Long
Living or No Left
Turns
Long
Living or No Left Turns
This is a wonderful piece by Michael
Gartner, editor of newspapers large and small and president of NBC News. In
1997, he won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. Well worth reading. And
a few good laughs are guaranteed.
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, and 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 making left turns.
No left turnes
for all of you. Fred
Living with uncertainty
It seems to me that there are periods
in the development of a person or a species where uncertainty is inevitable,
and
you gotta live with it. When you are changing from a great
world view to a completely different world view, and they
are
incompatible, then there is a period in the middle where everything is
swimming, when you have lost the old, comfortable
moorings in your
reality, and you have not yet found the new ones. And it is very unpleasant.
And I think it is very
important to learn to
live with it. To say "OK, so I can't find the bottom with my feet at the
moment, and the water is
choppy and cold,
and I don't know when things will change... but it will be all right soon, it
always is."
Because the alternatives are either
to never let go of the old moorings, meaning you never progress,
or to panic,
and you drown. So just relax and keep swimming.