FW: A Life without Left turns
Samir Inamdar
A wonderful little ditty well worth reading! Hope you like it!
A Life Without Left Turns
By Michael Gartner
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 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."
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