The Ride of Our Lives is the humorous yet deeply moving
account of NBC journalist Mike Leonard''s cross-country odyssey with
his eccentric parents, three grown children, and a daughter-in-law.
Full of ups and downs, laughs and tears, the month-long journey
becomes a much larger tale of hope, persistence, and valuable
lessons learned along the way. A celebration of the ties between
parents and children, as well as the unforgettable community of
people one can meet across America, The Ride of Our Lives is an
inspiring narrative of self-discovery and self-fulfillment-and how
one unique family found blessings and simple pleasures on the road
called life.
關於作者：
Mike Leonard’s entertaining video features regularly appear on
NBC’s morning show Today. He and his wife, Cathy, are the parents
of two daughters and two sons.
To schedule a speaking engagement, please contact American
Program Bureau at www.apbspeakers.com
From the Hardcover edition.
內容試閱：
Chapter 1
One
Walkie-Talkie #1: “Dad . . . where are you?”
Walkie-Talkie #2: “We’re one minute away. We got caught at the
light. You’re at that gas station in the middle of the next block,
right?”
Walkie-Talkie #1: “Uhhh, yeah but . . . ummm . . . we have a
slight problem . . .”
Walkie-Talkie #2: “What problem?”
Walkie-Talkie #1: “Ummm, Margarita didn’t swing wide enough
around the gas pump and we ran into a concrete thing. It tore out
the bottom of the RV. What should I do? Margarita’s sitting on the
ground crying.”
Walkie-Talkie #2: “Holy crap.”
Less than a half hour into the adventure of a lifetime and the
wheels had already come off. Well, maybe not the wheels, but
sizable chunks of the rented Winnebago now lay scattered around a
convenience-store gas pump in Mesa, Arizona. Big pieces of
splintered fiberglass, twisted strips of jagged metal, and in the
middle of it all, sitting on the oily pavement, head buried in her
hands, was my sobbing daughter-in-law, Margarita.
It was a distressing, stomach-churning sight. It was also moving.
Literally. I was in the driver’s seat of a second rented RV, a much
bigger rig called the Holiday Rambler, and couldn’t stop. The
entrance to the gas station was too narrow and I was too rattled.
Rolling past the accident site, the troubling scene swept by my
eyes like a slow panning shot in the movies. The wounded Winnebago
was beached on a concrete gas-pump island with three of my family
members walking around it in a daze. It was four-thirty in the
afternoon on the second day of February, rush hour in snowbird
season. The street was clogged with traffic and the drivers were
getting pissed, mostly because of us.
“That means the trip is over, right, Jack?”
It was the voice of my mother, eighty-two years old, with a Ph.D.
in pessimism, coming from the back of the Holiday Rambler.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Marge, nobody died.”
That was my eighty-seven-year-old father, the patron saint of
hope, launching yet another flimsy balloon of encouragement into a
howling hurricane wind.
Jack and Marge, the package of opposites, the plus and minus
charges still holding enough juice to light each other up after
more than sixty years of married life. They were raised in the same
New Jersey neighborhood, share Irish roots, and make each other
laugh. Other than that, Jack and Marge are polar extremes. My dad
expects the world to work the way it should. He bought into this
life believing the sales pitch that all people were made to be good
but then he tears open the package, rips away the bubble wrap, and
finds another con artist ready to take him to the cleaners. And it
still shocks him. Every single time.
My mom, on the other hand, would’ve been looking out the window
and checking her watch wondering why the crook was late. By her
calculations the per capita number of creeps and jackasses on the
planet is the highest in recorded history, and most of them seem to
be in possession of my father’s address and phone number. To deal
with that distressing situation and to cope with all the other
kinds of inevitabilities, including but not limited to horrible
diseases, fiery highway collisions, plane crashes, killer bees, and
Charles Manson–like home invaders, my mother has developed a
philosophy that she calls stinkin’ thinkin’. By assuming that all
of life’s encounters will stink, my mother has managed to stay even
keeled when in fact things do end up stinking. When they don’t
stink she’s pleasantly surprised. To better understand how my
parents’ opposing charges influence their outlook on life, I have
prepared this sample conversation.
Jack: “We should have my new boss, Fred, and his wife, Connie,
over for dinner.”
Marge: “Fred’s an asshole.”
Jack: “Come on, Marge, you can’t say that just because he wears
Harvard cufflinks. And why don’t you like Connie?”
Marge: “Connie thinks her shit is cake.”
Oh yeah, my mom swears. She also likes to down a little booze at
the end of the day. My dad hasn’t had a drop of liquor in his life.
