“Please sign on the pad,” the rep says. I’m at the Sixt rental car counter at San Francisco International. From here Tizi and I will drive three hours south and east to Mariposa for a family visit. The rep points at the 4 x 6 screen with its attached stylus on the counter, an odd marriage of new and old technology. I provide a jerky bit of scrawl that looks vaguely like my initials, remembering the days when my handwriting looked decent. No, it’s not the screen’s fault. But illegible doesn’t really matter here. If I made my X it would suffice.
When the agent finishes the deal, she sends the rental agreement and a receipt to my email and hands me the it’s-a-fob-not-a-key to the car.
What comes next is fraught–what kind of car? how new-fangled? It’s nice to drive a new car, but how do things work? I remind myself, before leaving the garage, to locate a few basics, like windshield wipers, like heat, like cruise control. Like how do I start this thing (a button hidden in a shadowy curve on the dash). When I find one, a genial Sixt garage hand helps me set up Carplay. I wake up Google Maps, rotate the P-D-N-R knob to D (I hesitate to say I “shift”), and head for the freeway.
A few years ago, when one of the Barnes and Noble stores in our area closed, I bought a packet of small black paperback 4×6 Moleskin journals, each with 40-50 pages. One of them would fit neatly in the bag I carry.
I figured, not for the first time, that I would take one with me on a trip. I pictured myself, not for the first time, sitting in a cafe or on a train, Moleskin open, a pen in my hand, thinking, writing, musing; capturing local sights and sounds along with new personal truths. Smart phone, I thought, be gone. No more thumbing its annoying tiny keyboard. One of my mentors often talked about writing longhand and honoring the written word, about the importance of pen-in-hand calligraphy in the long history of literacy. In theory, it made sense. Longhand was good. In practice, what I see on the page today looks ragged and dishonorable.
We’re approaching the San Mateo bridge at 65 mph when the car dings and the tv screen lights up. “PRECOLLISION WARNING!” What the hell?! Is it something I did or didn’t do? Should I slow down, speed up, swerve? Nothing has prepared me for this.
“What the hell!” I say. “Where is it?”
“Where’s what?” Tizi says.
I point at the tv. “That. Look! We’re about to have a collision.” I steal a glance at the screen again, which seems like the wrong thing to do in a precollision situation.
“It’s nothing,” she says. “I think I saw ‘test’ just now.”
“Test? That’s insane. It could cause an accident.”
Later, when we’re settled in cruise mode again, I’m reminded of the emergency broadcast script you see and hear: This was just a test. If this was a real emergency you would be instructed to . . .”
Out of habit I carry a functioning ink pen in my bag, with it a scrap of paper. Just in case. But over time, when I don’t feel like stopping and taking out the paraphernalia and looking for a reasonably flat surface, I’ve started composing notes on my phone, voice to text. “Hey, Siri, take a note.” On 12/16/25, I “composed” this note with Siri: “I pull up to a stoplight. In front of me is a Dodge Ram. On the tailgate in large letters RAM. I know that’s a noun not a verb, but it feels like a funny invitation.” On 12/22/25, this: “As one grows old, sometimes one develops a dodder, resulting in doddering behavior.”
#
New cars these days have between 50 and 100 interconnected computers, called ECU’s (electronic control units) and up to 5000 feet of wiring. Long gone are mechanical systems with levers and cranks and switches that snap and click and make things work. Cars are smart now. Our smart car back home has a 500 page user’s manual in the glove box (there’s barely room for a pair of gloves).
Our second car, the one I drive, is dumb.
Remember “cash for clunkers”? In the fall of 2009 I drove our fifteen-year-old rusty Ford Explorer to the Dodge dealer down in Saline. I’d been swapping phone calls with our salesman Barney for a week or so. He was dedicated, as always, to getting us the best deal possible. I was thinking about the PT Cruiser, feeling a certain fondness for the car, knowing that Tizi had worked on the engine’s air and fuel system. When I mentioned it to our kids, they both scoffed. (It’s terrible when your adult children scoff.) They said PT Cruiser was an old lady’s car. Barney said sure, he could get me one of those, but the government would give us even more money for an econo model. How about the Caliber?
I didn’t know the car. He didn’t have one on the lot. He said it would mean another $2500 from the government. I reasoned that it would just be a second car. How bad could it be? And I found that I could be bought. With government money, Tizi’s employee discount, a dealer discount, and additional reductions for a smaller engine and a standard transmission, I got the car for half price. Barney said it was the best deal he’d ever done.
