[AT] No Left Turns Part #1

Chuck Saunders gooberdog at gmail.com
Thu Sep 7 11:51:58 PDT 2006


Excellent! keep it coming
Chuck Saunders

On 9/7/06, jfgrant <jfgrant at triton.net> wrote:
>
>
>
> 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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> Remembering Our Friend Cecil Monson 11-4-2005
> http://www.antique-tractor.com/mailman/listinfo/at
>



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