Dearest Prabha,

I know you are a very busy person as you are on a full time job and have no time to see e-mail attachments forwarded to you but I disturb you only to show you and Tapasvi some things which interest you both which you can see together during weekends, may be. The write up was very funny and the slides of oddly shaped trees, I thought, would give joy to a person who loves greenery...

That was my grandmom's email to me right after she sent me two forwards, one with oddly shaped trees and another with a beautiful article by Michael Gartner, President of NBC News. Gartner is a fantastic writer, as you will see soon. He won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 1997. When I started this blog, I had intended to share all the great essays and speeches I had been reading. Somehow, that purpose faded and my obsessive desire to review anything and everything took over, not to mention some occasional ranting about this and that. I do listen to and read speeches even now, except I don't feel comfortable writing about them on my blog anymore. I feel like my writing does very little justice to the works of these great people. They deserve more than that.

Anyway, here is Gartner's very touching essay.

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.

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. 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."

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 those 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."

---
Both my grandparents had been self-reliant drivers. My granddad has lots of memories of road trips on the East Coast, like the 12-hour drive from New Hampshire to Washington DC with my mom and my brother who visited him from India. My brother and I have taken over that job as I live in DC and he in New Hampshire. Unlike Gartner's father, my granddad enjoyed driving and was happy to do all his traveling by road. Even in India, I remember many trips to places around Manipal to which he drove with the entire family. After his heart attack in 1987, he cut down on long distance driving and took the car only to work and back. We still travelled to a lot of places, but with Nayak (the driver) in control of the wheel.

In 2000, my grandparents moved back to Hyderabad with their old fiat. The car is as basic as it gets and serves as an oven in summer, requiring the driver to wear mittens to hold the steering wheel if he didn't want to lose the use of his hands. It was an embarrassment to say the least, especially since my paternal grandfather was a car enthusiast who collected all the latest cars like my brother collected stamps. But, my maternal granddad argued that it was all the same on Hyderabad's pot-holed roads where all cars move at 5 kms an hour. It would be stupid to throw money on an expensive car, he said. There is no challenging that!

Until he could find a driver, he did all the driving. As part of his everyday routine he drove all the way to Secunderabad to pick up my younger brother and take him to the club for his swimming lessons. If you can navigate the mad traffic from Hyderabad to Secunderabad, you can drive to Hell and back in shorter time. By the time he found a driver, my younger brother was too embarrassed to be seen in the car (or swimming with his granddad) and with that his swimming lessons stopped. :-) Kidding, my granddad had another minor attack and wasn't allowed to swim anymore, with that my brother's swimming lessons stopped and my granddads driving too.

My grandmom too used to drive a lot. Most of my moms memories of her driving were to the University for her french classes every evening. She was known for her nervous pinched look while driving and was the victim of a lot of imitation by family for that. The last time she drove was almost 10 years ago. They had just moved back to the city from Manipal and she took her old fiat out for a spin. I sat next to her as she drove to Food World. The store was two blocks away, but thanks to traffic congestion it took us forever to get there. I have never seen anyone cling to the steering wheel as dearly as she did, focussing all her attention on the road. With utmost silence we sat as the car plodded inch by inch to our destination. It was a very amusing experience but, she never drove again.

Now, they are happy to depend on their driver to take them everywhere. But it is sad to hear them say "we can't go anywhere today, because it's Sunday, and the driver needs his rest."

Last year my grandparents bought a new car after an incident that forced by grandmom to have to lie down in the backseat while traveling. She's better now, but the driver is happy to park the primordial fiat in the garage for good and drive in a new state-of-the-art one.