THE TRIUMPH OF TIME

 I borrowed my sister and her car today to teach my son how to drive a manual transmission car. He's thinking of buying one and had never learned to drive them. My sister insisted on coming along because she had taught her own 3 sons over the years to drive manual transmission and thought it would be fun to watch me enlightened as to how that goes. Her 3 were incredibly resistant to mastering the technique. As she said, if there was a car or a pole in the parking lot, the first one would hit it, the second one always found some way to drive out of the lot and onto the grass and the 3rd was always a surprise.

It went the way I thought it would. He's been driving for 7 years. Show the gears, go through them all with the clutch in, "OK, drive." The hill was iffy for a few minutes but I heard words I never expected to hear in this lifetime after a year as auxiliaries officer on the Middle East Force Flagship. "I was worried about over-revving the engine and that's why I kept stalling." Hah!

I remember well the day in Diego Garcia when we all got into the Captain's gig to head back to the ship riding at anchor in the lagoon and listening as the idiot coxswain wound the engine up to 5000 rpm in neutral and then slammed it into reverse gear so we'd have a dramatic moment getting underway from fleet landing. 

It was memorable. The boat slowly drifted over to the beach and grounded and the XO and I exchanged looks with the Chief Engineer and I shrugged my shoulders as the First Lieutenant was explaining it was all my fault and the fault of the engine men who maintained the engines. The V drive coupler had been torn apart and the drive shaft severely damaged. It was a sort of everyday occurrence on that ship back then under that First Lieutenant and Bosun. Nothing would get the bosun's mates to stop destroying any machinery they touched.

The new First Lieutenant joined us in the Seychelles just before we headed up to conduct MCM operations in the Red Sea. All the idiot shenanigans stopped the next day. The destructive mindset was one that was expected out of the old Bosun and the previous First Lieutenant and was gone within 24 hours.

Still, it caused a smile to appear on my face to hear my son express his concern about over-revving the engine before putting it into gear.  Whole worlds can be conquered simply by understanding that not everything has to be wound up to destruction.

OK, admittedly, Cortez took another approach, but still...