Not That You Asked (9780307822215) Read online

  One morning last spring, it was 37 degrees when I left the house. I noticed that a lot of the men going to work in their offices were dressed differently than they would have been on a 37-degree day in the middle of winter. Some of them weren’t wearing any topcoat at all over their suit jackets. On the same kind of day in the middle of winter, they’d have had on overcoats, scarves and gloves. The temperature was the same this morning as it had been on several days in January but the men’s dress had been decided on not by conditions but by the calendar.

  One man who catches the same train I do every morning doesn’t wear a coat all winter, and he never waits inside the station, either. He takes his position on the platform, jams his hands into his pockets with his newspaper under his arm and stands and waits, eyes straight ahead. It doesn’t matter if it’s below zero; he stands there and takes it like twenty lashes. I’ve never talked to him and I can’t figure out why he does it. He must have admired the Spartans. Or maybe he thinks it’s good for him, like a cold shower. Maybe he’s showing the weather who’s boss and proving it can’t intimidate him. If he were a woman, he’d probably be wearing a miniskirt.

  I’ve never believed the “thin blood” theory. That’s the idea that people who grow up in warm climates are more affected by the cold than people who grow up in the North. The same people are always cold and the same people are always hot. It doesn’t matter where they come from or what the conditions are. Being hot or cold is often more a state of mind than a condition of the blood. I work with a woman in a nearby office who always has a little electric heater near her. In the summer, when the rest of us are taking all the air conditioning we can get, she turns on her heater to fight it.

  The businesswomen catching the train I take to work are a small minority and it’s very apparent how much more of a problem clothes are for a woman than for a man in business. It’s acceptable for a man to wear the same suit to the office day after day but a woman won’t wear the same dress. I suspect this is something women have imposed on themselves because men don’t care whether women wear the same dress to work every day or not … as long as it doesn’t have a short skirt.

  Resolutions Don’t Work

  At the start of the New Year, when resolutions are so popular, it’s disappointing to consider how infrequently resolving to do something really works. Breaking New Year’s resolutions is as much a tradition as making them.

  In my lifetime I’ve resolved to do a thousand things I have not done. I have been determined, on countless occasions, to stop doing the things I do badly. I’ve promised myself to think things through more carefully, not to be so careless with money, not to eat so much, not to make so many cutting remarks either in writing or in conversation and to finish every project I start. These are my weaknesses, and I must add to those my inability to correct them by resolving to do so.

  Resolve simply doesn’t seem to help anyone be a better person. Alcoholics who are determined not to drink again are unable to maintain their pledge without outside help; cigarette smokers are unable to stop smoking even as they lie dying of emphysema or lung cancer. Gamblers can’t stop buying lottery tickets or playing the horses even though they know that in the long run they’ll lose.

  I’m sympathetic to everyone with a shortcoming who tries to correct it by determination. “Me too,” I say.

  We are led to put faith in resolutions because on rare occasions they do actually help. More than two years ago I noticed my arms were getting flabby and I decided to lift weights to rebuild my biceps. For what reasons I cannot say but I’ve stuck at curling a ten-pound weight every day for about five minutes an arm. I’m now up to doing it one hundred times with each arm and my biceps are noticeably firmer. I don’t know why I’ve been able to do this exercise every day when I can’t stick to a resolution not to eat so much ice cream. Whatever leads me to lift those weights also gives me false hope that someday I’ll be thin through resolve. It’s a mirage but I see it every day.

  The news, recently announced, that there is scientific evidence that heredity has a great deal more to do with what we’re like than the circumstances under which we live while we’re growing up is seriously bad news for all of us. I hate to believe it’s true. It means I’m hopelessly trapped being exactly the way I am for the rest of my life, and that isn’t good enough. It means that all the people who are poor because they’ve been born without much ability to succeed are having babies born with the same natural inclination to failure.

  The idea that our destiny is largely determined by the genes we inherit is a discouraging thought for many reasons. For example, it diminishes the importance of education. As much as I dislike accepting the theory, my failure at self-improvement has made me so skeptical of the power of resolution to improve me that I’ve all but given up making resolutions.

  The only hard thing I’ve ever decided to do and then consistently done in my adult life is to get out of bed early every morning. I’ve stuck at rising before the crowd through light and dark, warm and cold. Getting going early seems to be responsible for most of any success I’ve had. I was congratulating myself on this just now as I thought it over but I couldn’t help wondering how it fit into my belief that resolutions are almost never kept.

  It suddenly occurred to me that the chances are that determination and strength of character have nothing whatsoever to do with getting up in the morning. I can stop congratulating myself on having followed through on a resolution. It’s simpler than that. I get up because I can’t sleep.

  So, Happy New Year, but for better or worse, you might as well resign yourself to being about the same this year as you were last. Chances are, those resolutions aren’t going to improve your personality or lose you a pound.

