When I married Ken, he had a Jag XKE--or some letter or other--convertible.  Two seats.  Baby blue.  He told me to keep it at 4000 RPM's.  Whatever that meant.  So every time I went somewhere, the police picked me up for speeding.  I absolutely couldn't seem to get the car under control.

I had learned to drive with four on the floor, so shifting wasn't a problem, but every time I put the thing in fourth gear it exploded down the road like the racing car that it was.  The Police never gave me a ticket, they just stopped me and told me to keep it down.  I was eighteen, cute, and polite, and usually broke into tears when I explained the problem. They had pity.

Finally, I got stopped by a police man who explained what the problem was. "Didja ever drive a car like this before," he asked?  I told him I was from Oklahoma, married only a few weeks and had no idea why the car kept getting away from me.  "Well, sweetheart," (everyone calls you honey, sweetheart, darlin' or sugar-pie in the South), "You have to adjust your RPM to the gear.  Don't put this thing into fourth gear and you can stay under eighty."  Ken never told me what RPM meant.  Or how the gear you were in determined the speed of the car.  And in my defense, it was an English racing car.  I had always put the cars we drove in Oklahoma into fourth when I got out on the road.  You don't put a Jag in fourth gear unless you're on a race track.  I guess Ken thought I knew!!

I'm lucky I didn't kill myself.  However, I never got it over 120.  I had enough sense to turn the key off and start over again when the speed got away from me.

Ken never told me anything important.  He was 26, I was 18.  He assumed too much.  Flip side was that he never, ever, criticized me, griped at me, or corrected me about anything I did.  "You'll figure it all out," was the extent of conversation.  As a matter of fact, I don't remember a single time in 57 years of marriage he said anything critical to me, about me, or about anyone else.

I can't believe he turned the Jag over to an 18 year old kid with no instructions.  But he did.  And he did the same thing every month with his paycheck.  He would lay it on the table and tell me to learn how to spend it because he would be gone a lot.  I made mistakes, but he came in every month and laid the check on the table.  No instructions, no directions, no criticism.  I learned.  It was hard.