I've been thinking about the demise of my first car lately

I had literally driven my car into the ground by the time I was eighteen. My mom's adopted grandfather had given me a 1976 Pontiac Pariesenne for my sixteenth birthday. It had been my grandmother's but basically sat in the garage for the better part of twenty years. Sparky measured it out at a lean sixteen feet and seven and a quarter inches from bumper to bumper. We took that car everywhere. I would plow through up to eight inches of snow in the winter and the backseat was almost six feet wide which made it the ideal camper in the summer. When there were no parties in town we'd load it up with as much booze (the trunk comfortably fit two bodies) and as many people (it maxed out at ten) as we could, tie a couple of pallets onto the top and the first fallow we saw became the spot for the night. It's what we would have taken into battle. The only problem with it was that it was horrible on gas. It drank it in deep droughts. Oh, it leaked too. That was a big problem. We were on the way home from Lethbridge when I decided I needed something new. We were just putting out a left-hander when Sparky's phone rang. It was Bruce.
“Hey Dad.” Sparky never liked talking to his parents when he was high. I thought it livened the conversation.
“Hey buddy. Is that you and Christie in that big yellow beast in front of me?”
“Uh-”
“Because I'm getting splashed with gasoline.” My gauge had been falling so fast I just thought that it must have been broken. Sparky leaned over to see how much we had in the tank. It was sitting just below a quarter.
“Whaddaya figure?” he asks me, holding his hand over the mouthpiece of his phone.
“I say we can make it.” I look over at him. He gives a concessional nod, and puts the phone back to his mouth.
“Dustin figures we can make it back.” His eyes go wide as he covers the mouthpiece again.
“Maybe we should just call it a day at the Dairy Queen.”
“Why?” He hands me his cell.
“Hi Bruce,” I say.
“So Duster,” he starts, “do you know what happens when that gasoline splashes on your muffler?” Well, this didn't take a rocket scientist.
“It gets muffled?”
“It goes boom.”
“Boom?”
“Boom.”
We pulled into the Dairy Queen in Coaldale. I ran in and told the manager that I'd be leaving my car there. I didn't mention that it was leaking gasoline, but I figured they'd tune into that sooner or later. Bruce laughed at us as we got in his Blazer.
“You two are going to be scary all grown up,” he said, a big smile on his face.
“You two are pretty scary right now,” my Mom said, when we got back to the house. She didn't share Bruce's light-hearted attitude towards my incontinent car.
“You have to get rid of that boat,” she said.
“I just have to get a new gas tank.”
“If a boat leaks, you get a new boat!” And that was final.
Bruce phoned me a couple of weeks later. Sparky told him about my mom's decision and he had been looking around for a car for me. He had a little black sunfire, that brought over to the house for me to test drive. It was a 2002, only 60,000 kilometers on it, most of them highway, and he said he could let me have it for $10,000. It was a sweet deal, and I figured it would be mine until I got into the car. I sat in the driver's seat and stared at the center console with shame and trepidation. He didn't tell me it was a standard transmission. Granted, there were only five gears, but when you have a problem getting out of first there might as well be 24.
“You wanna get going?” he asks me.
“Yeah.”
“Well, let's get her started then.”
“Yeah.”
“Something the matter?” There was. It was something I'd never told anyone before. In a little town like Taber, everyone is pretty much the same. We all wear pretty much the same kind of clothes, hang out in the same arcades and parking lots (it's a small town), hell we even drink the same beer, and most of the time we had the same people buy it for us. Everyone learned how to drive a stick out in the middle of the prairies when they were twelve and their dad's were too drunk to drive back home. Everyone except me.
“I don't know how to drive a standard Bruce.” There. I said it. I waited for the laughter from the passenger seat, and prepared to answer the inevitable 'you gotta be kidding me, right? Right?' But I didn't hear him say anything. I prepared to turn me head toward him, to see the embarrassed blush on his cheeks while he tried to tell me that it was alright, not everyone learns these things. I was prepared for the mortification. So I turned to him. He looked at me through his bifocals and loosened his tie.
“Well, step on the clutch and turn the key. These things only take a couple of hours to master.”
What more can I say? The man taught me how to drive a standard. We tooled around for a bit. In between directions ('you take your foot off the clutch slowly, until you feel the motor catch the gear, then you give it gas, or it'll stall out'), and stall outs ('you didn't think you were going to master this thing in thirty minutes did you?') we talked about how school was going (good), how my mom was (also good), and if I had finally figured out what I was going to take in school.
“Medicine.”
“Dr. Christie eh? Good for you. I'm glad.”
“How's Sparky liking Anadarko?”
“It's going alright as far as I can tell. I don't know why you're asking me, you probably know better.” I did, but silence makes me uncomfortable.
“Yeah. I just have a very limited amount of small talk material.”
“You don't give yourself enough credit.”
“Everyone else gives me too much. It balances out.”
“You're a smart kid, you'll figure things out. Don't ride the clutch. It's a habit that ends up costing a lot of money.” I felt a hint of envy as I pulled the car back into my driveway. I thanked Bruce, shook his hand, and told him I'd think about it. I didn't buy that car.