Not That You Asked (9780307822215) Read online

  “They have the home-court advantage,” he says.

  “State has the edge,” the announcer tells us, “because in thirty-two of their last fifty-one games since they started this series way back in 1939, Central Western has been able to win on the road only nineteen times.”

  I don’t know what he’s saying. I just nod and figure State has the edge if he says so.

  “Johnny Podolak’s whole family is in the stands today cheering him on,” we’re told. “This could be a big factor in the game today because you can bet Johnny will be up, emotionally.”

  And, “Ed Werrgeles is playing against his old teammates this afternoon. This is going to give him a big psychological boost because you know he’s got to be out there proving to them that they made a mistake when they traded him.”

  The psychology behind things was very big during the Olympics. It was either a psychological advantage or a psychological disadvantage to come down the hill first … or, possibly, last. She knew she had only one person to beat or he knew they’d all have to catch him now. The psychological pressure was on them.

  Some of the Olympic performers who failed “weren’t motivated,” according to the announcers. “Motivation” is an important word with sports reporters and so is the athlete’s “concentration.”

  Dan Jansen, the speed skater whose sister died the day before the 1988 Winter Olympics, competed twice and fell both times. The announcers attributed his falls not to the condition of the ice but to “a lack of concentration.”

  You can be sure that if Dan had won, the announcers would have been saying the tragedy “gave him added incentive.”

  Depending on what’s going on in the world at the time, the diviners of the psychology behind things move from one event to the other. They explain politics, world events, sports, crime and marriage in psychological terms. Nothing is ever quite what it seems to the layman. It isn’t the better team that wins. It’s the team with “the psychological advantage.”

  A Nation of Exiles

  Considering all the talk about illegal immigrants, not many of us know much about immigration. I got through high school without being certain of the difference between “immigration” and “emigration.”

  The process of giving a person from one country official status as a citizen of another is called “naturalization.” It’s sort of a funny thing to call it. You’d think it might be called “unnaturalization.”

  Those of us born here in the United States know how lucky we are. I’d hate to be outside trying to get in. The requirements for naturalization are so complex and vague that there isn’t anyone who can tell you what all the rules are. I tried to find out and ended up with three fat volumes of double-talk law, very little of which I understood.

  Do you, by any chance, know where most people came from to get here? There are some surprises. Here are some of the numbers on immigration to the United States from 1820 to 1981:

  —The most immigrants came from Germany, 6,998,000. A relatively small part of that number can be accounted for by Jews who fled Nazi Germany.

  —Italians were second, 5,310,000.

  —There were 4,693,000 Irish immigrants and almost as many Canadians. I don’t think of Canadians as immigrants.

  —There were 4,319,000 immigrants from Austria.

  —I was surprised to see that 3,395,000 people came from Russia.

  —England accounted for 3,198,000 immigrants but that doesn’t include two of my grandparents. They came from Scotland.

  —The only other country exceeding a million was Sweden.

  —The big surprise to me was France. During those years there were only 757,000 immigrants to the United States from France. I find that amazing when you think nearly 7 million came from Germany.

  —There were 594,000 people who came from China but that statistic has to be qualified. While many Chinese came here before we had strict immigration rules, all Chinese were barred from entering from 1882 until 1943, when we opened that golden door again to them.

  In another few years these statistics will change. The pattern of immigration has changed drastically already. Few people are coming to the United States from Europe today. Great numbers are coming from Mexico and Central America.

  The mystique of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island is a thing of the past, of course. Anyone coming here now flies. No one comes in by boat unless they’re running drugs, and more people are sneaking across the Mexican border every year than ever came in legally past the Statue of Liberty in a year.

  The laws for entry into our country are not only complex, no one agrees on exactly what they should be. Congress has a new bill pending but it’s brought up a major argument. Some people don’t want to let anyone new in; others want to let everyone in.

  Do you know the people who object most to the aliens who are sneaking in this year? It’s the aliens who sneaked in last year. Last year’s aliens are the ones who’ll lose their jobs because the new ones will work cheaper in worse conditions.

  It’s an old American tradition to resent the people who come here after you do. I had a world-champion mother but she always felt a little superior to the Irish. She was probably a little embarrassed to have fallen in love with my father. In the small town in upstate New York where they both lived, the latecomers were the Irish. They mostly did the housework.

  Prejudice has always been a fact of life in America. One group of immigrants has always found a reason to dislike the next.

  Fortunately, I’m an enlightened person. I don’t have the same prejudices my mother had. I think highly of the Irish.

  It’s all those Mexicans I worry about.

  A Learning Experience

  “No,” I said.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “You just can’t,” I said.

  It’s Saturday morning and I’ve taken Alexis to the supermarket. Alexis is five.

  The trick with a child in a supermarket is to snake your way up and down the aisles, without forgetting the things on your list, without losing track of the child, without buying one of everything she wants, while, at the same time, keeping her interested and happy enough so she doesn’t make a scene.

  “Can I get in there?” she asked, pointing to the shopping cart.

