Not That You Asked (9780307822215) Read online

  It was hard to know how to feel.

  What killed the kitten? Its throat must have been slit with a sharp claw during the night. Could a raccoon catch and kill a cat? Why would it? Whatever killed the cat had no intention of eating it, as a fox might have.

  Did the mother cat recognize the irony of her kitten’s death right where she’d been killing chipmunks? If the cat was capable of grief over the death of her own, why was she not capable of understanding how sad it might be for the mother of a young chipmunk she’d mauled to death?

  It was apparent we wouldn’t have to bury the dead kitten, and I finally drove off. Going down the long dirt road, headed for the country road, I passed a row of maple trees. Several of the smaller trees had been overrun by wild grape, an eastern version of kudzu, the scourge of the South. Wild grape wraps itself around tree trunks, climbs the tree and pulls down its branches in a vicious stranglehold. Its mission killing trees in the big picture of nature is no clearer to me than the cat’s mission killing birds, chipmunks and mice or the mysterious killer’s mission in killing the cat’s kitten.

  On the Road to Recovery

  The old station wagon is in intensive care. I’m not sure it’s going to pull through this time.

  Last Saturday I started out the driveway and heard an unfamiliar heavy, grinding noise. Over the years, during the time I’ve put 118,000 miles on it, my 1977 Ford Country Squire has made a lot of noises, each with its own meaning. This was different. It was no pebble in a hubcap.

  I eased it into the Five Mile River Garage just a mile from the house and left it to be checked over.

  Later in the day I dropped back and my worst fears were confirmed. It had a broken axle.

  I talked with Malcolm in hushed tones about whether Old Faithful should be put out of the way or kept alive by heroic measures. If I gave him the thumbs up, the car would need surgery. Thumbs down, it would be gone from my life forever. Malcolm told me that first he’d have to operate to make sure there was no serious damage to the gears. If they were OK he could realign the axle itself and weld the axle casing.

  I couldn’t bear to see the car that had given me such good service for twelve years be put down so I gave him the go-ahead. The axle is being welded this week.

  When a car has a problem, we’re all inclined to think of a new one. We’re looking for an excuse to buy a new car. It doesn’t take much and car loans come easy. Even a dead battery can get you thinking the car isn’t worth keeping. Buying a new car is the ultimate in recreational shopping and most of us do it a lot more often than necessary. The urge to buy a car is a disease for which they ought to develop a shot.

  The idea of looking around for a new car appealed to me but as I stood there thinking about delivering the death blow to the station wagon, I knew I couldn’t do it.

  What would happen to my old car? It was only worth a few hundred dollars before the axle broke. It’s not a wreck but there are the inevitable dents and scratches on it. You can’t do anything about the people who open car doors and hit yours with the sharp edge of theirs in the supermarket parking lot. And there are other signs of use. After all, I did back into that high loading dock. I did catch the corner of the garage turning around in the driveway that day several years ago. That truck did skid into me on the cobblestone pavement down on Canal Street the day before Christmas in 1981. So the car has been through the wars. No prospective buyer could look at my station wagon and be fooled into thinking it had led a pampered life. It looks all of its 118,000 miles.

  If I had decided to abandon the car, I know what would have happened. Malcolm would have towed it to the car scavengers, where they’d dump it out in the yard with all the others, occasionally stripping it of a door hinge here or a generator there. Malcolm probably couldn’t get any more from the people at the car-parts dump than it would cost him to tow it there.

  All that makes it even harder for me to abandon. I like it. I know it’s silly to feel affection for any inanimate object but I’d hate to see that car get into the hands of someone who was going to abuse it or chop it up for spare parts.

  My station wagon is being fixed now and I hope everything comes out OK. It’s good to have a car you don’t worry about denting. The wagon was always the one that got left out in the rain and snow. If there was a dirty job to be done, I did it in the wagon. I saved my good car because I wanted the good car to last. I’ve had three good cars since I bought the wagon. The wagon, mistreatment and all, has outlasted the cars I pampered.

  When I get it back, the first thing I’m going to do is give it a nice full tank of high-octane gas, some clean, fresh oil and a warm bath. I want the wagon to know that it’s loved.

  Mr. Rooney Goes to the Dogs

  There is no doubt in my mind that dogs have more good qualities and fewer bad qualities than people. They behave in an honorable way without the benefit of religion, too.

  My high opinion of dogs in general was reinforced the other night by my annual visit to the Westminster Dog Show. There were 129 different breeds at the show, and backstage with the owners and trainers I must have talked to a hundred dogs of 50 different breeds. There were only three dogs I hesitated to reach out and pat without asking for the advice or permission of their owners first. They were (1) a mean-looking Doberman pinscher whose owner said he was a pussy cat, (2) a huge red Chow, known officially as a “Chow Chow” and (3) an alert German shepherd sitting at attention in his stall with a superior look on his face.

  The owners assured me it was all right to touch their dog. The Doberman’s master said, “You can pet him but just don’t move your hand toward him too quickly.”

