Driving with a fish bowl

After my son totaled the Volvo I'm back to a stick shift Volkswagen for the first time since I learned to drive on my mother's Karmann Ghia in 1968. What has changed in the intervening decades is the ascendance of the automatic transmission. The world around me seems to have no collective memory of the different rhythm of driving required by the old clutch.

Philadelphia drivers are like Philadelphia sports fans: obnoxious. They're on the horn the nanosecond the light turns red. This is not a fortuitous combination with the slow-out-of-the-gate manual. Romans are even more boisterous horn-blowers, by the way, but they don't mean it in a nasty way; they're just Italian.

Driving a '96 Jetta you are like a handicapped person. Or like a person with a fish bowl on the seat that you're bringing home for little Johnny's birthday. But the motorist behind you cannot see the fish bowl --- or understand stick shift issues --- and he is not sympathetic.

But what about me? How many times have a written someone off, or "blown my horn" at him, or been annoyed at him or disliked him, totally oblivious to the fact that he has, as it were, a fish bowl on his seat?