SOMEONE TO TELL US WHEN TO STOP [R, 2-12-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Reminiscences of An Old Man—SOMEONE TO TELL US WHEN TO STOP [R, 2-12-26]

 

Donna, my friend of almost 80 years, pulled out in front of a pick-up truck. The truck driver wasn’t hurt, but Donna was in the hospital in a coma for several days before she died. Mutual friends say that she had been acting a bit out of it for a couple of weeks before that. She should have given up her keys, but she was single, with no one to get her groceries or take her to the doctor if she didn’t drive. That’s a dilemma so many old people face.

More importantly, perhaps, there was no one to tell her to stop driving.

We were visiting Aunt Gertrude several years ago. She drove us to a restaurant for supper. She drove very well. But as we ate and chatted, she said that she had told Kae and Paul, her children, that when they thought she should stop driving, she would. Not long after, they told her, and she just quit, cold turkey.

My father was blind, so couldn’t drive, and Mother was an atrocious driver. She had never been taught to drive, and she had not needed to know how when I was growing up, because we couldn’t afford a car. But when Daddy and I got jobs at the same time, we bought what seemed to us like a luxurious new car, a basic, manual-transmission Chevy with 63,640 miles on the odometer. Mother had been stuck on the same hardscrabble five acres for 7 years. She didn’t know how to drive, but that didn’t stop her. She got in that gun-metal gray Chevy and made it go places it never would have gone if it had a choice.

As the years went by, I bought my parents a series of cars to replace the ones that wore out. I tried for small cars that would be easier to park, with automatic transmissions.

My brother, 9 years younger than I, was a teen when I bought them the green Rambler. Jimmy delighted in changing the letters around on the front of the car so that they said Mable instead of Rambler.

Apparently I had forgotten the need for small cars when I got the Rambler, for Mother got it wedged diagonally into their old wooden garage and couldn’t get it out. Fortunately, or unfortunately for Helen, we lived in the same town at the time. [We moved them around with us for several years. We would move because the bishop appointed me to some other ministry, and I would find Daddy a blind-man job and a place to live in our new town.]

Mother called Helen, who went over to help. She backed the car an inch at a time, then changed gears from reverse to drive, then twisted the steering wheel as far as it would go, without power steering, and then inched forward, repeating the maneuver, ad nauseum. She said it took half an hour before she got the car out of the garage.

The last car I bought them was a neat, sporty, two-tone blue, Dodge Dart. We were visiting when Dad took us aside and told us it was time. They had gone to the laundromat. There was a pole in the middle of the parking lot. Mother couldn’t decide which side to use to go by it, so she just drove into it.

We knew Mother would not give up driving, though, just because we told her she needed to. She never cooperated with anything we said. And she wouldn’t give up driving just because she was no good at it. She’d never been any good.

So we pulled the Grandma lever. We told her that granddaughter Katie needed the Dodge Dart since she was now in graduate school. That worked. Even a contrarian will cooperate if it’s for the sake of a grandchild.

John Robert McFarland