RIDE OF OUR LIVES, THE(ISBN=9780345481498) 英文原版 下载 pdf 百度网盘 epub 免费 2025 电子版 mobi 在线

　　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.

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　　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.

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　　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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媒体评论

　　“Mike Leonard is a national treasure and his touching,

hilarious, instructive account of a loving road trip with his

parents and children should be required reading in every family.

I’m sending it to all my children so they can share the laughs and

the tears.”

　　-Tom Brokaw, author of

The Greatest

Generation

　　“Mike Leonard has generously invited the rest

of us along for a ride aboard his land yacht, the "S.S.Fiasco." And

what a ride it is. Profound and profoundly funny, Leonard takes us

on a journey deep into the heart of his family. He has been blessed

with characters who are as bizarre, maddening, unpredictable and

hilarious as any dreamt up by Hollywood -- and they are his

real-life parents! "The Ride of Our Lives" reads like intimate

dispatches from your funniest friend, and is as touching and

whimsical as a series of home movies unspooling from an American

childhood.”

　　-Amy Dickinson, syndicated advice columnist, "Ask Amy"

　　From the Hardcover edition.

书籍介绍

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.