This past weekend my younger daughter turned 21 and during a brief lull between morning Mimosas and evening Margaritas, she surprised me by wanting to come along for my weekly exercising of the Alfa. Yes, I’m being a good boy and running the car each week.
So, the two of us are happily motoring along to the steady purr of two cams, accompanied by dual Webers, when my daughter casually looks down and innocently asks, “What’s that pedal in the middle?” Of course, my gentle, fatherly reply was, “You’re f-ing kidding, right?” Apparently, she wasn’t. “Ah…that’s the brake,” I replied awkwardly.
To which my now drinking age daughter countered, “Right, that’s what I thought. So, if that’s the brake, what’s the other pedal to the left of it.” Ah! Now we get to the crux of the situation. When she rode in the Alfa as a small child, she was oblivious to the many switches, levers and pedals. Few kids care about the details… Go faster Dada, go faster!
But now, as a driving adult, I realize that she’s never really been exposed to a car with a manual transmission. Nowadays, in the U.S. at least, you’re hard-pressed to find a new car with a manual transmission. Slightly appalled—but relieved that she at least knew what the brake was—I then launched into a fatherly diatribe on the workings of the clutch and its actions on the transmission… yadda-yadda-yadda.
To her credit, she appeared politely interested, but seemingly unimpressed with my lecture so we soon returned to just the gentle, dulcet tones of the engine singing along at 4,000 rpm. However, a few minutes later, our shared automotive Zen was again broken, when my apparently now more observant daughter proclaimed, “That can’t be right, we’re going much faster than 45 miles per hour.”
Since I had recently invested some $300 in having my speedometer fixed —some 10 years ago the needle elected to leap to his own death at the bottom of the gauge — I looked down with alarm, only to see that we were, in fact, doing 60 mph with said resurrected needle pointing dead-nuts straight up as God had intended it to. “What are you talking about?”, I countered. “The gauge says we’re doing 60.”
To which my youngin replied, “No it’s not, it says 45 right there.” Confused, and now concerned that I had been gypped out of $300, I furiously scanned the gauge until I finally located what she was referring to. Much to my amazement (and horror if I’m honest) she was looking at the trip odometer! But in her defense, she has grown up in a digital world, not an analog one and the trip odometer numbers stand out more prominently than the 60-year-old white MPH numerals silkscreened on the formerly clear, now yellowing bezel.
As we motored on down the freeway, I wrestled with how I could have so completely failed as a father. Should I have denied her all those dance classes in lieu of a shifter kart? Should I have at least forced her to learn to drive on a stick? I was beating myself up thusly when I happened to spot an early Porsche 911 coming up in the lane next to us. As it pulled alongside, I gave the man behind the wheel a knowing nod of acknowledgement, as we all do, and then noticed what appeared to be his teenage daughter in the passenger seat next to him, presumably on the same father-daughter Sunday drive bonding exercise that we were…except she had this bored, please-come-save-me hostage look on her face that said this was not her Sunday dream come true. And this gave me hope.
At least my daughter wanted to be out there with me in the old car. And between her growing interest in Formula One and possibly the first inklings of an interest in classic cars, I began to believe that maybe it’s never too late to pass on the disease. But if she is truly bitten by the bug, I’ll now face the even more daunting dilemma… how is she going to learn to drive a stick? She ain’t learning on my car!
