In 1989, I learned to drive around the relatively quiet streets of Rizal Village in Alabang in my dad’s pale-gold Mitsubishi Galant. I got my driving licence at sixteen, eventually made it all the way to Los Baños, had one fairly unsettling encounter in Alabang Market, and then somehow spent most of the next few decades not driving at all.
I remembered my dad’s old car completely out of the blue recently. There wasn’t an old photograph in front of me, no vintage Mitsubishi had just driven past, and I hadn’t fallen down one of those internet rabbit holes where you begin by looking up an old cassette deck and emerge two hours later knowing the complete history of Japanese automotive exports. The memory simply turned up: my dad’s pale-gold 1979 Mitsubishi Galant Σ Super Saloon, the car in which I learned to drive sometime around 1989, when I was sixteen.
It had been sitting somewhere in the back of my head for decades, apparently waiting for its turn. I hadn’t thought seriously about it in years, perhaps because driving itself eventually became almost entirely irrelevant to my life. Yet for a brief period when I was sixteen, learning how to operate that car felt important. Driving was one of those things adults knew how to do and children didn’t, so getting behind the wheel seemed like crossing some invisible boundary. I wasn’t suddenly independent or particularly grown-up, but I could now make a large piece of machinery go forwards without killing the engine, and at sixteen that felt like progress.
Beige Corduroy, an Old-Car Smell and Three Pedals
By the time I started learning, the Galant was already about ten years old, although it wasn’t what I would call a jalopy. My dad looked after it properly, so it still ran smoothly and the steering felt responsive. The air-conditioning occasionally had ideas of its own and would decide that producing properly cold air was an optional extra, but otherwise the car never struck me as particularly decrepit. Compared with some of the other vehicles around us at the time, it was almost respectable.
The colour was a pale gold that seems unmistakably of its period now. Inside, there were beige corduroy seat covers, which probably tells you almost everything you need to know about late-Seventies and early-Eighties automotive taste without consulting a design history book. Brown, tan, cream and beige apparently covered most human emotional requirements. It wasn’t a luxurious interior, and there wasn’t much personal clutter either. The cabin was usually quite bare, with the stock radio providing most of the entertainment rather than boxes of cassette tapes sliding around whenever we went around a corner.
If the radio was on, it was usually tuned to whatever I listened to at the time: NU 107, 99.5 RT, Monster Radio RX 93.1, or Campus Radio 97.1. I don’t associate the car with one particular song or album because the radio itself was really the soundtrack. You drove around and whatever was being broadcast became part of the journey. There were no playlists, no Bluetooth, no phone deciding that because you once listened to a song in 2017 you obviously wanted to hear it every third Tuesday for the rest of your life.
The Galant also had what I can only describe as an old-car smell. The new-car scent had presumably disappeared years before I ever sat behind the wheel, leaving behind that mixture of vinyl, fabric, dust, heat and age that older cars accumulate. Even cleaning one was a more analogue operation. Vacuum cleaners weren’t something we routinely dragged out to clean the interior, so the floor mats came out and were beaten with a broom until enough dust had escaped for everybody to agree that the job was finished. It wasn’t detailing. Nobody was applying ceramic coatings or using tiny brushes to clean the gaps around dashboard switches. You hit the mat with a broom, the mat became less dusty, and that was the job done.
Learning the Mechanical Negotiation
My instructors were my cousins on my father’s side, the sons of his only sister. They were several years older than me, which at sixteen seemed sufficient qualification to entrust them with the task of teaching me how to drive. We began around Rizal Village in Alabang, where we lived at the time. The subdivision streets weren’t especially busy, making them a fairly forgiving place to work out the mechanical negotiation involved in driving a manual car.
The first lesson was essentially about coordination. Clutch down, engage first gear, slowly let the clutch up, add enough accelerator to keep the engine alive, then try not to panic when the car begins moving. The theory is simple enough when somebody explains it to you. Your left foot, however, doesn’t initially understand why it has suddenly been given such an important job. There was a lot of concentration involved in finding that point where the clutch began to engage without either launching the car forward awkwardly or allowing the engine to cough, shudder and die.
