I’ve been meaning to update but it’s just so much that I haven’t wanted to put the effort in.

I got the job and I’ve accepted. Friday was my last day at work but I didn’t know until just after 5pm so I didn’t get to say goodbye to anyone. I called J and we cried and she invited me to dinner on Saturday night with her family and it was quite enjoyable. I felt loved.

I’ve been packing like a mad person since Friday night. My back stopped hurting in time for me to start and I’ve felt pretty darn good since. I actually have most of the house packed. The majority that is left is my office which is stuff I can throw into boxes…I just have to make myself do it.

Today I dropped my car off at the dealership to get checked and fixed as I’ve been having problems with it cranking. They got it fixed and my extended warranty covered it all so that’s good. Tomorrow morning I need to fax a form into my new job and then I’m taking the car by the tire place to have my tires rotated & balanced and get an oil change and my car will be ready to go. Wednesday morning I have an appointment to get my hair cut and then I’m free. All need-to-do’s will be done.

I hope to have everything in a box by Thursday night. That way I can spend Friday morning/afternoon doing my last loads of laundry and dishes and cleaning up the house in general as my family will be here sometime late Friday afternoon or early Friday evening. They’ll spend Saturday packing up the rental truck and then we’ll leave Sunday morning for my new home.

I can’t decide how I feel about all of this. I think that’s a good thing as I don’t feel extremely sad or upset but I also don’t feel super happy. I think it’s just weird knowing my life is on an entirely new path and I’m not sure where it’s leading to. Knowing I won’t see any of these people again makes me sad but that’s just my life. It’s how I plan my life to be…I’ll be alone and all the people I run into in my life will just be temporary in the long run ya know?

I am looking forward to the road trip home though. I’ve burned a few cd’s and found my case of old cd’s I like so I’m set for music. And I’ve been craving some type of road trip again. I look forward to having a new house to adjust to and organize and make feel as much like a home as I can. I don’t look forward to feeling trapped in that town. Trapped as in there’s nothing to do and no where to go that isn’t hours away. But one day I will get out of there. It’ll happen again. For sure.

Here’s where I am.

I had 2 phone interviews this week and I have an in person interview on Monday. Supposedly it’s just a formality…the company has rules about making sure they meet the new hire in person because in the past they’ve hired people just from phone interviews and a different person literally shows up to work. Can you imagine? They spoke earlier this week (Monday or Tuesday) about if I would be able to get home in time to start work for them if they could have me an offer by yesterday…I said yes and everything sounds good that I’m hearing so I’m pretty much expecting an offer, hopefully Monday night or Tuesday. If I get it I’ll not go back to work and will spend the rest of the week packing up the house and will be moved back home on the next Tuesday. Dad’s signing on a house for me on Friday if the offer comes through so I’ll have a place to move. All I’ll have to worry about then is selling this house.

I’m trying not to do too much this weekend because I need to make sure I can walk well on Monday for the interview. But at the same time I feel the need to do something because if I get this offer, say on Tuesday, I’ll have 5 days to pack the house, get a haircut, get my car serviced and change/cancel all my services. It’s going to be a very long week if I get this offer. It’s probably going to feel even longer if I don’t.

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, 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 making 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.’

I want to talk to someone and lay in bed and read jane austen and eat the icing off a cupcake and laugh till I cry. all in the same moment.

I’m having so many emotional and physical cravings right now. everything from cupcakes to hugs.