  “You’re a little big for that, aren’t you?”

  “Mom lets me.”

  “I’ll bet she doesn’t, but OK, get in.”

  I figured I’d have better control over her in the cart than out of it.

  “Let’s get some cookies?” she said.

  “We’ll get some cookies.”

  We passed the cookie shelves and I picked out two packages.

  “Get chocolate,” Alexis said firmly.

  I got chocolate.

  “Can I have a cookie now?”

  “No. It’s too early.”

  “Mom lets me have cookies,” she said with a little tiny smile on her face, indicating she was kidding and that I knew she was kidding.

  “You can’t open them until we pay for them anyway.”

  “Why can’t we?”

  “They aren’t ours yet. They still belong to the store until we get to the cashier and pay for them.”

  “Mom lets me,” she smiled.

  Being the father of Alexis’ mother, I knew better.

  A woman whose face was familiar but whose name I didn’t know, passed by.

  “Hello,” I said, smiling more than I normally would have, trying to make up for not being able to recall her name.

  “Why did you say ‘Hello’?” Alexis asked.

  “That woman is a friend of mine,” I said.

  “What’s her name?” Alexis persisted.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said.

  “Why doesn’t it matter? Now can I have a cookie? Can I have some candy? Mom lets me have candy.”

  I don’t know why I’d thought it was such a good idea to take Alexis to the store. Probably, in some general way, I thought it would be part of some educat
ional process for a young girl to go to the store with her grandfather. As things turned out, it was more of an education for me than for her.

  I had not realized, for example, how fiendishly clever all the companies had become at pushing their wares at us. After years of wandering through the aisles of supermarkets, I’d become inured to the attractive displays of food companies. We rolled the shopping cart to the car in the parking lot, unloaded it and I started to push the cart back to where they were stacked in front of the store.

  “Can I push it?” Alexis asked.

  “There are a lot of cars here,” I said. “I better do it.”

  “Dad lets me,” Alexis said.

  It’s about twelve miles home. I turned out of the parking lot and started down the road.

  “Are we almost home yet?” Alexis asked.

  By the time we arrived in our driveway, Alexis had eaten a small bag of popcorn and one big chocolate cookie. I had forgotten butter, lettuce and paper towels.

  Don’t Plan to Plan Ahead

  Something’s got to be done about slowing down the passage of time. If they can make cereal with ten times more iron than Shredded Wheat, they should be able to make a day last a week or a week a month.

  In January I was relaxed and happy because it would be twelve months before I’d be a year older. Now, here it is only a short time later and I’ve only got seven months left till my next birthday. It’s enough to put a person off birthdays for life. And while I’m on the subject, whoever decided that a birthday was an occasion for a party celebrating the day? I can understand kids having birthday parties, but no one past thirty thinks a birthday is any occasion for celebrating.

  When a person gets to be eighty-five, then he or she has good reason to rejoice over still being alive. The grandmother who announces, “I’ll be eighty-seven in August” shares pride in projecting the next step in age with the kid who answers the question “How old are you?” by saying, “I’m almost nine.” You don’t catch anyone approaching middle age, with a birthday six months past, saying, “I’m forty-two and a half” or “I’m almost forty-three.” Right up until midnight of the day before the birthday, that person’s going to be filling out forms and answering the question with forty-two.” Never mind the details.

  We keep moving things up—that’s one reason birthdays come up so often. We’re always hurrying time along by looking forward to things instead of enjoying what we have today. I keep hearing radio announcers saying that Memorial Day is the beginning of summer. Memorial Day is not the beginning of summer. Summer starts June 21. Let’s not press it.

  Planning isn’t good for the passage of time, I’m convinced of that. I just know that planning things a month or two months in advance makes time pass more quickly. You get to those days quicker than you would if you had nothing coming up. In March, I was looking forward to May because I had some interesting things to do on my calendar. Now it’s June, I’ve done those things I planned in May, but I’ve completely forgotten anything that happened in April. Did we really have April or did we skip it this year? I was so busy looking forward that I forgot to look around.

  The days that drag are the days when you have nothing coming up in the future, so that’s what we need more of to make time last longer—days that drag.

  It seems unfair, but the longest days are the days we’re sick in bed, in trouble at work or otherwise unhappy. These are the days we’d like to get rid of in a hurry but they won’t go away. The good days, the busy days, are gone before you can taste them.

  One of the most puzzling things about the passage of time is what happens in the middle of the night. I generally sleep well, but several times a year I have a bad night. I’ll look at the clock at 2:00 A.M. and then look at it again at 3:30 and swear I haven’t been asleep at all. Something strange has happened. I don’t remember anything I thought during the hour and a half. The time passed and I was awake but unaware.

  When I make my drive of three and a half hours every Friday to our summer home, I dread the thought of staring at the road for that long. I’ll note by my watch that I still have two hours to drive, but an hour later I can’t remember having driven the last hour.

