That was then. This is now.
May. 18th, 2011 08:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogDriving back ahead of our daughter earlier today, I was reminded of the far more tortured journey that I took to get home from MY dorm after my first year of college, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth (real ones, not the cheesy-CGI ones in Jurassic Park that wife and child are watching at this very moment).
As I've mentioned, my father was a bit of a, what's the word?, oh yeah- asshole. It was made clear that I would not be allowed to drive his car once I "came home" for that first summer, because such things were Expensive. Blessedly, my sister, who lived an hour away from me in college, was more than happy to conspire against such limits. She had a friend who had a seven-year-old used car she wanted to offload, and Donna made it possible for me, if not to own it, at least to drive it and insure my use of it.
"Nancy Ann" (the friend's nickname, I don't even remember her real one) lived in Sayre PA, just over the state border a bit over half an hour away from both Donna's then-home and my then-dorm. It was an odd detour if you weren't buying a car, but in the end it wasn't all that far from Ithaca, so I somehow got to Sayre, slapped on my first-ever NY plates and ten-day inspection sticker, and rammed the car into gear to drive it north on Route 34 to Cornell, all by myself.
It was a stick, you see. I'd never driven one before in my life other than on driver ed simulators. Nancy Ann gave me a brief lesson to keep me from stalling or slamming the car into the car ahead of me, enough for me to "have the hang" of it; and I crossed back into New York, fiddled with my newfound gearheadery, put the clutch down to get cruising in fourth gear,....
and had the stick separate from the rest of the tranny in my very nervous hand.
----
Some perspective here. This was 1978. Mobile phones were only seen on the TV show "Cannon." Praise the Lord, I did have a AAA membership, and payphones were relatively plentiful back then, so I somehow attracted the attention of both a cop and a tow truck, who jammed the tran into second and got word to my sister and her boyfriend of my verklemptness. Donna was pissed, but somehow we got that wreck back to Binghamton along Route 17, never going out of second gear, forming a slow and painful funeral procession that probably took 90 minutes but seemed like nine and a half weeks.
Days later, the stick was fixed, and I was back to my dorm room to reclaim my few possessions and take the fixed car the 250 miles back to Long Island. Two or three weeks after that, I totalled it on a clear June day, when an oncoming car hit it at highway speed while I was attempting a left turn in front of a median high with grass. (The grass was on the median, not in us.)
Oh, did I mention what kind of car this was? It was the same year and model my roommate for the next three years came back from Boston with- his, luckily retrofitted, to prevent the kind of human immolation that got revealed later that same summer about this particular brand of Fords, which was still being made fun of years later in the Zucker-Abrahams movie Top Secret:
Yes, friends, I present to you, my 1971 Pinto:
I never did drive my father's car, beyond an emergency or two, and I didn't buy my own car for more than two years after that. It was still a Ford, a malady I still suffer from to this very day.
As I've mentioned, my father was a bit of a, what's the word?, oh yeah- asshole. It was made clear that I would not be allowed to drive his car once I "came home" for that first summer, because such things were Expensive. Blessedly, my sister, who lived an hour away from me in college, was more than happy to conspire against such limits. She had a friend who had a seven-year-old used car she wanted to offload, and Donna made it possible for me, if not to own it, at least to drive it and insure my use of it.
"Nancy Ann" (the friend's nickname, I don't even remember her real one) lived in Sayre PA, just over the state border a bit over half an hour away from both Donna's then-home and my then-dorm. It was an odd detour if you weren't buying a car, but in the end it wasn't all that far from Ithaca, so I somehow got to Sayre, slapped on my first-ever NY plates and ten-day inspection sticker, and rammed the car into gear to drive it north on Route 34 to Cornell, all by myself.
It was a stick, you see. I'd never driven one before in my life other than on driver ed simulators. Nancy Ann gave me a brief lesson to keep me from stalling or slamming the car into the car ahead of me, enough for me to "have the hang" of it; and I crossed back into New York, fiddled with my newfound gearheadery, put the clutch down to get cruising in fourth gear,....
and had the stick separate from the rest of the tranny in my very nervous hand.
----
Some perspective here. This was 1978. Mobile phones were only seen on the TV show "Cannon." Praise the Lord, I did have a AAA membership, and payphones were relatively plentiful back then, so I somehow attracted the attention of both a cop and a tow truck, who jammed the tran into second and got word to my sister and her boyfriend of my verklemptness. Donna was pissed, but somehow we got that wreck back to Binghamton along Route 17, never going out of second gear, forming a slow and painful funeral procession that probably took 90 minutes but seemed like nine and a half weeks.
Days later, the stick was fixed, and I was back to my dorm room to reclaim my few possessions and take the fixed car the 250 miles back to Long Island. Two or three weeks after that, I totalled it on a clear June day, when an oncoming car hit it at highway speed while I was attempting a left turn in front of a median high with grass. (The grass was on the median, not in us.)
Oh, did I mention what kind of car this was? It was the same year and model my roommate for the next three years came back from Boston with- his, luckily retrofitted, to prevent the kind of human immolation that got revealed later that same summer about this particular brand of Fords, which was still being made fun of years later in the Zucker-Abrahams movie Top Secret:
Yes, friends, I present to you, my 1971 Pinto:
I never did drive my father's car, beyond an emergency or two, and I didn't buy my own car for more than two years after that. It was still a Ford, a malady I still suffer from to this very day.
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no subject
Date: 2011-05-19 12:56 am (UTC)My best friend's mother showed me the numeric tattoo on her arm and said, "The man who gave me this, gave medals to Henry Ford."
I'm sure the current generation of Fords aren't Nazis, but still.
no subject
Date: 2011-05-19 01:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-19 01:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-19 01:06 pm (UTC)The SHIFTER came off in your HAND?!
Mein gott.
Also: highway-speed total? In a PINTO?! I'm surprised you're still alive!
no subject
Date: 2011-05-19 01:12 pm (UTC)And the impact was front end to front end, so the dreaded exploding petrol tank didn't come into play.
no subject
Date: 2011-05-19 01:14 pm (UTC)