Shifting

“That is so forties,” she would say, looking at the clothes we were wearing in the seventies.

“That is so seventies,” I thought not long ago, looking at the jeans my college students were wearing, the same ones I had worn in high school and never wanted to wear again but somehow, dammit, did.

So here we are in 2026, and I’ve become aware that I’m becoming a dinosaur in a much more irritating way. The manual transmission cars I’ve driven since the 1980s are becoming extinct. 

“Dying breed,” quoth Car and Driver. “Relic of the past,” intones 24/7 Wall St. In just five years, a quick internet search revealed, cars with standard transmissions will no longer be made, thanks to advancing technology in electric vehicle manufacturing. 

I’m all for technology that helps the environment.

Learning to drive a car with a stick wasn’t easy for me—I couldn’t even drive my first one off the lot when I bought it, having scraped together enough money from high school and college jobs to finally get my own. At twenty-one, freedom for me didn’t mean legal liquor so much as it did my own keys to my own car—once I had mastered stick and clutch, brake and gas.  

It was so hard won. So glorious once achieved. Just because it was forty years ago doesn’t make driving a manual any less thrilling. In a life marked by things that don’t work out and others you’ll never get, can there be anything more regularly satisfying than coming around a curve with one hand on the wheel, the other on the stick, left foot releasing the clutch while right foot presses the gas, and singing a song you know all the words to on the radio? Not in my world. 

“You need both hands when you drive as you get older,” my sister tells me. She who was born thirteen months before I was. Huh, I say to myself. I remember how joyfully she once sped around town in her teal-coloured Jeep, a four-speed her husband taught her to drive.  

Our father taught me. He’d grown up on a farm, driving a tractor and then a school bus, like so many of his place and time. He had that country-boy patience while teaching me, despite me ramming into the garage and denting the brand-new bumper. My little brother is a grown man now, successful, with a big truck. But he will forever be, in my memory, that adolescent slinking toward invisibility in the passenger seat of my first car when I jerked it forward, tires squealing, on the main street of our small town.   

Inevitably, I ask a student to help, and always they do. Usually, it’s just a button to push, one I didn’t know about, generally in plain view. 

But I’ve noticed that on the rare occasions when I need valet parking, the young attendant is similarly at a loss. “Yes, ma’am,” he’ll say, smilingly as he takes my keys, only to quickly find me later. He’ll still be smiling, but shaking his head and not looking so confident. “I can’t drive it,” he’ll say, putting my keys back in my hands.

Yep. Back in my hands. My very capable hands.