On growing older

 A good read for all of my friends
 

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This is a story of an aging couple
Told by their son who was
President of NBC NEWS.*
   
   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. It is well worth reading, and a few good chuckles are guaranteed. Here goes...
 

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 shit! 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.
 
 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 more than 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.
 
 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. Augustine'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."
 
 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.
 
 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.
 
 Life is too short to wake up with regrets. 
 
So love the people who treat you right. 
 
Forget about the one's who don't. 
 
Believe everything happens for a reason. 
 
If you get a chance, take it; if it changes your life, let it.
 
Nobody said life would be easy, they just promised it would most likely be worth it.

  ENJOY LIFE NOW - IT HAS AN EXPIRATION DATE 

Are you older than Dirt?

Someone asked the other day, 'What was your favorite fast food when you were growing up?'
'We didn't have fast food when I was growing up,' I informed him.
'All the food was slow.'

'C'mon, seriously. Where did you eat?'
'It was a place called 'at home,'' I explained. !
'Mum cooked every day and when Dad got home from work, we sat down together at the dining room table, and if I didn't like what she put on my plate I was allowed to sit there until I did like it.'

By this time, the kid was laughing so hard I was afraid he was going to suffer serious internal damage, so I didn't tell him the part about how I had to have permission to leave the table.
But here are some other things I would have told him about my childhood if I figured his system could have handled it :
Some parents NEVER owned their own house, wore Levis , set foot on a golf course, traveled out of the country or had a credit card.
My parents never drove me to school. I had a bicycle that weighed probably 50 pounds, and only had one speed, (slow).
We didn't have a television in our house until I was 19.
It was, of course, black and white, and the station went off the air at midnight, after playing the national anthem and a poem about God; it came back on the air at about 6 a.m. and there was usually a locally produced news and farm show on, featuring local people...

I never had a telephone in my room.The only phone was on a party line. Before you could dial, you had to listen and make sure some people you didn't know weren't already using the line.

Pizzas were not delivered to our home... But milk was.
All newspapers were delivered by boys and all boys delivered newspapers --my brother delivered a newspaper, six days a week. He had to get up at 6AM every morning.
Movie stars kissed with their mouths shut. At least, they did in the movies. There were no movie ratings because all movies were responsibly produced for everyone to enjoy viewing, without profanity or violence or most anything offensive.

If you grew up in a generation before there was fast food, you may want to share some of these memories with your children or grandchildren. Just don't blame me if they bust a gut laughing..
Growing up isn't what it used to be, is it?
MEMORIES from a friend :
My Dad is cleaning out my grandmother's house (she died in December) and he brought me an old Royal Crown Cola bottle. In the bottle top was a stopper with a bunch of holes in it.. I knew immediately what it was, but my daughter had no idea. She thought they had tried to make it a salt shaker or something. I knew it as the bottle that sat on the end of the ironing board to 'sprinkle' clothes with because we didn't have steam irons. Man, I am old.
How many do you remember?
Headlight dimmer switches on the floor.
Ignition switches on the dashboard.
Pant leg clips for bicycles without chain guards.
Soldering irons you heat on a gas burner.
Using hand signals for cars without turn signals.

Older Than Dirt Quiz :
Count all the ones that you remember not the ones you were told about
Ratings at the bottom.

1.Candy cigarettes
2.Coffee shops with tableside juke boxes
3.Home milk delivery in glass bottles
4. Party lines on the telephone
5.Newsreels before the movie
6..TV test patterns that came on at night after the last show and were there until TV shows started again in the morning. (there were only 3 channels [if you were fortunate])
7.Peashooters
8. Howdy Doody
9. 45 RPM records
10.Hi-fi's
11. Metal ice trays with lever
12. Blue flashbulb
13.Cork popguns
14. Studebakers
15. Wash tub wringers

If you remembered 0-3 = You're still young
If you remembered 3-6 = You are getting older
If you remembered 7-10 = Don't tell your age,
If you remembered 11-15 =You're older than dirt!

I might be older than dirt but those memories are some of the best parts of my life.

Don't forget to pass this along!!
Especially to all your really OLD friends....

Generation Jones - Middlers

Well, I found out today that I am not only a middle child in my family, but a middle generation as well. Until today I had never heard of Generation Jones. Apparently, we are the generation of people born between 1954 and 1965.

Jonathan Pontell defined Generation Jones as a distinct concept. Prior to this theory, the generation members were identified with either Baby Boomers or GenerationX'ers.

From Wikipedia:
The name “Generation Jones” has several connotations, including a large anonymous generation, a “Keeping up with the Joneses” competitiveness and the slang word "jones" or “jonesing”, meaning a yearning or craving. It is said that Jonesers were given huge expectations as children in the 1960s, and then confronted with a different reality as they came of age in the 1970s, leaving them with a certain unrequited, jonesing quality.

Hmmmm.... so now I have a double 'middle child' complex? LOL