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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: "Not so!" 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.
Our 1950
Chevy...
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'd 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.
The ritual
walk to church...
Still, they both continued to walk
alot. 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. Augustine'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 and 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.
A
happy life...
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.
Michael Gartner has
been editor of newspapers large and small and president of NBC
News. In 1997, he won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial
writing