The day I drove it home, Caliber did not feel like such a good fit. It was slow to accelerate. It was modestly ugly. I’d made fun of hatchback models a couple friends drove, said their cars looked like miniature garbage trucks. And now here I was. But the car had a few redeeming characteristics, chief among them a five-speed stick shift on the floor.
If there’s a stick shift on the floor, in my book it’s a sports car.
I’ll always choose stick. For as long as I’ve driven in Italy, I’ve rented the standard economy model over there–with a stick shift on the floor. I want to cruise the Apennine foothills with my hand on the stick, my foot on and off the clutch, rounding curves, downshifting on hills, enjoying the feel of driving, of operating the car. Sometimes I’m asked at the counter, when the agent sees my passport—rental agencies over there lie in wait for American drivers—“Oh, do you need the automatic transmission?” There’s an extra charge for that.
In contrast, at the rental desk in the US, I don’t even bother asking for a stick. There’s probably an extra charge for that. I can imagine the rental agent saying, A what? Especially now, in the smart car era.
In casual conversation I say I drive a sports car. Driving a Caliber, it’s difficult to maintain the illusion. My dumb car is the object of ridicule and contumely. My son asked once, “Dad, how can you like that car?” The online critics are brutal:
An unimpressive driving experience (says Car and Driver).
Like a toy car, with hard, low-quality plastics and a ‘blow-molded turtle sandbox’ feel.
The official car of the milquetoast dad who meant to buy a Toyota Matrix or Pontiac Vibe, but instead got suckered into buying an ex-rental, refrigerator-white one-year-old example of . . .
Poor interior quality (cheap plastics, cramped space), weak performance (especially with the automatic trans), poor visibility (big blind spots), and significant reliability issues like transmission failures.
Condom of Cars: A car for short-term, disposable use, lacking character or longevity.
So Bad It’s Good (for, some): Its cheapness and quirks occasionally earned it a cult following, making it a low-cost novelty
When I mention it, I’m shown nothing but pity towards me and hatred towards the car.
Extremely ugly
Any other car in its class is better than it in every way.
It’s possibly one of the worst cars I’ve ever driven.
Third grade with Mrs Hilton was a long time ago. Using the Peterson Directed Handwriting method, she taught us our letters, upper case and lower case. I vividly remember the uppercase Q, which looked like the number 2. I think most of us wanted to write in cursive. It was cool. I wrote crooked, irregular longhand through junior high, practiced writing my signature hundreds of times in the 7th grade, always disappointed in its lack of flare; I wrote pen and pencil through high school, university, and finally grad school, where we wrote our three-hour final exams longhand.
By the time I got to the classroom of my own, I had developed a loopy scribble that I thought looked smart. I told students, many of whom wrote in block caps only, they’d get used to it. (I also told them to stop writing in block caps.) One student, who was new to English, dropped my class, saying she couldn’t read my writing on the board.
Today when I write something longhand, I feel a real sense of shame. My hands work fine for basic fine motor tasks. I’ve wondered if there’s something in the wiring connecting my brain to my hand. Studies of adults and their handwriting, however, suggest that unless a real neurological disorder is in evidence, the primary cause is simply lack of practice. In a study of 30 unimpaired adults in their 70’s, the average number of words individuals wrote at a time was 18. Shopping lists, puzzles, games, short notes (“gone to the store”) got those muscles working, falling far short of an actual workout.
The first fifteen years of my teaching, all freshman composition, I wrote longhand comments on students’ work. One hundred students each semester, eight assignments, 800 opportunities to compose a helpful, edifying note to the student in longhand that, to me at least, looked good. Then came computer-aided instruction, less longhand, more computer-aided comments.
Early in the morning after we get home from this trip I’ll go to the store for a few groceries, leaving a hand-written four-word note on the kitchen table. I’ll drive the Caliber, enjoying the feel of taking it through the gears. If there’s such a thing as cellular memory, I think that accounts for the pleasure I get from driving a stick. When I was a kid, as soon as I was old enough to sit up straight, I rode with my father in his truck. It had a four-speed transmission and two-speed axle. The power surging and easing as he went through the gears must have settled in my nerves and muscles. Resting my hand on Caliber’s stick shift I feel a connection, like I’m placing my hand on his.
In a cupboard above the desk where I write on my laptop at home is a recipe box. I can pull out a sheet of paper and see my mother’s notes on blueberry boy bait. I know the script. It’s her hand. One year at the family apartment in San Marino we found a shoe box full of postcards my father-in-law had sent to my mother-in-law from pre-WWII Africa. The hand was almost more important than the words. You know the longhand of the people you love the way you know their faces. Losing those traces–it now seems sure to happen–will be a great loss.