I stalled occasionally, although apparently not enough to make everyone give up on me. Once I began to understand the clutch, the rest slowly became less intimidating: shifting gears, braking smoothly, judging turns, watching the mirrors and learning that driving involves keeping track of several things at once while pretending this is all perfectly normal.
Uphill starts were more troublesome. A flat road at least stays where it is while you work things out, whereas an incline introduces gravity into the argument. There is a particularly unpleasant moment for a novice manual driver when the car begins rolling backwards and you know that somewhere behind you is another vehicle whose driver assumes you have considerably more competence than you actually possess. Eventually I learned to balance clutch, accelerator and brake well enough to make the car go in the intended direction. I’m sure my cousins experienced some character-building moments in the passenger seat along the way.
Out Through the Village Gates
Once I could start, stop and change gears with reasonable consistency, we began venturing outside Rizal Village. First came the service roads and then the main roads, which was when the whole business stopped feeling like an exercise and became actual driving. Inside the subdivision, mistakes could usually be dealt with at low speed with plenty of space. Outside it, there were jeepneys, buses, pedestrians, intersections and drivers who had no idea they were sharing the road with a sixteen-year-old still consciously thinking about what his left foot was doing.
One of those drives took us through the busy Alabang Market area, and that produced the incident I remember more clearly than almost anything else from learning to drive. Somewhere in the congestion, I managed to brush a woman’s backside with one of the Galant’s side mirrors. I use the word brush deliberately because I didn’t knock her over or cause some dramatic collision, but it was enough. When you are already a nervous young driver, discovering that part of the moving vehicle you are controlling has just made contact with an actual human being is deeply unsettling. I remember feeling badly shaken by it, and in hindsight I suspect that little incident affected my attitude towards driving more than I understood at the time. Until then, the challenge had mostly been mechanical: don’t stall, select the right gear, stay in your lane. Suddenly the responsibility became much more real.
Perhaps another sixteen-year-old would have shrugged it off and carried on without thinking about it again. I didn’t. I became much more wary of driving afterwards. I wouldn’t say that single moment explains why driving eventually disappeared from my life, but it certainly didn’t encourage me to become one of those people who cannot wait for an excuse to get behind the wheel.
Apparently I Wasn’t Allowed a Perfect Score
The process of actually getting my driving licence turned out to be considerably less dramatic than learning to drive. I did very well on the written examination. In fact, I was certain I had answered everything correctly, but the testers insisted I had made one mistake. There was a girl taking the examination at around the same time who was equally convinced that she had achieved a perfect score, and they told her that she had made exactly one mistake as well.
Even then, I remember thinking this was suspicious. Perhaps perfection was administratively inconvenient. Maybe there was an unofficial policy somewhere stating that nobody was allowed to leave the building believing they knew all the road rules. Whatever the explanation, I was credited with one mysterious error and moved on to the practical test.
I took that in the Galant itself. There wasn’t an elaborate obstacle course or any particularly intimidating series of manoeuvres. The examiner wanted to see the basic pre-drive checks and whether I could competently operate the clutch, brake, accelerator and gearshift, followed by a short drive around the block. After spending time learning on actual roads, it felt almost anticlimactic.
Passing was anticlimactic too, because I didn’t walk away with a proper physical driving licence in my wallet and a sudden legal invitation to roam the country. I initially received a learner’s permit, while the actual licence arrived some months later. At sixteen, you imagine certain milestones will arrive accompanied by some internal transformation. Mostly they arrive accompanied by paperwork.
Freedom, Subject to Adult Supervision
Having the licence also didn’t mean my parents suddenly handed me the Galant and told me to have fun. I wasn’t allowed to take it out alone. There was always a chaperone, usually one of my cousins, so my new independence remained carefully supervised.
Even under those conditions, being able to drive expanded my sense of distance. At that age, knowing how to operate a car changes the mental map around you. Places that had previously existed somewhere beyond the usual radius of home suddenly became theoretically reachable under your own control. You weren’t necessarily free to go wherever you wanted, but you now understood how to get there.
The longest drive I remember making was from Alabang to U.P. Los Baños, because my high school was there, the Philippine High School for the Arts. That journey felt like a genuine achievement. I had gone from trying not to stall on quiet subdivision streets to driving the Galant all the way from Alabang to Los Baños, dealing with proper roads and actual distance rather than circling familiar neighbourhood streets.