  Ticket to Nowhere

  Things never went very well for Jim Oakland. He dropped out of high school because he was impatient to get rich, but after dropping out he lived at home with his parents for two years and didn’t earn a dime. He finally got a summer job working for the highway department holding up a sign telling oncoming drivers to be careful of the workers ahead. Later that same year, he picked up some extra money putting flyers under the windshield wipers of parked cars.

  Jim was twenty-three before he left home and went to Florida, hoping his ship would come in down there. He never lost his desire to get rich but first he needed money for the rent, so he took a job near Fort Lauderdale for $4.50 an hour servicing the goldfish aquariums kept by the cashier’s counter in a lot of restaurants.

  Jim was paid in cash once a week by the owner of the goldfish business and the first thing he did was go to the little convenience store near where he lived and buy $20 worth of lottery tickets. He was really determined to get rich.

  Recently, the lottery jackpot in Florida reached $54 million. Jim woke up nights thinking what he could do with $54 million. During the days, he daydreamed about it. One morning he was driving along the main street in the boss’s old pickup truck with six tanks of goldfish in back. As he drove past a BMW dealer, he looked at the new models in the window. He saw the car he wanted in the showroom window but unfortunately he didn’t see the light change. The car in front of him stopped short and Jim slammed on his brakes. The fish tanks slid forward. The tanks broke, the water gushed out and the goldfish slithered and flopped all over the back of the truck. Some fell off into the road.

  It wasn’t a good day for the goldfish or for Jim, of course. He knew he’d have to pay for the tanks and 75 cents each for the fish and if it weren’t for the $54 million lottery, he wouldn’t have known which way to turn. He had that lucky feeling.

  For the tanks and the dead goldfish, the boss deducted $114 of Jim’s $180 weekly pay. Even though he didn’t have enough left for the rent and food, Jim doubled the amount he was going to spend on lottery tickets. He never needed the $54 million more.

  Jim had this system. He took his age and added the last four digits of the telephone number of the last girl he dated. He called it his lucky number …
even though the last four digits changed quite often and he’d never won with his system. Everyone laughed at Jim and said he’d never win the lottery.

  Jim put down $40 on the counter that week and the man punched out his tickets. Jim stowed them safely away in his wallet with last week’s tickets. He never threw away his lottery tickets until at least a month after the drawing just in case there was a mistake. He’d heard of mistakes.

  Jim listened to the radio all afternoon the day of the drawing. The people at the radio station he was listening to waited for news of the winning numbers to come over the wires and, even then, the announcers didn’t rush to get them on. The station manager thought the people running the lottery ought to pay to have the winning numbers broadcast, just like any other commercial announcement.

  Jim fidgeted while they gave the weather and the traffic and the news. Then they played more music. All he wanted to hear were those numbers.

  “Well,” the radio announcer said finally, “we have the lottery numbers some of you have been waiting for. You ready?

  “The winning number,” the announcer said, “is eight-six-zero-five-three-nine. I’ll repeat that—eight-six-zero-five-three-nine.” Jim was still a loser.

  I thought that with all the human-interest stories about lottery winners, we ought to have a story about one of the several million losers.

  The Silent Sound of Music

  At some point in life, everyone wants to learn how to play a musical instrument. My mother bought me a brass bugle for $5 when I was nine. I treasured it, polished it and tried to learn to play it. I learned how to get some noise out of the bugle but never what you’d call music.

  Jew’s harps became the fad one year. Every kid had one. It was like whistling—either you could do it or you couldn’t. I could play a recognizable version of “Turkey in the Straw” on that, but another year Uncle Bill gave me a good Hohner harmonica for Christmas and I never mastered the trick of sucking in and blowing out at the right time.

  I took one piano lesson in college and Bill Chernokowsky stepped on the back of my hand in football practice the next day and that permanently concluded my efforts to become a world-renowned musician.

  The world must be filled with unsuccessful musical careers like mine, and it’s probably a good thing. We don’t need a lot of bad musicians filling the air with unnecessary sounds. Some of the professionals are bad enough.

  Instruments come and go in popularity and some go and never come back. I hardly ever hear an accordion anymore. The lute, the mandolin, the ukulele and even the harp seem to be instruments of the past. The saxophone is still popular but the trombone seems to be disappearing. It’s too hard to hold up, probably.

  The most enduring musical instruments are the violin and the piano, although people don’t have pianos in their homes the way they once did. Most pop-music groups don’t use either pianos or violins but the instruments will outlive the kind of music that’s popular with young people now.

  The violin and piano take more work and ability than many modern musicians have the time or patience to master. They want something they can bang on. Their idea of music is a noise so loud that nuances of sound are lost in the cacophony of reverberations produced on the eardrum. The favorite instruments of the rock musicians aren’t made to be played so much as beaten. Drums are favorites and, while jazz drummers like Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich were artists, most modern-music drummers might as well be swinging a baseball bat.

  The change of the guitar’s standing among musical instruments is one of the most interesting recent developments. From the choice of the romantic, blanket-robed, gay caballero on horseback, the guitar has gone in two opposite directions. It has become a favorite of a group of serious musicians who hear in it sounds its Spanish inventors never dreamed of. And then, of course, electrified and plugged in, it’s the weapon of choice for the modern rock singer who needs something to hold on to.

