If anyone needs me, I’ll be sitting in my new car, trying not to cry. I’m not sad, just frustrated, and it’s my own fault. I’m the one who said, “I don’t care what kind of car it is, as long as it has lots of bells and whistles.”
Well, apparently I’m not as good with bells and whistles as I thought. My frustration is the result of staring at what looks like a jumbo-jet dashboard of lit-up dials, diagrams, and warnings and realizing how far I’ve come from my very first car.
You never forget your first
My dad helped me pick out that car. Ohio is Ford country and he was partial to Fords. So he steered me toward a 3rd-hand, mid-50s, two-toned Ford Fairlane with an automatic transmission and a push-button radio that I could never get to work, even though I spent hours trying.
It had crank and wing windows and fuzzy pink dice dangling from the rearview mirror.
Oh no, wait, I never had fuzzy dice. That was in “Grease!”
Sometimes I get my life mixed up with what I’ve seen in movies.
The biggest difference between my first car and my new car is that the former didn’t require a 6-week adult ed class to learn the features and there was no manual because the only instructions needed were the ones my dad gave me, after telling me to stop fiddling with the damn radio — “Get in. Drive.”
And, because it was snow-belt Ohio, “Turn into the skid.”
When left is right
I’ve owned many cars since that sleek Fairlane. There have been sedans, convertibles, station wagons, and SUVs and the only one that ever caused me a bit of trouble (until now) was the small Datsun I drove when we lived in Japan.
The issues I had were related to the fact that the steering wheel was on what we all know is the passenger side of the car. That never did feel normal. Also, since we were in Japan, everyone drove on the left side of the road.
I bet you’re thinking “double whammy!” but wait, it gets worse. I’m talking trifecta here because the car was a stick shift and had to be shifted with the driver’s left hand.
Left-handed people just shrug that off, but I am so firmly right-handed, my left hand may as well be a fin. With practice, eventually, I was able to drive around the block, but because I needed my right hand to help my left hand shift, I could never get the car out of 1st gear.
Still, I drove everywhere — just very, very slowly. And when I overshot our house, I had to drive around the block because I couldn’t get the car into reverse, even with two hands. The only bad incident was once, when I was turning left at a corner and using two hands to shift, I side-swiped a telephone pole.
Lesson learned: you can’t steer with your chin.
Careful what you wish for
All the cars we’ve owned over the years have been pretty basic and not too complicated and since we hang on to them for years, decades sometimes, I wasn’t aware of the bells and whistles that are now standard.
Not until I rode in a relative’s car that sends an alert when there’s a vehicle in the driver’s blind spot, vibrates when the car veers out of its lane, turns on its own windshield wipers, and, best of all, can parallel park itself.
My new car does a lot of those, but I’m not up on them yet because I’m trying to master the basics first, and it took me a whole day just to get into the glovebox. I couldn’t figure it out on my own and finally had to call the salesman who’d worked with us and ask him how to open it.
He said, “The instructions are in the manual.”
I said, “I didn’t get one.”
“Yes you did,” he said. “It’s in the glovebox.”
Read it and weep
The manual, with its small type, is as thick as a post-grad philosophy textbook, twice as boring and crammed with way too much information for my “Grease!”-era brain to grasp. I learn better by doing anyhow, so that’s my plan and why I spend part of each day teary-eyed and hunched over that manual in my car in the driveway.
I know this would make my dad smile. Here I am in a Ford again and all I’m trying to do is get the damn radio to work.
Maybe this is what it means to come full circle.
Image courtesy ClassicAutoMall.com — a 1957 Ford Fairlane described as “hot with a pinch of sweetness”
