Not That You Asked (9780307822215) Read online

  I see Dan Rather in the halls once in a while. He’s faultlessly neat. His pants always have a razor-sharp press, his hair is nicely combed, his shoes are shined, his shirt fits and there are no spots on his necktie. It all seems to come so easily to him that I resent him for it. He’d look perfect leaving a picnic in a rainstorm.

  It may be that anchormen have neat minds that lead them to being neat dressers, because Peter Jennings is always faultlessly attired, too. Like Dan, he looks just right in his clothes.

  This may be more than you want to know about my dressing habits but I assume that you will draw some interest from them as they parallel or diverge from your own. Last week I looked in the drawer in which I keep my shorts and undershirts and there were only a few pairs.

  I asked Margie if she knew what happened to the rest of them.

  “I threw them out,” she said. “They were rags. You can’t wear those.”

  Has there been a ruling from the Supreme Court on this? Does a wife have the right to throw out her husband’s underwear simply because it’s tattered? Have I no rights? Are not my dresser drawers sanctuary? Does another person have any business invading the privacy of what I wear under my outerwear?

  If I let her get away with this, first thing you know she’ll be throwing out my old flannel pajamas that are a little gone in the elbow; she’ll be tossing out the ties that are worn at the knot and sorting out the shoes that are down at the heels.

  When you can’t be what you’d like to be, there’s no sense eating your heart out about it. The best and easiest thing to do is simply change what you want to be. I’ve always wanted to be a neat dresser but it is apparent to me, after all these years, that I am incapable of being one. I am therefore altering my desire. I am convincing myself that my manner of dress is casual, informal, low-key, relaxed and homespun. The word “slob” will never cross my mind again.

  Rethinking Breakfast

  We have to rethink breakfast in America. No one in years has put any thought into the first meal of our day. How many times have you read in a cookbook or in the Sunday supplement of your newspaper a good new recipe for something to have for breakfast?

  Once the recipe writers have run through pancakes, waffles, eggs Benedict and blueberry muffins, they’re finished with breakfast.

  There are reasons why we haven’t paid any attention to breakfast, I suppose. For one thing, we’re busy in the morning. Eating is part entertainment, and at breakfast we don’t want entertainment, we want nourishment. We want to put something warm into our digestive tracts to get things going down there. People aren’t interested in reading breakfast recipes.

  You’d never know it from looking at the cereal advertisements but there are even a lot of Americans who start off their day with nothing more than coffee and a cigarette.

  Another reason why the cookbooks don’t spend much time on breakfast is that it isn’t as social a meal as the others. You never invite someone over for breakfast the way you might invite someone for dinner, and you don’t often have breakfast with friends or co-workers the way you often have lunch. People aren’t much interested in talking at breakfast. They have their minds on what they’re going to do that day.

  Being creative or looking into new things to eat doesn’t interest people first thing in the morning. They don’t want to think about food. They’re satisfied with more of the same thing they had yesterday.

  Some people eat the same thing for breakfast every day of their lives. I know a man in his eighties who says he has had the same thing for breakfast for sixty years. He says he has one soft-boiled egg, two pieces of toast and three cups of coffee, black. We got to talking about it and we figured he has eaten 1,825 dozen soft-boiled eggs.

  I like orange juice, toast, marmalade and coffee, but when I’m not home I end up eating bad muffins, soggy croissants or bakery coffee cake that smells of fake vanilla.

  I’ve never read what doctors have to say about orange juice but it seems unlikely that anything as acidic as orange juice is the best thing to pour down your throat into your stomach first thing in the morning. I know the vitamins in orange juice are good for you but they certainly must be just as good at some other time of day. When you think of it, orange juice probably would be better consumed as a sort of breakfast dessert, after toast or cereal.

  Weekend breakfasts are another matter, of course. I love breakfast Saturday and Sunday. Sitting there, in no hurry, reading the newspaper and drinking more coffee than is good for you is one of the great luxuries of life. Sunday morning is when I feel most sorry for the homeless.

  On special occasions when the kids are home, I make waffles, pancakes or popovers. When we’re alone on a cold winter morning, I make real, not instant, oatmeal. Directions on the box say it takes half an hour but it doesn’t take more than about twelve minutes. You cook it like rice so it ends up dry. (The only Sunday-morning problem I’ve never been able to solve is getting them to deliver two newspapers on just that one day.)

  I can’t figure why Campbell’s never pushed soup as a breakfast food. I’ve never tried it myself, I’ve just thought about it, but why wouldn’t chicken or beef broth, with rice or barley in it, be a great breakfast?

  I don’t have it in for Wheaties or Shredded Wheat but why wouldn’t hot chicken soup be the ideal breakfast? It’s nourishing and it could replace the drink you want when you have juice, the hot jolt you want when you have coffee and the nourishment you need when you have eggs, toast, pancakes or cereal. Maybe we could have chicken soup with caffeine.

  We have to reinvent breakfast. Bacon and eggs don’t do it.