  I took his word for it that I could touch his dog but any time someone has to qualify how it is I can touch their dog, I don’t touch it. I didn’t pat the Chow either because I didn’t want to encourage the owner into thinking people like Chows, but I did become acquainted with the German shepherd, whose owner I offended when I called him a “police dog.” The German shepherd turned out to be cold to my advances but not aggressively unfriendly. He could take me or leave me.

  There were some wonderful surprises among breeds I knew little about. The Rottweilers, big, strong, short-haired, brown-and-black dogs, were friendly in a big, rough way. I like rough, friendly dogs better than itsy-bitsy, fragile, nervous little dogs, although some small breeds that are relatively new to me like the Lhasa apso and the Shih Tzu seem nice.

  One woman who weighed about eighty-five pounds was showing three mastiffs that weighed about one hundred pounds each. They were simply great.

  Every time I go to this dog show, there are at least ten dogs I want to take home. Now, for instance, I want a mastiff. “We never bother to lock our house,” the woman said and, looking at these huge, fierce-looking dogs, I could see why.

  I don’t like guard dogs, and the only reason these mastiffs would make good guard dogs is their appearance. I sat down with them, a total stranger, in their pen. I put my hand on the head of the big brown one lying on my right and immediately the gray one behind me put his huge head over my shoulder and licked my face. Some guard dog!

  At that point the one at my side turned over on his side and plopped his twenty-pound head in my lap. They are magnificent animals and all I could think was that the American Kennel Club is doing a good job encouraging the breeding of all these relatively rare dogs that might otherwise become extinct. Like sailors, golfers or horse-lovers, dog people have one-track minds, but it’s a good track to be on.

  The winner of Best of Show that night was a German shepherd named Manhattan. It’s the first time a German Shepherd has ever won and one woman who breeds German shepherds expressed delight, with some reservations. She said the trouble with a breed becoming too popular is a lot of people who don’t know or care much about dogs start breeding and selling them for money without much regard to whether they are good examples of the breed or not and, as a result, the breed deteriorates.

  You couldn’t make that comment ab
out humans. In the dog world it’s acceptable to be racist. Breeders admit some breeds have both good and bad traits other breeds don’t have. All dogs are not born equal.

  I talked with a woman who had a pit bull, that tough, pink-eyed dog originally bred for that disgusting and most uncivilized “sport” of all, dog fighting. The pit bull, called an “American Staffordshire terrier” at dog shows, has a reputation of being good around people but death to other dogs. They are, therefore, difficult to have as pets.

  The woman said her dog did not fight and breeders of pit bulls everywhere were trying to eliminate the fighting trait, along with the name “pit bull,” from the breed. I wish they could breed a little of the mastiff’s disposition into the Chow and the Doberman pinscher.

  People tend to like any breed of dog they’ve known. That says something nice about dogs as a species. I grew up with an English bulldog named Spike and our children grew up with another named Gifford and, like most dog lovers, I argue with anyone who says English bulldogs aren’t the best dogs in the whole world.

  HOUSES

  Adding on to a House

  We’re having an addition put on our house. It isn’t much. It’s a small bedroom being tacked onto the side behind the kitchen. It’s only nine by twelve but we might as well be trying to build the cathedral of Chartres.

  Work was started in June. The room would be finished now, as I write in August, except:

  —The carpenter, who is also the contractor and very capable, couldn’t start until the foundation had been dug, and the man with the bulldozer said we’d had so much rain that the ground was too soft where he had to bring the dozer in over the lawn, so he had to wait.

  —The foundation took a lot of concrete but would only have been half a load from one of those big concrete-mixer trucks. They wouldn’t deliver half a load so it had to be mixed by hand, which takes time and makes a mess.

  —If they could have started right away it would have been finished July 15 but once the concrete was poured they had to wait for that to dry, so the carpenter started another job.

  —Part of the project involved moving the washer and dryer in an adjacent room. Water pipes and electrical lines had to be moved. The house is in a small town. The electrician doesn’t speak to the plumber and the plumber won’t speak to either the electrician or the man with the bulldozer. The contractor is Mr. Nice Guy who’d rather leave than get into an argument with the plumber, the electrician or the man with the bulldozer, so he’s been gone a lot.

  —Everyone had to go back somewhere quite often for something they’d forgotten.

  —The electrician said he couldn’t put the outlets in until the carpenter had the wallboard up but the carpenter said he couldn’t put the wallboard up until the windows were in, in case it rained, and he couldn’t put the windows in until the plumber took the old washing machine and dryer out through the opening because he was afraid they wouldn’t fit through the door or the window when everything was in place.

  —Someone asked how we’d ever get the washing machine and dryer out if we wanted to replace them. I ignored the question.

  —The windows hadn’t been delivered yet, anyway. The carpenter said there’d been some mixup in the order. He’d dealt with Ed instead of Bill over at the building-supply place and Ed wasn’t as reliable as Bill. He said he hoped they’d be in next Tuesday. “Next Tuesday” comes up a lot.

  —There was some indecision about where the windows should go. Before you can decide where windows go, you have to know where you want the bed to be.

  —You don’t know where you want the electrical outlets, either, until you know where the bed’s going, but it was hard to decide where the bed should go until the windows were in.

