Today, when I am at Dr. Dave’s, The Car Doctor, leaving my car for repair, I mention that I am going to call my eighty-six year old mother to come and get me.

Dr. Dave’s bushy eyebrows and his black hair shoot straight up in the air, he jumps away from me and shouts, “Oh, My God! Is your mother still driving?!”

He remembers what happened last time I called my mother to come and get me from his shop. He saw it all.

She was late and I was waiting impatiently by the curb. She drove up onto the sidewalk. “Yohoooo, Honey, I’m here!”

I jumped back real quick then jumped forward and hopped in the passenger side. Mom bumped off the sidewalk into the road and skimmied the car around the corner.
I screamed, “Stop! Oh my god, Stop!’

She did, but seemed puzzled.

She had almost run over someone on a bike and another person walking across the street. I had to explain it to her above all the yelling from the pedestrians.

Mom put her foot on the gas pedal and drove me home. It was the most terrifying car ride of my life. It was almost like the woman couldn’t see or hear.

We got to my house and I was trembling. “Mother,” I said, “you’ve always been an indifferent driver but you truly scared me, today. Can you see OK?”

“Well,” my mother admitted, “I guess I really can’t.”

That’s when we found out she had cataracts and was practically blind and that’s when we found out she was ‘profoundly deaf.’

We got the eyes fixed and we got her a good pair of hearing aides and we gave her some rules.
“You can’t leave town,” we kids said, “and you can only drive where there are stop lights.”

I turn to Dr. Dave now and say, “Don’t worry. She’s always been like this. It’s nothing new. God must protect people like her because I don’t think she has ever had an accident.”

Here is how my mother has always driven a car:

When we were little kids, Mom would take all of us to the grocery store with her. One day in particular, she pulled out of the grocery store lot, with the six of us kids all crammed into the station wagon with the many bags of groceries.

I happened to be looking out the back window. By golly, the woman was backing up and heading toward one of those long concrete things that you pull up to in some parking lots.

Mother was rushing the back end of the station wagon toward that concrete as fast as we kids chewed gum. It didn’t look right to me.

BAM! BAM! BUUUMP! KABUMP! BAM! BAM!
Mom ran the back end of the car right over that mound of cement and kept on going.

BAM! BAM! BUUUMP! KABUMP! BAM! BAM!

Mom then ran over the cement with the front end of the car. She didn’t stop. She whipped the car around and headed into the street.

I was yelling, “Mother, Mother! Mother! Something bad happened!”

“What happened?” my mother said.

“You ran over something.”

Mother declared that she had not.

“But, Mom, there’s something running out from under the car, all the way down the street!”

I was leaning over the back seat, peering at the road, watching something dark and wet splash lavishly along behind us.

I started screaming that something very bad was wrong with the car.

Finally, Mother said, “Oh, alright….” and pulled into our town’s only gas station.

The old guy, Mr. Burgett, who ran the station, came out to pump her gas, check the tires and the oil, wipe the windows and chat.
He was a friend of the family, as everyone in town was. There were 1200 people and we all felt related and we all knew each other’s business.

Finally, I leaned out an open window and said, “Mr. Burgett, Mr. Burgett, Mom ran over the cement thing in the parking lot and something is wrong with the car.”

Mr. Burgett got down on his knees and looked under the car. I think I heard him say something like, “Jesus Christ.”

When he stood up, his eyes were rolling around like beads on a plate.

“Margaret, didn’t you notice you took out the undercarriage in the car?”

No. Mom hadn’t noticed.

Another time I remember riding with Mom and ahead in the road was a deep, wide hole with red flags and wooden saw horses all around it. I thought, ‘Oh, surely she sees that huge hole and is going to stop or go around it!’

Nope, she aimed right for it and didn’t blink. It was like we were playing chicken with a cavernous hole in the road. Finally, I screamed like I’d been shot and Mom flipped the steering wheel and we musta’ gone around that hole in the road on two tires.
I was left panting in the front seat while holding my heart.

My mother said, rather accusingly, “I saw it.”

When Summer was a little kid, about four or five, we took my mother to lunch in another town. She was driving, which was foolish to begin with.
I remember we ate Chinese food.

