Not That You Asked (9780307822215) Page 22

  “Yeah,” Lonnie said, “I been working for sixty-two years now. Want to go back to school. Never did get enough school. Never really learned how to read. I was a little lame boy, you know. Embarrassed to go to school. All the big kids. What I want to do is learn to read, good enough to satisfy myself.”

  I’ve known Lonnie for thirty years and never knew how handicapped he was.

  My Friend the Horse Thief

  It’s too bad life isn’t like the movies.

  When they make a movie in Hollywood, the women are beautiful, the men are handsome and all the characters are either good or bad. We aren’t confused about what we think of anyone. That’s the way life ought to be.

  Life isn’t that way, though. In real life, it’s impossible to tell the good guys from the bad guys because people are too complicated. Good people are always doing bad things and bad people keep fooling you by doing good things. The ax murderer drops bread crumbs out of his cell window to feed the birds.

  The other night we were sitting around with some friends and, as will happen, we started talking about another person we all knew well who wasn’t there. The subject of our discussion was Fred Friendly, onetime president of CBS News, a Columbia University professor and director of Columbia University Seminars on Media and Society. One of the people in the group referred to Fred as a “genius.” A second man in the room exploded in anger and said some things about Fred that I wouldn’t repeat here in print.

  I didn’t say anything because I was thinking they were both right. To almost everyone who has ever met him, Fred Friendly is “My Most Unforgettable Character.” He is one of my best friends and I have not only great respect for his brilliance as an accomplisher of things but great affection for the way he is. I can’t explain why I like the way Fred is, I just do. I don’t fight with anyone who can’t stand him. I understand.

  Fred can be an egomaniac and a jerk. When he is, I just smile because he’s my friend. I stopped judging him years ago.

  That’s the real problem. A person can be so many different things. He or she can be a loving husband or wife, a considerate friend who’d do anything for you in an emergency, but also someone who’d steal a sweater from a department store. This mixed-up quality of the character of all of us is hard to get used to and the movies make it harder because they condition us to expect people to be predictably all good or all bad.

  The reason for arguments about people, like the one my friends had about Fred the other night, is that one person’s memory of another is taken from that person’s good side. The one who hates the person can only remember the bad things he’s done. I know someone Fred Friendly fired twice. Fred fired him from one company and the man got a job at another. Two years later Fred moved to that company and fired the man again. I do not expect to hear anything good about Fred from him. I like them both and try not to mention one when the other is around.

  Whether you like or dislike people can also depend on your relationship with them. I’ve known several couples I consider good friends. They came to hate each other and were divorced. I still like and see all of them but no longer at the same time because they don’t speak to each other.

  I understand the complaint these people have with each other. I like them as individuals but wouldn’t want to be married to them, either. One of the former wives complained that her husband made her spend half an hour every day clipping coupons from the newspaper so she could get a dime off on things like boxes of laundry soap. I, on the other hand, always found her husband to be quick to pick up a check in a restaurant.

  It would be best if we didn’t take such satisfaction in our firm decisions about whether people are good or bad. We’re amused by our initial reaction to someone and keep repeating it until it becomes our own opinion. In a conversation, we know it’s a lot more interesting if we say someone is a genius or a jerk than it is if we withhold any comment.

  I don’t think any of us are going to change but I wish the movies would.

  Death of the Handyman

  Last weekend, we returned to the house in the country one last time to close it for winter.

  The house has stood for sixty years and I guess it’ll still be there on that windy hilltop looking out onto the Catskill Mountains when we get back in the spring, but there were a lot of things left undone. One storm window was missing, I never got to clean the leaves out of the gutters and I couldn’t find any insulation to stuff under the door of the little building I write in. I’m sure some snow will drift in.

  Those things are minor, though, compared to the big problem. Lloyd Filkins has been shutting off the electricity and the water and draining the pipes and the radiators every fall for about forty years. In the spring, he’s been turning on the water and reconnecting the electrical system.

  Lloyd knew where all the pipes and valves were because he put them in.

  Lloyd knew which switches to throw to cut off the furnace and the electricity to the house and in my shop. He knew because he wired the place, too. Lloyd knew where everything was and no one else but Lloyd knew.

  Lloyd died three weeks ago and took a thousand secrets with him.

  We often said we couldn’t do without him and now we’re having to do without him. Lloyd was a wonderfully dependable old grump. You had to be careful who you mentioned in his presence because there were a lot of people he wasn’t speaking to and if he wasn’t speaking to them, he didn’t want you to speak to them either.

  It wasn’t that he held a grudge for long … maybe fifteen or twenty years at the most.

  He was more like a country doctor than a handyman. He knew the medical history of just about every house in the village and made house calls when things weren’t going well. He had the keys to fifty of them.

  Lloyd thought of it as his town. The rest of us lived there by the grace of his beneficence.

  Just about everyone in the village had some job that Lloyd had started and was waiting for him to come and finish. He had so many emergencies that he usually couldn’t come … sometimes for years.

