Left Turns

[mermaid]

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."

[grumpie]

I think that was a very nice piece. Thank you for doing it
Richard Hagen.  AKA grumpie

[NETim]

Yeah, great story.