NO LEFT TURN

(This is a wonderful piece by Michael Gartner, editor of newspapers large and small and president of NBC News.  In 1997, he won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing.  Well worth reading...and a few good laughs are guaranteed. You may know these people or you may be one of these people).

My father never drove a car.  I never saw him drive a car as 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 90's "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 a household without a car.  The neighbors all had cars, 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.

In 1952, when my mother was 43 years old, she asked a friend to teach her to drive.  For the next 45 years or so, until she was 90, my mother was the driver in the family.

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 was 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.  So your mother and I decided never again to make a left turn."

"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."

Mother drove until she was 90 and died four years later.  My father died the next year, at 102.  He continued to walk daily, and was of sound mind and sound body until the moment he died. 

Just before he died he announced that he was in no pain, he was comfortable and that he had as happy a life as anyone on the earth could ever have.

I surely miss him a lot and I think about him alot.  I have 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.