STICK

      My parents owned a 1970 Chevy Nova and when they handed it down to me not too long after my sixteenth birthday, they had it painted it black with a red racing strip.  It was as close to be “cool,” as I would ever come.  The catch, as it turned out, was that I was going to have to learn to drive a manual transmission.  Learning to drive a stick was easier than I thought, but that doesn’t mean things went perfectly.
One day I remember heading to school, motoring up the long hill on the way to another mind-numbing day of eleventh grade, when I had to come to a full stop at the red light at the top.  Even though I knew what to do with a manual transmission, hills were a problem.  On even a slight grade, taking your foot off the gas pedal could mean rolling into the car behind, but letting the clutch out too fast meant you could stall.
I always dreaded stopping at this particular light because of how steep the hill was and sometimes even blew through the yellow just so I wouldn’t risk being stuck there on the red.  So there I was: stuck in this ugly metaphor for my adolescence when I noticed that, beside me, Nancy Bucaro had just rolled up in her family’s VW Microbus.
My “problem” just graduated to a moral dilemma.
Questions began coursing through my brain.
Pop the clutch and risk stalling?
Take my foot off the brake and accordion the hood of the car behind me?
Actually, those weren’t the questions at all.  At that point, embarrassing myself in front of Nancy was a foregone conclusion, so the only question left at that point, really, was in what WAY did I want to embarrass myself?
It was no longer an issue of probability, but execution.
While I was pondered just sitting there with the engine idling until graduation day, the light turned green.
Instinctively, I yanked my left foot off the clutch and my right foot crushed the accelerator.
The air filled with the squeal of peeling rubber, and that decade-old Nova flew off the line like a black bullet.
That was nearly forty years ago, but I still figure that if you have to embarrass yourself in front of a girl, peeling out’s the way to go.  DFP