[AT] No Left Turns Part #1
jfgrant
jfgrant at triton.net
Thu Sep 7 11:44:39 PDT 2006
Subject: No Left Turns
A great little story... 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.
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 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.
The ritual walk to church
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."
Part #2 to follow.
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