THREE RIGHT TURNS EQUALS A LEFT.

THREE RIGHT TURNS EQUALS A LEFT. Our friend Bruce Cayard sent me a link to Michael Gartner’s charming memoir of his mother and father. Gartner tells how his mother did all the driving in his family. When she got into her eighties, Gartner’s parents decided it was safer not to make any more left turns. My father didn’t drive either. He gave up his driver’s license shortly after he was married. He said that he had stopped driving because my mother was a better driver. (My mother was a good and enterprising driver. The Chicago Tribune published an article about her driving her family to the Badlands. It was considered noteworthy because the roads were primitive.) Unspoken was the fact that my father’s father had been killed in 1920 by a car that came up on a sidewalk. The independent spirit and the shared decision making that led Gartner’s parents to stop making left turns reminded me of my parents and their marriage. In their generation, in most marriages, the man usually did all the driving. My parents went their own way.