ODE TO THE STICK SHIFT

“Why do you want to drive a stick?” I’ve lost count how many times that question has been aimed at me. My usual response is, “I like to control my driving, to feel the dialogue between my feet and hand. Hell, I can glide to a stop and start up again so smoothly as to not cause a single ripple in my open coffee mug, using my manual stick shift.”

I learned to drive in a car that eventually became my college vehicle: a fourth-generation hand-me-down green Volkswagen bug, still popular and rolling on in the 1970s. A family friend, Bobby, taught me to feel the clutch like an elastic, to envision the slow release of the gears’ teeth to allow the glide