Walking Through Life

Walking Through Life

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. Well worth reading. And a few
good laughs 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 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 to 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.