There were no navigation apps constantly recalculating routes or announcing lane changes ahead of time. You learned the route, followed signs, paid attention and occasionally relied on whoever was sitting beside you. Completing that drive felt significant in a way that is difficult to reconstruct now. I hadn’t merely learned how to make a car move; I could use it to go somewhere that mattered to me.
It Was Always My Dad’s Galant
Although the Galant served as the family car, I always thought of it primarily as my dad’s car. He had access to other vehicles through his work, including an old Mitsubishi Colt hatchback that occupied a very different point on the automotive respectability scale. It was rusted, the paint was peeling, and I remember other cars seeming to give it plenty of space, possibly because it looked as though physical proximity might be enough to contract tetanus.
There was also his official service vehicle, a blue four-door Nissan pickup, but the Galant was different. It belonged to the ordinary rhythm of family life rather than work. It was the car that sat in the background of the household, doing what family cars do without anybody thinking that this ordinary machinery would someday become part of the archaeology of memory.
We kept it for several more years, but sometime around when I went to university it disappeared from my life. I don’t remember precisely what happened to it. Presumably it was sold or passed on, but there wasn’t a ceremonial final drive or a moment when I stood beside it knowing I would never see it again. It was simply there until, eventually, it wasn’t.
That seems to be how many objects from our lives disappear. The things that will later become nostalgic rarely announce themselves as important while we still have them. Nobody says, “Pay attention to this dashboard because in thirty-five years you’ll suddenly want to remember exactly what it looked like.” You get out of the car, close the door and go inside.
The First Car, and More or Less the Last
The slightly strange part of this story is that learning to drive never led anywhere in particular. Most people who get their licence at sixteen begin a long succession of cars. There is the family car, perhaps a first cheap second-hand car, then another one, and eventually decades of petrol stations, parking, repairs, traffic, insurance and increasingly elaborate debates about whether a new vehicle really needs a touchscreen large enough to run air-traffic control.
That didn’t happen to me. The Galant was the first car I ever drove and, in any meaningful sense, the last. I don’t remember the exact final time I drove it, and there wasn’t a conscious decision that I was giving up driving. I simply stopped doing it. Years accumulated, my licence eventually expired, and I never bothered renewing it. Before I quite realised what had happened, something like twenty years had passed since I had last been behind the wheel.
There is something peculiar about spending time learning a physical skill and then allowing it to disappear through disuse. Somewhere in my brain there must still be a faint map of the sequence: clutch in, first gear, release slowly, accelerator, clutch again, second gear. Whether my feet would actually cooperate after all these years is another question. Put me into a manual car tomorrow and there is every possibility I would reproduce my first driving lesson with impressive historical accuracy by immediately stalling it. I don’t feel any particular urge to test the theory.
The Things That Come Back
Perhaps what interests me most now is that I wasn’t especially sentimental about the Galant when we had it. It was simply my dad’s car, part of the scenery of ordinary life. Only now, decades later, do the individual details seem worth examining: the pale-gold paint, the beige corduroy seat covers, the manual gear lever, the stock radio, the slightly unreliable air-conditioning, the smell of an ageing interior and the floor mats being taken outside and beaten clean with a broom.
I can picture myself at sixteen sitting behind that steering wheel in Rizal Village, concentrating far too hard on the clutch while one of my cousins sat beside me. I can remember graduating to the service roads and then the main roads, the unpleasant moment in Alabang Market, the slightly dubious single mistake on my written test, and eventually the much longer drive from Alabang to Los Baños. None of these memories is particularly monumental on its own, but together they reconstruct a small part of a life I hadn’t thought about for a very long time.
Maybe that is why the car came back to me now. Not because it was rare or glamorous, and certainly not because it began some lifelong love affair with driving. Quite the opposite, as it turned out. It matters because for a short period in 1989, that pale-gold Galant was where I learned one of the things I thought adults were supposed to know how to do. Life moved on, the car disappeared, the licence expired and I stopped driving, but thirty-odd years later I can still remember how to find the biting point of that clutch. Or at least I think I can.
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