What’s the most underrated life skill?
The first thing that came to mind when I read this is not exactly a life skill. I don’t need it in order to live. It’s not like doing laundry or knowing how to cook. But in the early 2000s when I blew up the engine of the car I had in high school, this skill was indeed very important. And that skill was driving a manual transmission car. A “stick shift”. Since my car was dead, never to be driven again, Josh bought a new car and then gave me his old Ford Escort to drive to school. Back then I was commuting to school for the last two years of my undergrad degree. Come to think of it, I think this happened during my senior year. I remember because I was student teaching at the time and in order to get to the school where that was happening, I had to drive on a road that ended with a traffic light at the very top of a very steep hill. If you know anything about driving a stick shift, you know that your car has a tendency to roll backwards before you drive forward. Hills are especially tricky. Since I was a novice at it, we found an alternate route to that school that went around the hill.
Honestly, I miss driving a stick shift. When we were shopping for a new car, before we settled on the Kia I had, we were looking at a different Kia. It was a sporty one with a hatchback and a manual transmission. I was looking forward to driving it. We saw it on the dealer website, but it wasn’t there when we actually went and the car we went home with was an automatic. Nothing wrong with an automatic. But shifting gears in a manual car makes you feel like you’re really driving.
In the early days of dating Josh, when that white Ford Escort was what he drove me around in, he had a trick that I could never replicate in all the time I drove that car after he gave it to me. He could pull that car into the driveway at the house, have the keys out of the ignition, and have his door opened and step out before the car even stopped rolling. I’ve asked him how he did that and I can’t remember what he said. It’s definitely not something that you can do in a modern, automatic transmission car. Shoot, my new Subaru has so many safety features that just me thinking about opening the driver side door while the car is still moving would set off a bunch of alarms.
I love my new car. I love not having to worry about stopping on a hill. But I would still love to drive a stick shift again someday. In fact, I have never driven a stick shift car that wasn’t that Ford Escort. We ultimately gave the car to our family mechanic when the clutch went out on it for the 2nd or 3rd time. It was time to let it go. But man was it fun driving it.
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