  How to Read a Newspaper

  Considering how much time I’ve spent reading newspapers in my life, it’s amazing how little thought I’ve given to how a newspaper should be read. There’s nothing I do so much of that I do so badly.

  If I ate dinner the way I read the newspaper, I’d be starting with dessert; if I drove the way I read the newspaper, I’d be arrested for drunken driving because I was wandering all over the road; if I read a book the way I read a newspaper, I’d be starting near the end, working forward and then jumping to the beginning. My method of reading the newspaper makes no sense at all and yet there’s no small pleasure I enjoy more. Anyone can read a newspaper any way he or she wants to. This is the great advantage of reading a newspaper over viewing television news. With television news, you take it the way they want to give it to you or not at all.

  I wish I were more disciplined about the way I read the newspaper. It may be OK to start with the social notes, the gossip columns, sports pages, recipes, comic strips or the columnists, but my trouble is when I do that I often run out of reading time before I get to what I ought to read to know what’s going on in the world. There is hardly a day that I don’t put the newspaper down, fully intending to pick it up and finish it later. Unfortunately, there is hardly a day when I pick it up and finish it later. First thing I know, tomorrow’s paper has come and the one I didn’t finish reading is no longer news, it’s history. I often wonder if newspaper editors read all of the things in their paper.

  The reason I don’t finish the paper is that there’s a limit to how much time I can spend reading it before I have to get at life. I often feel guilty about that and so I save the paper. As a result, there are piles of newspapers everywhere in the house and office. They’re on the floor next to my chair in the living room, on the radiator in the kitchen and on the table next to the bed. Every stack of papers reminds me that I don’t get things done. Sometimes I wish that newspapers were printed on stock that evaporated into thin air when it was a day old.

  We’re bombarded by information from every side, and it’s a good thing. The hardware for the distribution of intelligence is vastly better than it was even twenty years ago. Reporters, generally speaking, are not being given enough time to dig out the information they need for a complete story, but the means of spreading information around is so much better that we’re getting more of it than we used
to despite that sad fact. A little of that information is bound to sink in and make us better informed.

  The trouble with reading novelty, gossip or sports items or reading half a news story is that we end up paying too much attention to things that have no bearing on our lives. They’re dream-world stuff. They’re interesting as entertainment but they have no practical value for our lives. Everything doesn’t have to be important, but most of it ought to lead us somewhere, even if it’s only to making a better cup of coffee or adding a tidbit of information about foreign policy that will help us vote intelligently in the next election. For all the information we have available, most of us are stupid and uninformed, and it isn’t our newspaper’s fault, it’s our own.

  It might be a good idea if schools had courses in “How to Read a Newspaper,” although I don’t know who is qualified to teach it. Not me.

  The Worst Job in the World

  People like their jobs. It isn’t for the money alone that they work. Most men and women go to work with some anticipation of enjoying the companionship and the satisfaction that comes with accomplishing something.

  Years ago, I talked to a group of women who were doing a repetitive, assembly-line job for the Parker Pen Company in Janesville, Wisconsin, and I remember being surprised to find that almost all of them liked the work. It took them away from the problems of their own homes. It brought them together with people they liked to talk with, and the job didn’t involve making any decisions. It had never occurred to me before that someone might actually like doing an assembly-line job.

  While most of us like our own jobs, we’d hate to have someone else’s. There are a lot of jobs I wouldn’t take:

  No one has asked me but I wouldn’t take the job as president or vice president of the United States. I don’t think I’m being too modest when I say I’m not smart enough. Not being smart enough has not kept a great many men from wanting to be president and some from actually being president, but I am not one of them. To tell you the truth, there is no city in the United States so small that I think I’m even smart enough to be mayor of it. And I’d rather be mayor than police chief of Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami or Philadelphia.

  I don’t think I’d want to be a dermatologist with people coming in to see me all day with skin diseases. I know darn well I wouldn’t want to be a podiatrist, examining people’s feet.

  I’d even hate to be a shoe clerk in a store that sells expensive shoes to rich women. Whenever I pass by one of these stores, some poor guy is sitting there on that little stool at the foot of some woman with ten boxes of shoes on the floor around them. She can’t find anything she likes and he’s working on commission.

  I’m thankful that there are compassionate people who will work in mental hospitals but I don’t think I could do it.

  There’s an animal hospital I pass on the way to work every day and I hope the people who work there love dogs but it would break my heart to be around so many unhappy animals all day long. I certainly would refuse to be the one who picked out the dogs to be done in.

  Being a plumber doesn’t interest me. Trying to fix a leak under the sink is not my game … although I’d lots rather be a plumber than a school-bus driver.

  I’d hate to be an airlines ticket clerk, a gynecologist, a prison warden or a Supreme Court justice. I’d never be able to decide what was right.

  And can anyone who isn’t one imagine being an undertaker? How badly would you need money before you’d work at a profession where you were daily exposed to the grief that goes with every bit of business you conduct?