  If all you read about music were the billboards on the concert halls, you’d think every good musician was well known and making big money. Our neighbor Ed Wright is a superb guitarist who plays in what I think of as the Andrés Segovia style. If Ed ever makes it big, he’ll have good stories to tell about how hard it was getting started.

  Four years ago Ed gave us a cassette of Christmas music he’d recorded on his own equipment, and it’s a gem. It has every Christmas carol you’ve ever heard, played with clarity and finesse. Just for fun, I played it for myself on the Fourth of July last year, and I play it often at Christmas. I don’t get tired of his sophisticated, understated style, but Ed’s never going to get rich giving cassettes to his friends, and no business is tougher to break into than the recorded-music business. It’s not so much how you play as who you play. I have the feeling you could be Arthur Rubinstein your whole life and not be discovered if you didn’t get some kind of lucky break.

  If I’d stuck with the bugle or the harmonica, do you think I’d be playing in the New York Philharmonic today?

  Finishing Refinishing

  Is there anyone reading this who hates to start a job but loves to finish one?

  If there is, I’d like to get in touch with you because I’ve got at least a dozen jobs I’ve started that I never got around to finishing. Maybe we could get together. As a matter of fact, I’d love to have you living next door. We could make beautiful music together, with you finishing all the jobs I start and then abandon.

  See if any of these appeal to you:

  The air conditioner in one of the upstairs bedrooms doesn’t fit in the window very well, and in the winter a lot of cold air seeps in. I started to fix it by buying one of those rolls of felt you stuff in the cracks. I also got some insulating material and special tape to do the job after looking it over carefully. Unfortunately, that’s as far as I got. If you’d like to drop by to get the satisfaction of finishing it, you’re welcome.

  I got a good start on my taxes too. I was determined not to be in such bad shape next spring at income-tax time so several months ago I marked a folder IMPORTANT—IRS and started putting receipts, bank statements and canceled checks in it. It was a good start but I didn’t keep it up. I notice, for instance, that since April 30 I haven’t made any new entries in the diary the IRS tells you to keep.

  If you like accounting and would enjoy finishing this kind of bookkeeping work, I’d love to have your help. In exchange, I’ll come over to your house and start a lot of things and then not finish them for you. That’s where I excel.

  The Sunday papers are piling up in the back room. I started reading all of them but never finished. I know there’s a lot of good stuff in them so I can’t throw them away but I never seem to get at reading them.

  There are two articles I want to read in the travel section of May 8 and at least four editorials I started reading but put down when the phone rang. I also meant to look up the story of the fellow I knew at work who got married.

  If finishing reading newspapers is your kind of thing, let’s work out a deal.

  Are you, by any chance, handy around the house? You aren’t a careful woodworker who isn’t satisfied until everything’s just right, are you? Because if you are, I have a lot of projects I’ve started but haven’t finished.

  I began making a little coffee table for the living room last August but then I got sidetracked because I had to make a lean- to for the two big garbage containers out by the garage. To tell you the truth, I haven’t quite finished that either, because it was supposed to have doors on it but I haven’t put the doors on because I don’t have any hinges. Maybe I’ll quit what I’m doing and go to the hardware store for hinges.

  While I’m there, I could get some varnish for that little table. I took the little table down in the basement one day to sand it but I couldn’t find the right sandpaper down there so I just left it and I can’t varnish the table until I sand it. Before I sand it, I ought to glue that stretcher between the legs that’s loose. It makes the table wobbly.

  I’m not sur
e, though. The table may be wobbly because the floor’s a little uneven. I rented a big sander from one of those rent-all places. I thought it might smooth out the bumps in the wood floor. I sanded some of the floor but something came up and I had to take the sander back and I never got at it again. Anyone want to finish fixing the table and sanding the floor?

  A lot of people are better at starting a job than they are at finishing it but if I’m ever offered a teaching job at a good college, I’d like to give a course in how to start more than you can finish. You won’t find anyone better at that than I am.

  By the way, I wrote some letters this morning but never mailed them. Do you like mailing letters?

  Living Longer but Less

  It always seems wrong for the head doctor in our country to be called the “surgeon general.” Dr. C. Everett Koop wasn’t even a general in real life. He was an admiral. Surgeon admiral?

  Dr. C. Everett Koop fooled many of his critics who didn’t want him put in the job by being a surprisingly good and active surgeon general. It was Koop, more than any other person, who pushed the country to stop smoking.

  Smokers are so uncomfortable smoking around other people now that you see more and more people smoking as they walk along the street. They take any opportunity to do it when they aren’t in a room or office with other people they may offend. When I take the train home from work, there is an attractive young woman who gets off at my station who heads for the door ten minutes before the train arrives. She gets her cigarette and her match out so that she can light up the instant the door opens. I look at her and think to myself, “Boy, I’d like to have the life she’s throwing away.”