mermaid
02-03-2010, 04:56 PM
A little long but a great read if you haven't already seen it, enjoy!!
> This is a wonderful piece by Michael Gartner, editor of newspapers
> large and small and president of NBC News. In 1997, he won
> thePulitzer Prize for editorial writing. It is well worth reading,
> and a few good chuckles are guaranteed. Here goes...
>
> 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 more than 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. "
>
> Life is too short to wake up with regrets.
> So love the people who treat you right.
> Forget about the one's who don't.
>
> Believe everything happens for a reason.
> If you get a chance,take it & if it changes your life, let it.
> Nobody said life would be easy, they just promised it would
> most likely be worth it."
> This is a wonderful piece by Michael Gartner, editor of newspapers
> large and small and president of NBC News. In 1997, he won
> thePulitzer Prize for editorial writing. It is well worth reading,
> and a few good chuckles are guaranteed. Here goes...
>
> 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 more than 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. "
>
> Life is too short to wake up with regrets.
> So love the people who treat you right.
> Forget about the one's who don't.
>
> Believe everything happens for a reason.
> If you get a chance,take it & if it changes your life, let it.
> Nobody said life would be easy, they just promised it would
> most likely be worth it."