After lunch, we all got in the car with Mom at the wheel. I wasn’t alarmed in any way. Why should I be?

We were parked with the sidewalk in front of us and next to it on the other side was a row of thickly planted bushes and another sidewalk was on the other side of the shrubs and beside that was the paved road.

Mom started the car, put it into drive and drove forward, right over the sidewalk, through the bushes, over the other sidewalk and turned right onto the paved road.
I am not kidding.
And, she never blinked. She never acted like a terrible mistake had been made. She was puzzled when I caught my breath and started screaming.

Summer and I still talk about that outing.

When I was a kid, Mother sold real estate. I remember one couple she had as clients.
Mom had driven them around to see houses and when she drove them back into our drive way and they tumbled out of her car, I heard them whispering, “My god, did you see that two ton dead possum she rolled right over in the road! She didn’t even notice! Did you feel that huge bump! Kerplunk! Bump! And, she kept right on chatting and driving…like she didn’t notice a thing.”

That couple became friends and they adore my mother and they still talk about the two ton possum.

When I grew up and had my own house, just down another road from mother, I had her drive me home one day.

She turned off the highway onto my road, and why I thought she would notice, I can’t say, but there was a huge ditch by the side of my road and my mother took that car and jumped the ditch and kept on going!
I started screaming (again) and mother (as usual) couldn’t understand why I was hysterical.

When my father got old and went blind, she walked him places, the same way she drives cars.
He’d have to hold on to her and trust her and the poor man! I was with them one day when when she walked him straight into…and over…a big bush that happened to be growing where they were walking.
She didn’t notice the bush but he did when he fell right over it and rolled on the grass.

Sometimes people say, “You still let your mother drive! Are you crazy?!”

Well, she is just the same as she always was. Her driving is no different now then it was when I was a kid.

The last time she went to the DMV she passed her eye test and her book test 100%. She told me everyone in the place stood up and cheered for her.

Now, how can you tell a woman who gets a standing ovation at the DMV that she can’t drive anymore?

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HARD TIMES?
*As mentioned on my last show, if you are looking for another way to make a living and for a company that is doing well in this strange economic time, check my website at www.godisalwayshappy.com and click on ‘Health and Beauty.’
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*WINNER OF A FREE 15 MINUTE PHONE SESSION WITH VENUS: Linda Bock Snyder
Offer good through Oct 3rd, 2008. After that, null and void

It’s late at night, at the start of the Labor Day Holiday, when a sister calls me.
Our youngest brother, Arthur, is in the emergency room at the hospital down the mountain. The situation appears grim.

It will be a week before we get a real diagnosis. The diagnosis is acute leukemia.

Our brother is dying.

My brother, Jim, drives my mother to the hospital. My mother tells me later that Jim cries all the way down the mountain and that he says “I love Arthur! I love my brother! Arthur is my favorite brother!”

Mother tells us she reaches her hand to Jim, touches his arm and says, “Jim. Arthur is your only brother.”

We all think this is hysterically funny. When I tell Art about it a day or so later, he too laughs heartily.

A few days later, we get the final, final diagnosis. It’s a leukemia that is actually better then some; more amenable to a possible remission or cure.

Our brother begins chemo. If he hadn’t he would have died, most likely within the week.

Art is my dear brother; a man with a sweet soul.

This is the brother that could have been a major movie star, but turned the offer down because he wanted a normal life with his wife and two boys.

After Art grew up, became a jeweler, married and had two children, he changed from the little boy I had known.

That little kid walked miles over the fields every day collecting arrowheads.
He ate my father’s fishing worms and enjoyed them.
He attracted money. He would find it, everywhere.
He ate our blue glass Christmas tree balls when my mother walked down the lane to get the mail.

My sister Candy almost killed him one day.
The two of them had dragged a mattress off somebody’s bed and put it on the hard ground, below a two story window in our house.

They took turns jumping out the window and onto the mattress.

Before Art made his last jump, Candy waited on the ground below as Art faced away from her and the mattress, leaned back and dropped through the air.
Candy, quick, snatched the mattress away.
Art landed with a great Fwampt! and Splat, on his back on the hard dirt.

