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On Easter Sunday I went with Sarah to her parent's house in Bedford. Among my many pursuits is to eventually be able to fly an airplane but since I am a little short on cash and I can't even drive a stick shift car yet I decided to work this weekend on solving the problem of learning to drive the stick shift by driving Sarah’s Passat around. On Saturday we took the Passat to a local church parking lot where Sarah sat in the car and gave me useful instructions on how to drive the manual transmission. The general advice she gave me was the same as the advice I had been given during prior aborted attempts to drive a standard. They are the following – To get the car into gear you should lift up on the clutch and down on the gas so that one is going up and the other is going down at the same time. So throughout Saturday for about an hour I managed to make both Sarah and me sick in a strange rocky amusement park style ride where I would stop the car, try to put it into gear, stall it so that it rocked back and forth jostling us to near the puking point, and then turned the car off and started it again. I got a little further than this about 20 percent of the time where the car would either go into gear or be rescued from stalling out by pushing back down on the clutch. Sarah wasn’t too impressed with my style when the Passat actually did get into gear because my solution to the problem was to give the car ridiculous amounts of gas to overcome inertia that would then cause the wheels to make a screeching noise and skid as it popped into gear. Finally at the end of a long hour where both Sarah and I were sweating heavily and beginning to show early signs of having a pre-post-traumatic stress disorder we went back into the condo so that we could fight over who got to puke in the toilet first.

So on Sunday I got some great advice from Sarah, her mother, and her grandmother on how to drive a stick shift including the basic diagram of an H that Sarah’s great grandfather had shown her grandmother to explain where all of the gears were and warnings from Sarah’s mother that I should watch out for the kids in the neighborhood playing ball. Afterwards I decided to spare Sarah a repeat of the pre-post-traumatic stress and set out on my own in the Passat to drive around the quiet Bedford neighborhood of Sweeney Ridge Road with a stick shift car. My basic strategy was that my problem with the stick shift wasn’t driving it but getting it to move, so I defined my practice routine to be to move the car into gear in first, drive to one of the cookie-cutter mailboxes in front of the next house and then stop, take it out of gear and then start again to try to get it into first.

At first I was having tremendous problems as I did the day before but I had upped my percentage of successful starts from 10 percent to about 40 percent within 10 minutes. As I was creeping from house to house and had gone around the block about three times I noticed that some of the people who were out walking on their quiet suburban Stepford street were looking at me as I proceeded from mailbox to mailbox. Sweeney Ridge Road is not the most central street in Bedford. You need to take three or four turns off of the major minor road in order to reach it. So although I hadn’t expected it I was confronted in my slow crawl of a journey down the street by a police car driving in the other direction patrolling the street. The pair of officers looked at me as they drove past to commit my face to memory and most likely took a photograph of my with a hidden camera on their cruiser and then wrote down Sarah’s license plate for any future reference as a potential source of suspects for future crimes in the area. (See the Bedford Police Log). I don’t know yet if I made the log since the edition covering Easter has yet to be published. I can imagine the log entry:

A suspicious looking Passat was reported slowly driving from house to house on Sweeney Ridge Road. The driver had a red beard and was looking into mailboxes and listening to Led Zeppelin.

I had been at it for about 45 minutes and was getting very good at popping the car into first gear. The trick for me was that I finally realized that it was a bad thing to pull all the way up on the clutch. The right thing to do is to leave the clutch near the point where it catches and then slowly come up on it as you feed gas to it. The up/down advice hadn't mentioned that the last 5 percent on the clutch is where you need to take your time pulling up. At least that is my opinion on how I was doing in learning. I could be doing it totally wrong though. So I was starting to get better at it and was increasing my pace from each stop. It was a nice day and I was sweating due to the stress of trying to learn how to drive the stick shift so I had my window open. A six foot two man with a moustache on a mountain bike drove past me and looked me in the eye as he biked by. I stopped the Passat because I wanted him to go by before proceeding. Rather than biking on he made a snap decision, squeezed tight on his brakes, skidded around into a 180 and then biked back to address me in my window. He said 'What are you doing here?" while making a threatening face. I was clearly sweating and already nervous so I told him that I was learning to drive a stick shift car. He wasn’t satisfied with this answer so he asked "Do you live here?". I told him I didn’t so he asked, "Why are you here then?" I told him that my girlfriend lived down the street as he continued to encroach me bending down and examining me with his big head practically into the car window. Then he asked "What is her name?". He was clearly trying to foul me up with a cross examination question. He was probably an evil Bedford lawyer. I squeaked out "Sarah Carvey?". He seemed to have a glint of recognition come over him so he let me go while seeming to overcome an internal struggle of whether to accept my answer or pull me out of the car by my Boston College golf shirt and Zildjian jacket to pummel me on the street for putting his family at risk for a child abduction. Then he biked off.

I managed to get the car back into the driveway shortly after that incident. I'll be flying an airplane in no time. Probably down the street from Sweeney Ridge Road at the Hanscomb airfield.