On the Road of Life

When my Pappa talks about his life, he frequently uses miles to measure time. For example:

"After your Mamma's heart surgery, the insurance had paid the hospital over 1 million dollars and they asked me for $27,000 more. After I paid them, I told your Mamma, 'Those hospitals aren't going to have all of our money' and I went down to the dealership and bought a brand new van. Did you know your Mamma rode over 86,000 miles in that van? And now it has over 190,000 miles on it. I decided it was time to retire it, but, it has so many nice memories that I just parked it in the garage and stopped driving it. My children can decide how to dispose of my things after I am gone. I like to have them around for the memories."

Miles to measure a lifetime. Over 40,000 miles on his motorcycles in the past 5 years. Over 500,000 miles on motorcycles in his lifetime.

When my Pappa was a young married man, he got a job at a coal mine in Kentucky. Because of his expertise with electricity, he became an instructor. When my mom (the third of his four children) was seventeen, he got a better job at a coal mine in Tuscola, Illinois and the family moved.

While he was a young father working at the coal mine in Kentucky, he met a man who was trying to figure out how to get to Arizona to visit his family. My Pappa decided to give him a ride. After finishing a day shift at the mines on a Friday, he loaded the man on the back of his motorcycle and took off. They traded turns driving for about 30 hours and then arrived at their destination. My Pappa stayed in Arizona for less than 12 hours, using a few hours of that time to get some sleep, then he got back on the motorcycle by himself and headed home. He arrived in Kentucky four hours before his night shift began on Monday. My Pappa likes a challenge.

"I know how to do things really fast. I can sleep eight hours in two if I need to," he likes to say with a smile.

My Pappa loves to drive. He would never fly. He would stay home before he would fly.

He has had a lot of nice vehicles in his lifetime. He measures time in miles and he remembers important events with story openers like, "That was the year we bought that Buick . . ."

All of the vehicles my Pappa has owned have been so well cared for, they have looked like showroom models. On any given Saturday, he could be found outdoors gardening and washing down his cars by hand. Gently rubbing them dry with towels.

"Now that is what I call productive energy," he would tell us. "You won't never find me in a gym, nosiree. I get all the exercise I need through hard work. Productive energy."

After the accident, the Doctors told my Pappa he would never drive again. Those are words that nobody wants to hear, but, you can see how they would especially be the worst thing to tell my Pappa.

He will never be able to drive a motorcycle again. But, he proved the Doctors wrong on one account when he started driving a short time after he completed physical therapy.

In physical therapy, he had to learn to walk again and how to feed himself again. I can't imagine a person of his age being able to make such a miraculous recovery. He likes to tell the joke, "After I learned to walk again and get myself dressed again, they decided I could go home, but, when they handed me the pen to sign out I realized I couldn't write so they had to take me back and teach me to write again!"

After all that, he could finally drive again. And, now, it's not even a year later and he's driven all the way from Kentucky to Utah to visit us.

We're awfully lucky he can drive because he certainly would never have flown out to see us. He doesn't measure his life in frequent flyer miles, it's miles on the road.