  There must be some condition of the brain in between asleep and awake. You can wake up even though you haven’t been asleep. You can suddenly realize you haven’t been noticing anything around you and start noticing things again. You’ve been awake but nothing registered. Your mind has been a blackboard but nothing got written on it. We have so little time, we should savor every minute.

  HABITS AND OCCUPATIONS

  The Inadvertent Reveille

  Early risers are good people. They do the work of the world while late risers are still in bed. All the things like cars, television sets, bars and all-night McDonald’s never would have been invented if the world had waited for late risers to get out of bed and invent them. The late risers have the ability—they just don’t get up in time to start.

  Early risers have one serious problem. It has plagued me all summer. The problem is how to keep from waking the whole house when we get up. Being a typical early riser, I’m thoughtful of those who stay in bed and have to have a cup of coffee as soon as they get up. Once they’re up, I’m not too nice to them but while they’re in bed, I respect their disease. Staying in bed longer than it takes to get the rest you need is a disease.

  When I rise at about six on my vacation, there are often other family members or guests in the house. I try to be quiet, but it’s not possible.

  I slip silently out of bed, trying not to move the springs under the mattress, and I head for the bathroom. I’m careful to open and close the bathroom door gently. I hold the doorknob and ease it back to its normal position, rather than letting the spring snap it back, which would shoot the catch noisily into the hole in the doorjamb designed to catch it.

  Up until this point, I’ve done well every morning, but then come the problems. Being quiet is so difficult in a silent house. The silence is broken the instant I flush the toilet. That’s like a public-address announcement. ATTENTION! ATTENTION! ANDREW ROONEY IS NOW UP!

  It is not simply that I’m thoughtful. I want to be alone for two hours. I don’t want to interact with my dearest friends or family for a while.

  I tiptoe back to the bedroom and silently pull on my socks while the sleepers doze off again after their rude awakening. The minute I start down the stairs leading to the living room, their sleep is interrupted again. At 6 A.M. the stairs make a racket that Rip Van Winkle couldn’t sleep through.

  The house is just sixty years old, and I’m sure that for all of those sixty years every time anyone came down those stairs, they have issued forth the same noises. Gingerly I extend the ball of my sneakered foot downward to the next stair tread. Each time I put my full weight down, there are a series of explosive little cracking sounds as the wood changes position in relation to the piece it is up against. I’ve tried coming down barefoot, I’ve made my way down placing most of my weight on the bannister and I’ve tried putting my weight on different places on the steps, looking for a spot that doesn’t announce my descendancy. The stairs still snap, crackle and pop.

  In deference to their sleeping habits, I don’t get my breakfast first thing. Coffee making is quiet enough but squeezing oranges or even opening and closing the refrigerator door can create an impression in sleepers that the kitchen is going full blast and that they ought to get up.

  Now I take the car and go get the newspaper. If the running water and the creaking stairs haven’t permanently awakened everyone in the house, raising the garage door usually does. When I reach down and give the handle a jerk, the garage door starts up, and the sound of the little metal wheels in their metal tracks is like a drum roll echoing through the house. I open the car door quietly enough, climb in and close the door. Closing a car door is another one of those loud and inevitable sounds. There is no way to close a car door quietly. Car doors are built to be slammed. Slamming is what activates the lit
tle catches that hold a car door tightly shut.

  What I need is a sound engineer to come into the house and find a way to muffle my morning. Or maybe I’m just going to stop worrying about it. I know late risers wouldn’t be thoughtful if I were still in bed.

  What I hate most about late risers is, they lie.

  “I hope I didn’t wake you,” I say.

  “Oh, no,” the late risers say. “We were awake. We were just about to get up anyway.”

  Inside Outside Rightside Wrongside

  How come, if I admire neatly dressed people so much, I didn’t do anything about it this morning when I noticed I’d put my left sock on inside out?

  It’s still inside out as, sitting at my typewriter, I look down at it now. The ribbing looks a little different but not any worse, as far as I can see. To tell you the truth, it’s hard to describe exactly how you can tell when clothes are inside out. They have a different look but not necessarily a worse look. I don’t think anyone will notice.

  That must be the difference between someone who dresses neatly and someone who doesn’t. I put something on that isn’t quite right and I just shrug and say, “Who’s going to notice?” My collar may be a little frayed, there may be a small spot on my necktie and my pants are baggy at the knees. I wear them.

  Being a neat person isn’t something a person should get credit for. Neat people can’t help it. They’re neat, that’s all. It isn’t a decision they make every day. They can’t help themselves. They wouldn’t dream of leaving the house with one sock on inside out.

  One reason I’m not better dressed than I am is because I get attached to some of my clothing. If a pair of shoes, a shirt or a necktie has been with me to a lot of interesting places, I hate to throw it away after it’s seen its best days. These shoes, these very shoes I wear today, are a little down at the heels but I happen to know they have walked the streets of Moscow, were on board the U.S.S. Guam off Beirut and stood in the little garden by our house when Emily and Kirby were married. Could I throw them in the trash can as if they were something I hardly knew? I could not. This kind of sentimentality adds to the image I have of not being a very neat or well-dressed person.