The Ride of Our Lives by Mike Leonard

Mike Leonard is a contributing reporter for NBC’s Today Show, one of those guys who travels around the country interviewing quirky characters and putting together videos for us to watch over our morning coffee with Matt and Meredith. (Disclosure: I haven’t watched the Today Show since the days when Bryant Gumbel made nasty remarks about Willard Scott to Jane Pauley, so I’m guessing here, but I think I’ve got it right.) He’s also a real family man. He’s crazy about his kids, and cherishes his parents. This alone makes him a saint in my book, because a more ornery, difficult, nutty, bizarre pair of parents does not exist.

Marge is a tiny red-headed two-fisted drinker with a hard head and a potty mouth. She also is crippled by various travelling anxieties: bridges, tunnels, mountains, curvy roads, straightaways. Her husband Jack is a sweet, lanky, teetotalling pussycat who never met a stranger, and the kind of guy P. T. Barnum claimed was born every minute.

Jack is 87 and he and Marge have been married 60 years when Mike decides to take them on the trip of a lifetime — a month touring the country in an RV. Three of his kids come along in a second RV. The remaining daughter is in Chicago with her husband and mother, expecting Mike’s first grandchild and Marge and Jack’s first great-grandchild.

The fun never ends with two cranky octogenarians in tow. They are completely blase about the beauties of the Great American West, but light up when they spot a Shoney’s or an Office Depot on the horizon. Civilization at last! As they cruise, Leonard meditates on his childhood and on his parents’ struggle to achieve the American Dream. His father tells the story of being put on a boat to Ireland when he was twelve years old, to travel alone to stay with relatives he had never met. Why? He never knew. Perhaps because there wasn’t enough money to feed him, perhaps because a brother and a sister of his had recently died. Life was hard then and you didn’t ask why.

Leonard had his own difficulties as a child and young man. Learning disabled in an age when no one acknowledged learning disabilities, he drifted through school until he discovered hockey. With hockey, he discovered the power of hard work and extra effort. His close family provided love and affection but didn’t hover — in those days, if you came home alive at the end of the day, your parents had done their job. This sense of independence and faith in himself led him to success as a television reporter against all odds.

I actually took this book home from the library because I thought it was about RVing. What I found instead was a funny and inspiring story of what the nuture, love, and spirit of one small family can accomplish in the world.