  In many states an undertaker cannot legally refuse to take in the body of someone who has died of AIDS. I’m sympathetic to AIDS victims but you wouldn’t have to be a terrible person to be reluctant to do whatever it is morticians do with body fluids, to an AIDS victim.

  Fortunately, most people like their jobs. They get up and go to work every morning with a lot of enthusiasm for what they’re going to do that day. People who stay at their jobs because there’s a pension coming at the end of the line are wasting their lives.

  I don’t know how a bright person stands being the president of a college. A college president consistently deals with people who are dumber than he or she is … people like students and alumni. If the president isn’t dealing with them, he’s dealing with faculty members, some of whom are brighter than he is, and this must be even worse.

  No matter how objectionable a college president finds any of these groups to be, he has to be sweet and reasonable with them—especially the rich ones.

  I feel selfish about my job. It may be the best job in the world and I’m the only one who has it.

  Fall Falls Short

  Whatever the season is, I’m not ready for it when it comes. You’d think this was the first time I’d ever seen fall arrive and faced an imminent winter.

  Fall isn’t a real season. It’s merely an interlude between the end of summer and the beginning of winter. Spring is the same kind of intermediary season. It’s that brief period between when it’s too cold and when it’s too hot. Summer and winter are the major seasons.

  I needed a topcoat Tuesday morning for the first time. When I got out of the shower, the weatherman on the little radio in the bathroom said the temperature was in the thirties and I made the coat decision right there, standing wet and naked on the bath mat. That’s where winter strikes first.

  Before I left the house, I got my topcoat out of the closet, where I’d put it the last time I wore it sometime in April. I remembered instantly that I’d meant to have it cleaned and waterproofed last spring, so I’d be ready for this day. I never got at taking it to the cleaners, though. There seemed like plenty of time then, so it was just as I’d left it, spots, missing buttons and all.

  I didn’t really need gloves but there has been just one glove lurking around the shelf in the closet where I keep gloves and I’ve been meaning to look for the mate to it before I needed them. Last year I went most of the winter with one glove on my right hand and my left hand in my coat pocket.

  When I came home from work late Tuesday afternoon, Margie was in the kitchen, which is always warm. I changed into my sitting-around clothes and came back downstairs and settled into my chair in the living room to sit around. The room was uncomfortably chilly. I got up to push the thermostat up to 70 from its minimal summer position.

  I sat down again and the draft in the room reminded me that I’d meant to cover the air conditioner and push some insulating strips into the cracks around it.

  The oil burner stayed on for longer than it should have to bring the living room up to a comfortable temperature and I remembered I’d never got at climbing up into the attic to cover the big exhaust fan in the gable. It has louvered aluminum flaps that come down when it isn’t running but it needs more than that to keep it from letting the heat out of the house.

  The car is probably OK because I keep antifreeze in it all year long now, but I meant to check that and to change the oil before it got cold. Adding antifreeze from a plastic container I buy at a supermarket for a lot less than a gas station charges is very satisfying although I don’t know what I’ll do with the 37 cents I saved.

  Our driveway is difficult when it snows and, instead of paying someone to plow it several times a year, it probably would be worth it to buy some kind of snowplow or snowblower that would do the job. I mean to do that before it snows but, knowing myself better than all but three or four other people know me, I doubt if I’ll look into the snowblower until the morning of the first heavy snow when everyone else is down at the hardware store looking for the same thing.

  I haven’t skied for the past couple of years. I don’t want to lose it so I’ve been meaning to do some exercises to get my legs in shape. It’s tough to hold that crouching position, with your knees bent, all the way down a long trail unless you’re in condition for it. I have the nervous feeling I won’t ski again this year because I didn’t get ready and this could be the end of my skiing career
, never illustrious at its best.

  Maybe what I ought to do is face the fact that I’m not ready for winter this year and never will be. That way, I could start getting ready for next summer early. I could do things like lose some weight so I’ll look good in a bathing suit and tennis clothes.

  Where Are All the Plumbers?

  For the past few days I’ve spent most of the time in my woodworking shop making a complicated little oak stool for Emily.

  I like the whole process of writing but when I get back there in my workshop, I notice that I’m quite contented. Yesterday I worked until 2:30 before I remembered I hadn’t eaten lunch. It even has occurred to me that I could give up writing and spend the rest of my life making pieces of furniture that amuse me. Who knows? I might get good at it.

  It’s a mystery to me why more people don’t derive their satisfactions from working with their hands. Somehow, a hundred or more years ago something strange happened in this country. Americans began to assume that all the people who did the good, hard work with their hands were not as smart as those who worked exclusively with their brains. The carpenters, the plumbers, the mechanics, the painters, the electricians and the farmers were put in a social category of their own below the one the bankers, the insurance salesmen, the doctors and the lawyers were in. The jobs that required people to work with their hands were generally lower-paying jobs and the people who took them had less education.

  Another strange thing has happened in recent years. It’s almost as though the working people who really know how to do something other than make money are striking back at the white-collar society. In all but the top executive jobs, the blue-collar workers are making as much as or more than the teachers, the accountants and the airline clerks.