Commentary: Driver’s licenses and stick shifts…a Labor Day reflection on retirement

By James Ward

What goes around, comes around.

On the playgrounds of Buffalo, NY, where I grew up, that was an oft-stated proverb. If you did someone wrong, eventually you will have an equivalent wrong done to you. This notion, like Hammurabi’s code of an eye for an eye, seems harsh in today’s more forgiving era. But looking over my almost seven decades, I have to say that there’s something to it.

What has come around to me is a long-ago insensitivity to an aging man’s regret at his shrinking life. My guess is that anyone with a relatively long life and the habit of introspection can look back on times when they lacked the perspective or patience to comfort someone in need of comforting. It’s a case of too soon old, too late smart.

The boomerang comes around with the most force if the original put-upon person was a loved one. In this case it was my father.

He, like many of his generation lived a life of fundamental challenges. Born into poverty in Oil City, PA, he never knew his father, spent two long periods in a Buffalo orphanage, received an education not equivalent to today’s third grade, and was a combat-wounded, partially disabled and decorated veteran of World War II.

He overcame all of that to earn a good blue collar living, own a house, and with my mother, his wife of nearly 50 years, raise four children all of whom were determinedly set on the path to the American middle class.

He earned his living as a truck driver and mechanic. What comes back to me so vividly now is one night in the early 1980s, sitting at his little kitchen table after his retirement, watching him open his mail. One of the letters was from the Motor Vehicle Department – his driver’s license renewal. His was a special license, what is now referred to as a Class A Commercial Driver’s License (CDL). He also had an added endorsement permitting him to tow a double trailer.

He sat at the table deciding whether to renew all levels of his license – there was added cost for the CDL and the enhancement. At that point he was 70 years of age, and unlikely to ever drive a big rig again. He was a frugal man. He told me the additional cost of the commercial license and the special endorsement and asked what I thought.

Not thinking much about it, I gave a perfunctory answer, based on logic, not feeling. It was something about the decision being an easy one – drop the CDL and the endorsement and save the money. At his age it made sense, and he was a man dedicated to common sense and practicality, traits which had served him well. Traits which I tried to emulate.

I remember being surprised that he didn’t immediately agree and fill out the form indicating he was only renewing his basic license. Instead he set it back on the counter with the bills to be paid as close as possible to their due dates.

What I didn’t think about at the time, was how proud he was of his special license and what giving it up meant to him. But the conversation took root in my memory, waiting patiently for sufficient grounds to come around. It took almost 40 years and a specific spark for that to happen – me at 68 shopping for a new pickup truck.

I’d been telling friends of my dilemma. In over 50 years of car and truck ownership I have remained faithful to the standard transmission. From the car that my father taught me on, a 1956 Chevy Bel-Air with a cranky clutch and three-speed column shift, to my first car, a 1962 Chevrolet, and my current 2009 Toyota Tacoma pickup, it’s been all stick shifts.

Now, looking at the 2020 vehicles with their limited selection of standard transmissions, the only way I could continue with a stick shift was to buy, at extra expense, a model that I didn’t need or want. When I mentioned this to family and friends, the reaction was universal – get the automatic and save the money, they’re better anyway, and at my age, isn’t it time to prioritize ease and convenience.

So why should giving up the stick shift for an automatic transmission matter so much to me? I had to think about that.

Maybe it was my father preaching to me in the 1960’s about the superiority of the standard: Better performance and gas mileage, the ability to push the car and pop the clutch if the battery died, better control when you can manually choose the gears and, of course, lower cost.

But today the automatics are not only easier to drive than a standard, but with their increasing sophistication they have closed or eliminated the performance gap.

As I thought about that, my father and the long-ago discussion of his special license came back to me. What had gone around, had come around. Because now I recognized it was not about my fidelity to the standard transmission, just as my father’s decision wasn’t about additional license fees. It was about not giving in to aging, and what even the slightest retreat portends.

So, what if I could go back to that evening of 30-some years ago and answer my father’s question about his license renewal.

“Son, what do you think?”

I can say one thing for sure. Before I answered, I would think a lot more.

James Ward is a novelist and short story writer. He lives in Morristown, New Jersey. His novel titled Every Commandment but the Fifth takes place in a town very similar to Morristown. His late father was born during Labor Day week in 1913.