"Please, George, don't get morbid," I protested. "I'm nervous enough as it is, without having to worry about my own bodily safety."
"The middle pedal, marked 'R,' is the reverse, and the one at the right, marked 'B,' is the foot brake. Now, when you want to start—"
"Just a minute, please," I said sternly. "You skip over those as if there were something about them you were a little ashamed of, George. Are you keeping something from me about the reverse and the foot brake?"
"I didn't know but that somewhere in your valuable college course they taught you what 'reverse' meant, and I was sure that your little son had told you all about the foot brake on his express wagon," said George, waxing sarcastic in the manner of the technical man that he is.
"I don't want you to take anything for granted in teaching me to run this thing," I replied. "It is those little things that count, you know, and I would feel just as badly as you would if I were to run your car over a cliff into a rocky gorge because of some detail that I was uninformed about. You know that, George."
"Very well," he said, "I'll get down to fundamentals. When you push the reverse pedal, you drive the car in the opposite direction from that in which it is headed. This is done by tightening the external contracting clutch bands which are between the gearing and the disk clutch."
Somehow this struck me as funny. The idea of reversing by tightening any bands at all, much less external contracting ones, was the one thing needed to send me off into roars of laughter. The whole thing seemed so flat, after the excitement of the war, and everything.
Naturally George didn't get it. It was 'way over his head, and I knew that there would be no use trying to explain it to him. So I just continued to chuckle and murmur: "External contracting clutch bands! You'll be the death of me yet, George!"
But I felt that, as the minutes went by, the situation was getting strained. My instructor and I were growing farther and farther apart in spirit, and, after all, it was his car and he was going to considerable trouble to teach me to run it, and the least that I could do would be to take him seriously, whether the thing struck me as being sensible or not.
So I calmed myself with some effort, and tried to bring the conversation around to an opening for him to begin with further explanations.