Where's a vehicle grab handle when you need one? Or a shirt pocket?

There are a lot of things you don’t miss until they’re gone. I miss some things that were never even there.

Take the grab handle above the driver’s-side window of my 2020 Kia Soul. Kia certainly did. Take it, I mean. The ceiling above the other three seats has them, just not above the seat I spend most of my time in.

Apparently these handles are known colloquially as “Oh, Jesus!” handles. That’s because some passengers have been known to shout that before desperately grabbing at one when the driver performs a high-speed 180 in a Walmart parking lot.

The handles are useful in other situations, too, including when lowering oneself into a car or hauling oneself out. Some sources say automakers don’t put them on the driver’s side because the driver already has a steering wheel to serve that purpose.

Well, I miss mine. In our previous 2012 Kia Soul, there was a handle on the driver’s side. In our current one there’s just a rectangular depression where one would fit. Either there was a screw-up on the assembly line the day our car was made, or the manufacturer decided three was enough.

Of course, for decades people did just fine without any grab handles inside their cars. When I first saw one I thought it was laughable. Does a midsize sedan or family station wagon really need a grab bar? Who’s getting in and out of these vehicles? Paratroopers? Do they need to snap in and wait for the jump light?

Then I got a car that happened to have four, one at each door. And I loved them.

I know we’re supposed to keep both hands on the steering wheel at all times while driving, but does anyone actually do that? Occasionally you need to move your upper body into a different position, maybe slip one hand off the wheel just to restore circulation in a shoulder. That’s when I came to love my grab handle. I’d lift my left arm, wrap my fingers around the handle and let my arm hang there.

It may have looked ridiculous to other drivers, like I was imitating a subway straphanger — aping public transportation in the most private transportation there is — but I didn’t care.

Now I can’t do this. This little omission isn’t enough for us to replace the car. Neither is the thing that really bothers my wife: no fuzzy strip along the door window sills. Do any cars have those any more? Neither of our Kias did, so maybe it’s just a Kia thing. It used to be that you could wipe raindrops or dew off the outside of your window just by raising and lowering it. That little fuzzy strip was like a squeegee.

This car doesn’t have that. My wife grumbles every time she goes out to the driveway and sees that it’s rained.

That’s nothing compared to an obsession that’s consumed me the past few months: Where did the pockets on men’s dress shirts go? It’s bad enough that men’s dress shirts these days are all “slim fit” and “modern fit.” My modern fit days are long past.

But then when I do find a shirt that’s “regular fit” or “relaxed fit” or “Dad bod fit,” I have to make sure it has a pocket over the left breast. Very few do these days.

For as long as I’ve been a grown-up, dress shirts have had pockets. That was always standard. The website realmenrealstyle.com says that “the vast majority of men never use this pocket,” adding that “the fact of the matter is that most men would actually do better to have no pocket at all.”

Well, while most of us buckle our seat belts, the vast majority of us don’t actually use them, but the fact of the matter is when we’re in a crash, we’re glad they’re there. And because I depend on a pen for my job, I need pockets. My shirt pocket holds my company-issued Uni-Ball Onyx rollerball.

If you’ve ever seen a guy at Macy’s pawing through the men’s shirts, trying to find one that ticks all the boxes in terms of color, collar, cuff, fabric, fit and pocket, that was me.

And that was me the other day mailing back three shirts I’d ordered online from one of those fancy English shirtmakers. Somehow I’d missed that they didn’t come with pockets.

So I wrapped the shirts back up, printed out the return label and drove to the post office, both hands firmly on the wheel.

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