a cute little piece by Michael Gartner (formerly of NBC News)
My father never drove a car. Well, that's not quite right. I should
>say I never saw him drive a car. He quit driving in 1927, when he
>was 25 years old, and the last car he drove was a 1926 Whippet.
>
>"In those days," he told me, when he was in his 90s, "to drive a car
>you had to do things with your hands, and do things with your feet,
>and look every which way, and I decided you could walk through life
>and enjoy it or drive through life and miss it."
>
>At which point my mother, a sometimes salty Irishwoman, chimed in:
>"Oh, bull____!" she said. "He hit a horse."
>
>Well," my father said, "there was that, too."
>
>So my brother and I grew up in a household without a car. The
>neighbors all had cars -- the Kollingses next door had a green 1941
>Dodge, the VanLaninghams across the street a gray 1936 Plymouth, the
>Hopsons two doors down a black 1941 Ford -- but we had none.
>
>My father, a newspaperman in Des Moines , would take the streetcar
>to work and, often as not, walk the 3 miles home. If he took the
>streetcar home, my mother and brother and I would walk the three
>blocks to the streetcar stop, meet him and walk home together.
>
>My brother, David, was born in 1935, and I was born in 1938, and
>sometimes, at dinner, we'd ask how come all the neighbors had cars
>but we had none. "No one in the family drives," my mother would
>explain, and that was that. But, sometimes, my father would say,
>"But as soon as one of you boys turns 16, we'll get one." It was as
>if he wasn't sure which one of us would turn 16 first.
>
>But, sure enough, my brother turned 16 before I did, so in 1951 my
>parents bought a used 1950 Chevrolet from a friend who ran the parts
>department at a Chevy dealership downtown. It was a four-door, white
>model, stick shift, fender skirts, loaded with everything, and,
>since my parents didn't drive, it more or less became my brother's
>car.
>
>Having a car but not being able to drive didn't bother my father,
>but it didn't make sense to my mother. So in 1952, when she was 43
>years old, she asked a friend to teach her to drive. She learned in
>a nearby cemetery, the place where I learned to drive the following
>year and where, a generation later, I took my two sons to practice
>driving.
>
>The cemetery probably was my father's idea.
>
>"Who can your mother hurt in the cemetery?" I remember him saying once.
>
>For the next 45 years or so, until she was 90, my mother was the
>driver in the family. Neither she nor my father had any sense of
>direction, but he loaded up on maps -- though they seldom left the
>city limits -- and appointed himself navigator. It seemed to work.
>
>Still, they both continued to walk a lot. My mother was a devout
>Catholic, and my father an equally devout agnostic, an arrangement
>that didn't seem to bother either of them through their 75 years of
>marriage. (Yes, 75 years, and they were deeply in love the entire
>time.)
>
>He retired when he was 70, and nearly every morning for the next 20
>years or so, he would walk with her the mile to St. Augustin's
>Church. She would walk down and sit in the front pew, and he would
>wait in the back until he saw which of the parish's two priests was
>on duty that morning.
>
>If it was the pastor, my father then would go out and take a 2-mile
>walk, meeting my mother at the end of the service and walking her
>home. If it was the assistant pastor, he'd take just a 1-mile walk
>and then head back to the church. He called the priests "Father
>Fast" and "Father Slow."
>
>After he retired, my father almost always accompanied my mother
>whenever she drove anywhere, even if he had no reason to go along.
>If she were going to the beauty parlor, he'd sit in the car and
>read, or go take a stroll or, if it was summer, have her keep the
>engine running so he could listen to the Cubs game on the radio.
>
>In the evening, then, when I'd stop by, he'd explain: "The Cubs lost
>again. The millionaire on second base made a bad throw to the
>millionaire on first base, so the multimillionaire on third base
>scored."
>
>If she were going to the grocery store, he would go along to carry
>the bags out -- and to make sure she loaded up on ice cream.
>
>As I said, he was always the navigator, and once, when he was 95 and
>she was 88 and still driving, he said to me, "Do you want to know
>the secret of a long life?"
>
>"I guess so," I said, knowing it probably would be something bizarre.
>
>"No left turns," he said.
>
>"What?" I asked.
>
>"No left turns," he repeated. "Several years ago, your mother and I
>read an article that said most accidents that old people are in
>happen when they turn left in front of oncoming traffic. As you get
>older, your eyesight worsens, and you can lose your depth
>perception, it said. So your mother and I decided never again to
>make a left turn." "What?" I said again. "No left turns," he said.
>"Think about it. Three rights are the same as a left, and that's a
>lot safer. So we always make three rights." "You're kidding!" I
>said, and I turned to my mother for support.
>
>"No," she said, "your father is right. We make three rights. It
>works." But then she added: "Except when your father loses count."
>
>I was driving at the time, and I almost drove off the road as I
>started laughing. "Loses count?" I asked. "Yes," my father admitted,
>"that sometimes happens. But it's not a problem. You just make seven
>rights, and you're okay again." I couldn't resist. "Do you ever go
>for 11?" I asked.
>
>"No," he said. "If we miss it at seven, we just come home and call
>it a bad day. Besides, nothing in life is so important it can't be
>put off another day or another week."
>
>My mother was never in an accident, but one evening she handed me
>her car keys and said she had decided to quit driving. That was in
>1999, when she was 90. She lived four more years, until 2003. My
>father died the next year, at 102. They both died in the bungalow
>they had moved into in 1937 and bought a few years later for $3,000.
>(Sixty years later, my brother and I paid $8,000 to have a shower
>put in the tiny bathroom -- the house had never had one. My father
>would have died then and there if he knew the shower cost nearly
>three times what he paid for the house.)
>
>He continued to walk daily -- he had me get him a treadmill when he
>was 101 because he was afraid he'd fall on the icy sidewalks but
>wanted to keep exercising -- and he was of sound mind and sound body
>until the moment he died.
>
>One September afternoon in 2004, he and my son went with me when I
>had to give a talk in a neighboring town, and it was clear to all
>three of us that he was wearing out, though we had the usual
>wide-ranging conversation about politics and newspapers and things
>in the news. A few weeks earlier, he had told my son, "You know,
>Mike, the first hundred years are a lot easier than the second
>hundred." At one point in our drive that Saturday, he said, "You
>know, I'm probably not going to live much longer." "You're probably
>right," I said. "Why would you say that?" He countered, somewhat
>irritated. "Because you're 102 years old," I said. "Yes," he said,
>"you're right." He stayed in bed all the next day.
>
>That night, I suggested to my son and daughter that we sit up with
>him through the night. He appreciated it, he said, though at one
>point, apparently seeing us look gloomy, he said: "I would like to
>make an announcement. No one in this room is dead yet."
>
>An hour or so later, he spoke his last words:
>
>"I want you to know," he said, clearly and lucidly, "that I am in no
>pain. I am very comfortable. And I have had as happy a life as
>anyone on this earth could ever have." A short time later, he died.
>
>I miss him a lot, and I think about him a lot. I've wondered now and
>then how it was that my family and I were so lucky that he lived so
>long.
>
>I can't figure out if it was because he walked through life.
>
>Or because he quit taking left turns..........
Posted by lewyn
at 5:12 PM EST
