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KsSooner
10/23/2007, 06:57 PM
A Life Well Lived


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. It is well worth reading, and
a few good chuckles 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, 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."