  Lloyd loved an emergency best. You could call him any time of day or night with an emergency. He’d grumble at you over the phone and he’d tell you that whatever had happened was your own fault … but he’d be there in no time.

  When Emily and Kirby were married in the little garden by the side of the house, someone parking hit the standing hose connection up by the garage. The pipe broke and water gushed out. The well pumps only three gallons a minute so it’s quickly emptied if someone in the upstairs bathroom takes a long shower at the same time someone is taking a long shower in the downstairs bathroom … or if there’s a broken pipe.

  The pump cuts out automatically when there’s no water in the well and that means no water for washing dishes, cooking, showers or flushing toilets. With sixty people at a wedding party, this is bad news.

  When I called, Lloyd dropped whatever he was doing and came. His routine never varied. Without looking or speaking to anyone, he went around to the back of his truck and pick out his tools for the job. He spent a lot of time at the back of his truck.

  He fixed the broken pipe that day, restarted the well pump and grumped off without saying a word. Lloyd took some perverse pleasure in not giving me the satisfaction of thanking him. His visit that day of the wedding showed up on some bill with other items later in the season. FIX PIPE it said. LABOR … $8.00 … PARTS … GASKET $.12 … TOTAL $8.12.

  There were people in town who said Lloyd had a heart of gold and others who were not sure. He never spoke to them unless they called him in the middle of the night with an emergency.

  Goodwill Toward Men

  When you consider all the groups of people who don’t get along with each other in this country, it’s surprising that the country works at all. You’d think we might have a Beirut or a Belfast here.

  Blacks and whites, for example, don’t get along. Our growing Hispanic population is alienated from both blacks and whites. There’s growing friction
between the young and the old. In small towns the Baptists don’t have much to do with the Methodists and neither of them speak often to the Catholics. Southerners resent Northerners, and in every major city in the country there are enclaves of Italians, Chinese, Germans and Vietnamese who don’t mingle much with anyone who doesn’t speak their language. The farmers are mad at everyone, and doctors and lawyers aren’t looking each other in the eye on the street because of all the malpractice practice.

  Just when I get most depressed about all this, something happens to revive my confidence in the goodness of people, the greatness of our country and our common interest in things that are right.

  Last Tuesday after work, I stopped by the Whitney Museum in New York City because there was an exhibition of Shaker furniture that I’d been wanting to see. It had been there for several months and was closing soon. I thought I’d be wandering around the museum more or less alone. It wasn’t as if the Shakers were a rock group.

  The Shakers were a religious sect of no more than six thousand people who lived in a handful of eastern communities in the 1800s. Not many groups that small have made such a lasting impression on some area of our culture.

  Shaker furniture is some of the simplest, most interesting and graceful ever designed. The Shakers didn’t selfconsciously set out to design anything. Design grew out of necessity. They made pieces of furniture and tools that did what they needed to have done. It wasn’t design, the way we talk about design in overblown terms today. It wasn’t built to sell—it was built to use.

  Their furniture is beautiful because it is so instantly recognizable as useful. A small sewing table of cherry provides a good work space and it has a curly maple front edge an inch wide that is a yardstick. A Shaker woman measuring a piece of cloth never had to move. The yardstick is its own decoration. They applied nothing to furniture that was merely decorative. If Shakers had built cars, they wouldn’t have put chrome on them.

  Shaker craftsmen didn’t turn out furniture to be bought by strangers and fitted into a strange place in a strange home, either. No two pieces of Shaker furniture are alike because each was built for a specific purpose to be put in a specific place.

  You wouldn’t think a wheelbarrow could be a work of art, but the museum displayed a Shaker wheelbarrow that would compete for any crowd’s attention if there were a Rembrandt hanging next to it.

  Impressed as I was with the Shaker furniture, I was even more impressed with the people who had come to the museum to see it. It is a small, unpretentious exhibit and yet here, on a hot summer night, several hundred Americans … Presbyterian, Chinese, black, white, lawyer, doctor, young, old … crowded into the Whitney Museum to stare thoughtfully at and enjoy, with a common sense of appreciation, the work of people from another age who had done something good.

  In the subways beneath the same street, there was filth. At the very moment people gazed on a Shaker chest made of maple, cherry and butternut, there might have been a mugging in a nearby street, but here, in this one civilized place, there was evidence enough of intelligence, humor, compassion and respect for other human beings to sustain anyone’s belief in the fundamental goodness of people for a long time.

  It was exhilarating. The world, I thought, is not going to hell after all.

  PLACES

  The Living City

  It’s kind of nice that most Americans who live in a city are proud of it. They like their city and they want the rest of the world to like it too. New York is the only exception to this.

  If you visit any city for a few days, you’re left with an impression of what it’s like and whether to turn left or right in a few places, but your impression probably doesn’t have much to do with what the city is really like.