How did they stay together for sixty-plus years? It doesn’t
compute. Match.com would’ve built a firewall between their
applications. Vegas bookies would’ve shut down the
wedding-anniversary betting line. It’s the classic mismatch.
In the right corner, at five foot two, 105 pounds, wearing a
white floppy hat, denim jacket, denim shirt, denim pants, and white
sneakers over pantyhose . . . with an undefeated marital fight
record of 973–0, all but three of those victories by knockout . . .
the pride of Paterson, New Jersey . . . The Cynical Cyclone . . .
Marge Leonard.
crowd roars
And in the left corner, also from Paterson, New Jersey, at five
foot nine, 160 pounds, wearing a dark blue jacket trimmed in white
powdered doughnut crumbs and brown coffee stains, winless in sixty
years of fighting but still battling . . . The Smiling Slugger . .
. Sugar Jack Leonard.
polite applause
Another bout between my parents was the last thing I needed as I
gripped the steering wheel and scanned the road ahead for a
suitable exit route. The rising chorus of car horns was starting to
unnerve me. Mesa’s rush-hour motorists seemed to be having major
problems with the way my RV was taking up both lanes. We were now
two blocks past the crash site and in a desperate attempt to find a
wide driveway, or an empty lot or a cliff to drive off, I cut my
speed again, this time down to ten miles per hour. The car-horn
octave level shot into the Roy Orbison range. It’s not easy trying
to navigate an ocean liner through a rolling city sea of ticked-off
people.
I had picked up the gigantic Holiday Rambler only a few hours
earlier. It was thirty-six feet long, ten feet high, with a huge
curved windshield and a large, round, bus driver–type steering
wheel. The helpful folks at the dealership had given me an
hour-long lesson on how to operate a rig far bigger than the
Winnebago, but all that went out the window when the rubber met the
road and hostile people started shaking their fists at me. How were
they to know that I’m not an RV guy? I’m not even a car guy. I
drive cars, but I don’t know cars. Manifold? Carburetor? If it’s
under the hood, it’s over my head.
Last year the front headlight went out on our Volvo wagon. When I
drove it up to our small-town service station, two blocks from my
Winnetka, Illinois, home, the young mechanic asked me to get back
in and pop the hood. I didn’t know where the hood popper was. I
really didn’t. Masking panic with a cocky nod of the head, I found
a lever and pulled it back. My seat reclined. The mechanic, with
disdain written all over his grease-smeared face, walked over,
opened my driver’s-side door, reached down near my left leg, and
pushed or pulled something. The hood popped. Then he went back to
the front of the car and yelled, “Switch on the brights.”
Crap.
Looking down at the two levers sprouting from each side of the
steering-wheel pipe, I flipped a mental coin and went with the one
on the right. Blue water sprayed onto my windshield. The mechanic
told me to get out of the car.
That’s the kind of idiot who was now at the wheel of the S.S.
Fiasco as it lurched through a raging urban shitstorm. With the
lead vessel already on the rocks, it was now up to me to somehow
save the day. Three blocks past where the Winnebago had gone down,
I spied a Doubletree Inn with a large driveway leading to what
appeared to be a nearly empty back parking lot. To guarantee a
sufficiently wide turning radius, I cut our speed to four miles per
hour and edged farther into the oncoming traffic lane before
swinging the nose of the RV back to the right. This maneuver caused
the Roy Orbison car-horn choir to morph into a deafening Phil
Spector-esque wall of sound. Concerned about clipping the elevated
Doubletree Inn sign with the vehicle’s high back end, I glanced
over my right shoulder just in time to catch a glimpse of my mother
giving somebody the finger.
We cleared the sign, made the turn, and rolled to a stop in a
vacant corner of the hotel parking lot, where I turned off the keys
and rested my forehead on the huge steering wheel. All was quiet.
For five seconds.
“Jack, do you think the man at the gas station can fix it?”
“For crying out loud, Marge, those guys can’t fix a Slurpee. You
know that.”
Of course she knew that. She also knew that my father would take
the bait and respond, as he always does, totally unaware that he
had been duped once more into becoming an unwitting mule for
another load of my mother’s stinkin’ thinkin’. Now he was the one
mouthing those negative words—nobody at the gas station can help
us—and that’s when my resolve started to weaken.
I had always prided myself on staying positive and toughing it
out, but these were extreme circumstances and the urge to feel
sorry for myself was overpowering. What harm could come from a
small dose of self-pity? Lifting my forehead off the steering
wheel, I leaned back in the driver’s seat, stared out the front
window, and softly muttered two simple words: “Why me?” That’s all
it took. Within seconds I was in a full-blown stinkin’ thinkin’
funk, convinced that our trip was doomed ...
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