  —We lost another day because it was the eightieth birthday of the ailing mother of the wife of the plumber who doesn’t speak to the electrician, and the plumber had to drive his wife to Massachusetts to see her mother. The electrician said that if he’d known the plumber wasn’t going to be here that day, he could have finished up but he didn’t know it until he’d already promised someone else he’d come that day.

  —The contractor got a nice young man to rake and seed the area that had been torn up by the bulldozer but we had a thunderstorm that night and everything was washed away, so he’s going to have to do that again.

  —The plumber was mad at the man who did the landscaping because he said the landscape man drove his truck over the pipe leading to the septic tank. If it was broken, the plumber said, it wasn’t his fault. I was as nice to the plumber as possible. I agreed that if the pipe was broken it wasn’t his fault because, if it is broken, I hope I can get him to fix it.

  Some friends came over for dinner the other night and wanted to know why we hadn’t put the new addition on the other side.

  Maybe I’ll have them move it when it’s finished.

  Thy Neighbor’s House

  Phil Donahue, the television talk-show host, bought a piece of property next to his house in Westport, Connecticut, for $6.8 million and tore down the house on it. Even if we get along with our neighbors, we’d all like to be rich enough to buy the piece of property next to ours and tear down the house on it. Most of us don’t have the $6.8 million to do it … or even the $68,000, if that’s what it would take.

  The problem is that the house on the seven acres Donahue bought was the work of a distinguished architect named John Johansen. It was all concrete, no wood, and was considered highly unusual, so a lot of the townspeople of Westport are plenty angry at Phil for having it bulldozed.

  Donahue bought the house and property from a man named Stephen Rapaport, who had it on the market for six months before the sale.

  “It was a difficult house to live in and Mr. Donahue had every right to do what he did,” Mr. Rapaport said.

  The twenty-six-year-old house had been empty and untended for years. Grass grew high around it. Donahue complained that it attracted “vagrants, lovers and other strangers.”

  Westport’s architectural historian, Mary McCahon, on the other hand, said, “I still get knots in my stomach when I think about it. It was a wonderful building.”

  Phil’s answer to that was “If it’s an architectural gem, why didn’t someone take care of it?”

  I don’t know Phil Donahue but I’ve always liked him on the air. He seems bright, fair and sensible and a great popularizer of complex issues. Anyone who appears on television is considered a philistine by the I-never-watch-television crowd and it’s anyone’s natural inclination to be on the side of the preservationists, so Phil is taking a lot of heat.

  The preservationists are usually the cultured, intelligent people in any community, but there are knee-jerk preservationists who’d save every building ever constructed for no other reason than that it’s old. Age is no guarantee of excellence in people or buildings.

  I don’t know whether this building should have been saved or not but if three quarters of the buildings in most American cities were torn down, we wouldn’t lose much of our cultural heritage. In many European countries, towns are constipated by their own history. In so magnificent a city as Florence, Italy, there are more great old buildings of historic significance than the living Italians can maintain. How much of the income of the living should be spent to preserve the history of the dead? It’s always sad to see a building in which so much has happened fall into ruins but it’s also sad to pass a cemetery and think of all the lives represented by the stones there. The fact is, there’s a limit to the amount of time we can spend remembering anything.

  Westport isn’t Florence and the Johansen house was not an ancient artifact. I’m not much attracted to architectural tours de force anyway. The Frank Lloyd Wright houses called “great” are fascinating but they are not houses I’d trade my own house to live in.

  Many of our best architects haven’t served us well because they’ve devoted their talent to showpiece structures and not to the buildings that are most important to our lives. The aver
age house in the average city is an artistic monstrosity.

  The architects’ defense to that charge is that too often houses are built without an architect’s plan. This is true but architects have to find a way to make their skill more readily available. We have enough office buildings, banks, museums and churches. What we need from Mr. Johansen are fewer unusable unusual concrete gems and more help building or remodeling our homes.

  If Phil Donahue puts up nine houses on the property where the concrete house was and makes a profit of $5 million on the deal, I take back every nice thing I’ve said about him.

  A Car Wash in Every Garage

  There are a dozen or so conveniences for the home that I’d like to have, except some of them haven’t been invented yet as far as I know. I’ve been making a list:

  —When I turn off the shower, I’d like to be able to switch on blowers that shoot hot air at me until I’m dry. I like a good, big towel but it’s hard to leave it someplace outside the shower where I can reach it without getting water all over the bathroom floor.

  —Is anyone so rich that they have a garage equipped with a car wash? Why not? Every night when you put the car away, the washer would go on automatically as you turned out the lights. Every morning you’d go out to a sparkling clean car.

  —It would be wonderful to have a dining-room table that would lift straight up and be conveyed to the kitchen on some kind of overhead rollers. In the kitchen, the dishes and leftovers could be cleared from the table. It then could be reset for dessert and returned, with another push of a button, to the dining room.

  —Why don’t we have dry-cleaning machines in our homes just the way we have washing machines? As far as I know, about the only difference is washing machines work with soap and water and dry-cleaning equipment uses some other fluid.