  I have pleasant impressions of dozens of cities and unpleasant impressions of others but my opinions come from events or sights that were probably not typical of the place. Maybe I had a terrible breakfast in the hotel I stayed at that turned me against the city; maybe I asked directions from a stranger who was so pleasant and helpful that I went home thinking everyone in that city was the same way.

  This comes to mind today because I just spent two days in Boston. I was reminded what a good place Boston would be to live in. A good city has a core where there are lots of people doing different things, and Boston’s core is centered around the rebuilt Quincy Market downtown. (I’d be more comfortable if I was certain how to pronounce their historic old “Faneuil Hall.”)

  I could live happily in Boston, San Diego, Seattle, Pittsburgh, San Antonio or Madison, Wisconsin. There are some cities you couldn’t make me live in but I’m not going to mention them in case a newspaper in one of those cities runs my column. Why go out of my way to anger a space salesman?

  Here are some things for anyone thinking of moving to a city to look for:

  —Check to see if the downtown parts of the city close up and move to the suburbs at 5:30 P.M. You want a city where there are still people on the streets after dark.

  —The presence of one or more colleges is a good sign. You can’t beat having a good educational institution in town for livening up the city.

  —If the biggest cultural event of the winter season is the basketball game with the traditional rival, you might want to have second thoughts about moving there.

  —The number and importance of country clubs is something to watch for. If everyone seems to belong to one, don’t move there.

  —Be wary of a town that allows diagonal parking.

  —Don’t move to a city in which the best restaurant is in a hotel.

  —Watch out if there are too many churches and not many bookstores.

  —If the mayor has been in office more than eight years, consider another city.

  —Don’t move to a place whose principal shopping center is called “The Miracle Mile.”

  —Make certain the railroad station hasn’t been turned into a boutique.

  —There should be at least one good hotel that isn’t part of a big chain.

  —It’s not a good sign if all the police are in cars and none are walking the streets.

  —Look for a bridge that leads into the main part of town. Bridges are a good sign. A bridge often means the place was worth going to some trouble to get to.

  —Check to see how many intersections have signs reading NO RIGHT TURN ON RED.

  —Make sure there’s at least one bakery that bakes good bread.

  —Perfect symmetry in the layout of the streets is not good. A city should be a little irregular, suggesting that its growth was somewhat haphazard.

  —There should be at least one good news store that’s open twenty-four hours a day.

  —Make sure the city has a good newspaper. It’s even better if it has two newspapers, one of which you hate.

  —Don’t dismiss a city that has a dishonest local government. Some of them are interesting.

  —It’s not a major city if you can see the water tower with the city’s name on it from the center of town.

  Canada, Oh, Canada

  It’s about time the United States gave a party for Canada.

  No country in the world has a better neighbor than the United States has in Canada and our friends up there are having sort of a tough time. The Canadian dollar is worth about 72 cents, unemployment is high and Canada isn’t getting any favorable mentions for paying people millions of dollars to lobby for them in this country.

  It would be a good time to do something nice for Canada to let them know how much we appreciate their good neighborliness. For too long now, we’ve taken Canada for granted. Just look at some of the facts of our friendship:

  —We share the longest undefended border between two countries in the world, 5,500 miles long and not a military weapon pointed in either direction.

  —There are 70 million border crossings a year. Every once in a while a border guard will look in the trunk of a car to see if someone is smuggling something or hiding a criminal but most of the 70 million people go wi
thout much checking.

  —We are each other’s best customers. Canada sells us two thirds of everything it exports and we sell more stuff to Canada than to any other country. Canada buys twice as much from us as Japan does.

  —I hadn’t realized, before I looked it up just now, that Canada is bigger than the United States. It’s close, but Canada has 3,849,670 square miles and the United States has 3,623,420.

  The trouble with that figure is that a lot of Canada’s land isn’t usable. Most of the 25 million Canadians live in the narrow strip just above our border because if they go much farther north it’s simply too cold to live in the winter. They cuddle up to us for warmth. There are places in Maine where the border with Canada is all but invisible. You can enter Canada without knowing it on a lot of dirt roads.

  As a result of the way its population is distributed, a lot of Canadians have more in common with their American neighbors to the immediate south than to other Canadians a couple of thousand miles away to the east or west. For instance, Windsor, Ontario, is all tied up with Detroit because it’s so close. The people from Windsor probably don’t know any more about Canadians from Saskatchewan than the people from Detroit do.

  For an American to go to Canada or for a Canadian to come to the United States isn’t like going to a foreign country. It simply isn’t any big deal. Canada gets so cold that a million Canadians head for Florida for some part of every winter and at least that many American tourists go to some part of Canada in the summer.

  It must be hard for Canadians not to resent us sometimes. You can tell they’re a little nervous about the possibility of having their economy, their language, their traditions and their culture flooded out by ours. How would we feel if we lived in the shadow of this benevolent giant? How would we feel if we were swamped every day with books, movies and television from the country next door?