas wasn’t heavy. For a month, I stayed within a 5-mile radius of the small town I lived in until I felt confident I could take off a green light on a hill without stalling out or rolling into the farm vehicle behind me.

So since 1996, I’ve bought two more cars and they’ve both been 5-speed Honda Accords. There’s really no point to this story other than to say that my friend’s comments the other day reminded me of Danny and his excellent car-buying assistance when I was young and dumb, and it’s a good memory of a good friend.

Shifting gears (har har, see what I did there?), I was innocently driving down the road today and minding my own business (as I’m wont to do) when a mouse scurried out of my hood by the wiper blades and tried to climb up my windshield. Since the ol’ 5-speed had been parked in my garage all day, you can imagine where the mouse originated (that’s another story for another day). It scrambled and wiggled, buffeted by the wind of my brisk 35-mph speed, clinging to my windshield wipers right in front of my horrified eyes. WE MADE EYE CONTACT. Then I turned on my wipers and catapulted him into oncoming traffic, and that was that. My next murderous attempt, should that one have failed, was to hit a bridge pylon head-on and hope my airbag went off.