Red is positive, black is negative. It’s like a mantra from a youth spent around old and failing cars.
“Just remember,” I said to my son as we stood over the engine of one of my late father’s junk cars like two paramedics about to employ a defibrillator, “black, negative, like negative space in a painting, like the negative void of blackest outer space.”
“Yeah, I got it,” he said with some impatience. And then, with a happy little spark, we got the alligator teeth of the jumper cable clamps to grip the battery terminals, and with a revving of the juice-giving “good” car — carrying on the tradition, a 2008 Honda with 290,000 miles on it — the decrepit vehicle started up with a roar.
The battery was only five years old, and thus serviceable, and the car’s sedentary status had lasted only a year, but was well evidenced by the copious green mold on most every inch of the interior, as the driver’s-side window is forever unable to rise.
The transmission, it turns out, is shot. I’d thought it at least semi-functional. Worse, the car is German — not only remarkably heavy, but punishing on the average American’s wallet for so much as a token repair.
Still, even if it was only an exercise, and even if none of it is exactly my son’s cup of tea, it was worth it to show him how to jump-start a vehicle, because you never know.
Unfortunately, with the death of the stick shift, I won’t be instructing him on the more athletic strategy of shouldering against a hunk of sheet metal, getting the bucket of bolts rolling, hopping behind the wheel while it’s in motion, and popping the clutch to turn the engine over. One of life’s more satisfying maneuvers.
Children of the 1970s, and at best middle class, this is a background my wife and I share — the bad car follies, the automotive headaches, the switcheroos and the making do, the stripped-down Dodge van, her family’s celery green, ours blood red, the legendarily shoddy Ford Pinto, hers two-door, ours a station wagon, one whose odometer miles I remember watching my father roll back, pre-sale, maybe not the greatest lesson, but hey, those were different times.
As a teenager my wife even popped the clutch to start some old jalopy as her older brother shouted “Now!” after getting it rolling from the top of an incline.
My heart sang when I heard that story.