[AT] No Left Turn Part #2

charlie hill chill8 at cox.net
Thu Sep 7 12:25:59 PDT 2006


That's a beautiful story and very well told.

Charlie
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "jfgrant" <jfgrant at triton.net>
To: "ATIS" <at at lists.antique-tractor.com>
Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2006 2:45 PM
Subject: [AT] No Left Turn Part #2


> No Left Turn Part #2
>
> No Left Turns  Part #2
> 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."
> 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.
> A happy life
> 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.
>
>
>
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> Remembering Our Friend Cecil Monson 11-4-2005
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