“Ease off the clutch.” My father spoke calmly from the passenger seat, but I was nervous.

We were on a steep incline and there was a car behind me, a teenage boy in a muscle car. I could see him in the rearview mirror gesturing angrily.

The light was green, I was still sitting there, afraid I’d pop the clutch, or worse, roll backwards.

“Here pull up on the handbrake.” The handbrake was between the bucket seats. Daddy yanked it up with a squeak.

“You’re not going anywhere, now ease off the clutch with your left foot and gently press the accelerator with your right.”

The boy behind me began to honk.

As I slowly let off the clutch and pressed the gas, my father released the handbrake. The car lurched forward.

“Clutch!”

The car jolted up the hill.

“Now second.”

The boy screeched his car around mine and shouted as he passed, “Learn to drive!”

I knew how to drive. I had gotten my license a few months earlier. Now I was learning how to drive a stick.

Daddy was keen to teach me.

He grew up driving manual transmissions. In fact, as a young man, he drove flatbed lumber trucks piled high with logs around winding West Virginia roads. He had a lot of stories about spills and jackknifes. When we passed a log truck—or really any kind of truck on the highway—he always had a story to tell about the make and model. He’d wave to the drivers and they’d nod in return. Or flash their lights.

It was a special league—the league of truck drivers.

“Learning a manual shift will make you a better driver,” he said. “And if you can learn to drive this Saab, you can drive anything.”

I wanted to drive anything. I wanted to drive a school bus. Almost all the buses were manual shift, and if you couldn’t drive stick, you couldn’t join the school bus drivers league. And the bus drivers’ league was cool.

Joining was a goal of mine.

But Daddy’s Saab was a challenge.

He had a red, two-door 1967 Saab 93. He had to pre-mix the oil—a special kind of Castrol—the same kind you used in a lawnmower. In fact, Daddy’s Saab was not much more than a lawnmower with windows. Even so, he loved it. Most Saturdays I could find him in the car port of our Oak Park house, under the hood at work on the two-stroke, three-cylinder engine. The Saab was not fast, by any means. But it was a hoot to drive, once you learned the gear ratios.

It wasn’t easy, though. The car had four on the tree, which was unusual then, as well as a manual throttle that you had to fiddle with when the engine was cold.

“Go back. I want you to practice on the hill again,” my father instructed.

I was excited that he was allowing me to drive the car, his prized possession.

Daddy had bought the car secondhand for my mother. At the time, she was commuting to work, and he liked the car because it was good on gas. But she just couldn’t drive it. The car made her madder than a wet hen, always stalling and sputtering when she tried to change gears.

As much as she hated the car, she did credit it with saving her life once.

She stalled at an intersection. And just as she was cursing her luck—to a chorus of honking from the cars behind her—a large tractor trailer plowed through the intersection, completely ignoring the traffic signal. If the Saab had not stalled, my mother would have been right in the path of the light-running truck, instead of frustratingly trying to get out of first gear on the green light. She likely would have been killed.

Mother refused to drive the Saab after that.

Daddy kept the Saab for himself and bought my mother a small Datsun station wagon. Needless to say, it was automatic shift.

Some of the auto repairs on the Saab exceeded even Daddy’s abilities. He discovered an auto mechanic named Tim Nine, who specialized in Saabs and other exotic imports. His shop was in Franklin, NC, some distance from our place in west Raleigh. Daddy made frequent trips there even so. He and Tim soon became fast friends. At one point Daddy bought a wrecked Saab from Tim and hauled it to our house, where he parked it in the backyard under a stand of pine trees. He cannibalized the car for parts whenever he needed to tune up his Saab.

The more I drove the Saab, the better able I became at easing out of first gear—even when stopped on a steep incline. The rest was magic.

People would pull up beside me at a traffic light and shout, “What kind of Volkswagen IS that?”

“It’s not,” I’d say, and wave as I glided smoothly away when the light turned green.

Being able to drive stick was an impressive credential.

I could drive the old clunker trucks that Daddy bought to use on his mountain land.

I could confound pimply-faced boys at valet parking stands, many of whom could not manage to park my car. I heard manual-transmission cars were also rarely stolen.

And, I was able to get that job driving a school bus.

So many benefits for a few weeks of embarrassment stalling out at intersections.