Candy always says, “I don’t know why I did that.”

One day when we were kids, Art and I were biking down the paved road that ran into the fields and mountains across from our home.
We were still rather close to our house, chugging and puffing our small legs on old clunky bikes; the kind of old bikes that used to build muscle.

I hit a little bump in the road and flew off my bike, rolling on my side on the pavement. I lay there and screamed, “I’m hurt! I’m hurt! Run home and tell Mother and Daddy!”

Art took off running, his little legs going whippity, whippity.

I lay on the road and waited. And waited. Stared up at the sky and waited. I sat up and assessed my knees and lay down, again. And waited.

Eventually I heard, “Whippity, whippity.”
I closed my eyes and waited for my folks to save me. My rescue and sympathy was at hand.

“Here,” I heard my brother say. I opened my eyes. Art was gently placing a bed pillow under my head!”

This is my brother who now lies in a hospital bed. He’s covered with bruises and red spots. His color is a mix of gray, green and yellow.
He pees blood. Blood runs down his throat. He hurts all over. With the chemo, he can’t stop peeing and that hurts. He can’t sleep. He’s horribly nauseous. He doesn’t complain, but he worries that his predicament is upsetting us!

He looks at me and says as he has said the day before, “Are you alright, Venus? Do you feel OK?”

Well, I am as OK as a sister can be, I suppose, when their brother is deathly ill and is being tortured.

My sister Polly looks over at me, grabs my arm and says, “What’s that red spot on your arm!?”

It’s a bug bite, but I know what she’s thinking. We’re all of us getting strange; looking for our brother’s symptoms in ourselves and in and on each other.

A few days ago we were laughing because Art was having an odd spell.

He said, “I dreamed that I had sex with our sixty year old, lesbian cousin who looks like a man! What is wrong with me? Why would I dream that?”

He asks everyone. He asks us, he asks our mother, he asks the nurses.
He tells us the nurses look really good to him, “even the really old ones!” and that when the TV showed nursing mothers he got excited about that! He wants to know what the heck is going on.

I think, “This man is dying? Maybe not.”

Most likely it is something in his treatment that brought this on.

Art tells me about four days into his hospital stay and before the chemo starts, “You know Venus, I wasn’t taking all of this seriously. Then, one night I woke up and I thought, ‘I’m dying. I could lose everyone I love. I have to change my life.’”

Art went from his perfectly attuned childhood, from his mystical connections with the earth, to laboring for years in the back of his jewelry shop, hunched over a small work table, fixing and designing jewelry. He was out of the beneficent sun and away from the earth and its rich dirt, it’s hearty trees and variable winds.

As he tells me now, “I missed every Holiday. I worked every day, trying to support my family. I didn’t eat right, or sleep right, or live in balance. I worried all the time. I let things from years ago eat at me.”

Being desperately ill gives a person a lot of time to think.

It gives his family a lot of time to think, too.

I think of Art all day long. Before I sleep he’s in my mind. He’s there when I wake in the night, and again when I wake in the morning.

I look around me and I think, “Am I living my life the way I want to be living it? Am I taking good care of myself?”

Death or the possibility of death can snatch you up at any time. The coffee is left un-drunk on the table, the cut grapefruit sits on the plate.

And, then there is love.

A few days ago while his sisters, his mother and his wife were all gathered around his bedside, Art looked at his wife, MaryEllen and said, “I can feel her with me. When I go to sleep at night, I can feel her in my arms. During the day, I feel her in the bed with me and I hug her. When I go off on trips without her, I take her with me. We’re attached. Wherever we are, we’re attached.”

Art tells us all the time now, that he loves us. We tell him the same. And, we tell each other.

But, you say, you don’t have love in your life like Arthur has?
If you only had love like Art has, (you say,) or the money you want, or the career or the friends or the good health, well, then you could be happy?

Don’t whine about what you don’t have. Embrace what you do have.

There’s always somebody who dearly wishes they had what you dismiss as not enough.
And, remember…no matter how long a life may be, life is always shorter then you think.
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*WINNER OF A FREE 15 MINUTE PHONE SESSION WITH VENUS: *karol chernich
Offer good through Sept. 12th, 2008. Null and void after that.