[AT] No Left Turns Part #1

Bob Seith seithr at denison.edu
Thu Sep 7 12:47:11 PDT 2006


It was a common expression when I was a smart aleck kid:

"Two wrongs don't make a right, but three rights make a left -- and two 
Wrights made an airplane."

Ducking for cover...
Bob Seith

Chuck Saunders wrote:

> 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.
>> ---------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> AT mailing list
>> Remembering Our Friend Cecil Monson 11-4-2005
>> http://www.antique-tractor.com/mailman/listinfo/at
>>
> _______________________________________________
> AT mailing list
> Remembering Our Friend Cecil Monson 11-4-2005
> http://www.antique-tractor.com/mailman/listinfo/at





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