Here's an amazing story derived
from the writings (forwarded email) of Michael Gartner, editor of
newspapers, large and small and former president of NBC News. In 1997,
he won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing.
It's a narrative about how a Catholic woman and an
agnostic man could share a happy marriage for 75 years and teaches that
life can be lived to the fullest even with a simple lifestyle but plenty
of common sense applied.
It is a little bit long but 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.
So my brother and I grew up in a household without a car. The neighbors
all had cars . 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 when my brother turned 16 before I did, in
1951 my parents bought a used white model stick, shift 1950
Chevrolet from a friend who ran the parts department at a Chevy
dealership downtown.
In
1952, when she was 43 years old, my mother 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. 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.
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.
If she was going to the grocery store, he would go along to carry the
bags out and to make sure she loaded up an 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. 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.
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 afternoon, he had told my son, "You know,
Mike, the first hundred years are a lot easier than the second hundred."
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 ones who don't. Believe everything happens
for a reason. If you get a chance, take it and if it changes your life,
let it. Nobody said life would be easy, they just promised it would most
likely be worth it.
Enjoy life now. It has an expiration date!
I shall pass through this world
but once. Any good, therefore, that I can do or any kindness I
can show to any human being, let me do it now...for I shall not
pass this way again.--St. Francis of Assisi
"Some people, no matter how old they get, never lose their
beauty--they merely move it from their faces into their
hearts.-- Martin Buxbaum |