12/9/22 - Friday Forget-Me-Nots by Jim Silcott

Dear Our Lady of Peace Family,

I finally got my new used car this week after a definitive encounter with a six-point buck on Halloween night that totaled

my 2013 stick shift Honda Fit.

After the accident, after being trapped in my car for fifteen minutes waiting for the Licking County Sheriff to get me out

while vehicles of all shapes and sizes sped by on 161 at 70 miles an hour inches from my driver side door, after sitting

there with no lights and no flashers, hoping that the deer would be the only collision of the night, after realizing that the Fit was completely destroyed, and, after dozens of people seeing the picture of the wreck tell me how lucky I was, these same people urged me, this time,

to get a bigger car.

But I can be stubborn. I wanted another Fit. I wanted another Fit with a stick shift.

Honda doesn’t make Fits anymore and manual transmission cars are hard to find, but I am stubborn. I wanted what I

wanted. Mark Warren, the Grand Knight of our local Knights of Columbus Council, told me to call “his guy.” “You tell

Larry what you are looking for and he will keep his eyes open at car auctions.”

So I called Larry and told him I wanted a used Fit with a stick shift. Larry said, “ I have about 4 people ahead of you

looking for a Fit. Besides that, Fits with stick shifts almost never come up.”

But the same guardian angel who kept me safe that night went back to work. The very next day Larry phoned me. “You

won’t believe it,” he said, “but there’s a 2015 Honda Fit with stick up for auction today, and if its any good, I am going to

get it.”

And he did. Larry spent a few weeks sprucing up an old car so that it looked mostly like new. On Saturday, after

Breakfast with Santa, I was able to take it home.

Most of my life I have owned stick shift automobiles. I purchased my first car at the age of 15 anticipating the

obtainment of my driver’s license. It was a beat-up 1961 Ford Falcon with “three on the tree” manual transmission for

one hundred bucks. It also had a hole on the front passenger side floor. My father insisted on a safer and bigger car, so

ended up with a 1964 Buick Skylark Convertible, one of the only automatic cars I have owned.

Other cars down the road included at 1971 VW square back, a 1963 Kaiser post office jeep with the steering wheel on

the right and sliding doors, a CJ 5 jeep, a beat-up old Datsun sedan, a couple of Saturns, and a Smart Car. All had stick

shift.

My children all realized that they needed to learn how to drive with a third pedal and a manual transmission if they

wanted to use the car. Like me, they all experienced those moments of terror when you are stopped on a hill and must

take your foot off the brake to engage the clutch, and you think that you are going to roll back down the hill and hit

whatever is behind you! None of us ever did!

I am not a good athlete, and I am not that coordinated. The older I get the more klutzy I become. But driving a stick shift

car and riding a bicycle are two things that I have done long enough to be good at. I still get a thrill from upshifting and

downshifting the car as I increase and decrease speed. Yes, driving a stick in heavy traffic can be a pain, but using three

pedals instead of two and changing gears effortlessly makes me feel kind of cool, and being cool is not something I get to

experience in most other aspects of my life.



The 2015 Fit is the sporty model with mag wheels and tinted windows and a six-speed transmission. It also has a back-up

camera which I still don’t fully trust. One of the students here gifted me with a set of deer whistles for the front of the

car. I am not sure how effective they will be but I’ll feel better anyway. A friend told me that the odds were now in my

favor. “Once you hit a deer, you probably won’t ever hit another.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him that while living in

Lancaster I had not one but two deer collisions with my little, tiny Smart car! Just call me Deerslayer!

Jim Silcott