Not That You Asked (9780307822215) Read online

  I even feel sorry for my car when I have to park it out in the open where I know it will be sitting in the hot sun all day.

  There seems to be something basically wrong and counterproductive about having the air-conditioning unit of a car cooped up under the hood of a hot engine.

  Air-conditioning itself, essential though it is, is not really lovable. In restaurants you sit where it hits you in the back of the neck and at home you bought a unit that’s a little too small to do the job right. And then there’s something pervasively unpleasant about the atmosphere in an air-conditioned room. You feel you’re breathing old, canned air that has been previously breathed by someone else before it was chilled and pushed out into the room again. After a day in an air-conditioned office, you have a vaguely uneasy feeling somewhere in between a headache and a cold.

  Clothes are a terrible problem in the summer heat. My clothes all seem smaller, tighter and less comfortable in hot weather. I wear lightweight clothes all winter and, as a result, don’t have much to shift down to when summer comes. Hats shade your head from the sun but they increase the temperature of your head under them, so I usually discard a hat after a short time.

  The most idiotic clothing custom in the whole civilized world is that of a man tying a piece of cloth around his neck and knotting it at the throat to make a necktie.

  If daytime heat is ever tolerable, nighttime heat never is. I’d like it if I never had to sleep without a blanket again in my life. Beds should be made so that on hot nights we could sleep on firm nets allowing the air to circulate around our bodies. A mattress is like having a six-inch blanket under you.

  The temperature reached 90 degrees in a lot of places last week. That’s the harbinger I mentioned. I personally hope for a cold, wet summer.

  A Vacation Postcard

  It’s wonderful having a summer house to retire to for vacation. If we didn’t have a summer house, I wouldn’t be having all this fun. For example, yesterday, when I made the mistake of turning on the toaster while someone was using the iron in the next room, it blew a fuse in the box in the cellar. It’s a cellar; it isn’t a basement. You have to go outside to get to it.

  We all head for water on vacation so you can probably imagine what a joy it was for me when I opened the doors over the stone steps leading into the cellar and saw five inches of water down there. The fuse box is at the other side of the oil burner, fifteen feet from the steps. I don’t know much about electricity, but I know enough not to wade into five inches of water to do any electrical work. I didn’t change the fuse.

  I don’t want to go into the unpleasant details, but I don’t want to leave you with the impression this was spring water in the cellar, either. It had backed up from a clogged pipe leading to the septic tank.

  Unclogging the line leading to the septic tank isn’t even half the fun I’ve had on my vacation. On my first day back on the tennis court, I made a clumsy move, tripped and came down with my full weight on my ankle in a turned position. It’s as much fun as slamming your finger in a car door.

  Then I’ve been having a high old time meeting people at the Albany Airport thirty miles away too. Martha and Leo were due from Washington at 2:30 on a USAir flight for the July Fourth weekend. It’s an hour’s drive from here to the airport, so I started at 1:30. It’s also an hour’s flight from Washington to Albany. When I got to the airport, USAir said the flight hadn’t left National Airport in Washington yet. The flight was two hours and twelve minutes late.

  Today Ellen was scheduled to arrive from Boston on Bar Harbor Airlines, a subsidiary of Eastern, at 10:05 A.M., on flight number 3753. I arrived at the airport at 10:00 and was told the flight had been canceled. “Mechanical problems,” they said. I called home and Ellen had called Margie to say she was catching the next flight, number 3801, due in at 11:25.

  The airline said there were air-traffic problems and that flight number 3801 would be arriving about noon. It arrived at 12:20.

  Today I called the FAA in Washington. Eastern had not yet reported any mechanical problems to it on canceled flight number 3753. On-ground problems need only be reported once a month. I’ll be checking. I hate being lied to even more than I hate waiting.

  In meeting three flights, I’ve spent a total of six hours and fifteen minutes at the Albany Airport so I’ve had a lot of time to look around. One of the cops out front should lose some weight. Coffee is 70 cents a cup.

  Joe gets $2 for a shine and Fred gets $10 for a haircut. I got a haircut, but I told Joe $2 seemed like a lot for a shine. Of course, Joe would have to shine a lot of shoes to make what I make writing so maybe it isn’t too much. And anyway, during the whole time I was there, Joe didn’t have a single customer. I felt kind of sorry for him, but I didn’t get a shine because I was wearing old sneakers. By the time Ellen arrived and we drove back out to the house, it was after three. The dump closes at three so we’re stuck with the garbage until Saturday. Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here—Andy.

  A Vacation Hangover

  I’m back from vacation but everything feels strange.

  My shoes feel strange because I’ve been wearing sneakers for a month.

  My collar feels tight because I haven’t been wearing a necktie, and my leather belt must have shrunk while I was away.

  This typewriter feels strange because it hasn’t been hit for a month. It’s slow and sticky.

  The city seems strange, loud and dirty.

  There’s no time of year that goes so quickly as those summer vacation weeks. I’ve been taking a month now for several years, and when I pack up to leave, the days seem to stretch endlessly before me, one vast amount of time to rest and catch my breath. And then the time flies. There’s no good substitute for that cliché.

  When I was eight and in between the second and third grade, we had a cottage on a lake for the summer, and I recall clearly the feeling of dread I had in the middle of the night even then. I’d awaken and start thinking about how close to its end my vacation was. Time was running out. It evoked in the pit of my stomach then the same feeling of dread I get in the middle of the night now, contemplating death.

  It may be the clear delineation of a period of time that makes the time seem to go faster. Perhaps we ought to try to conserve time by dropping weeks and months as a means of dividing the years. We simply could number the days of the year. I am, for example, writing this on the 219th day. What would be wrong with calling it simply that? The date at the top right-hand corner of our letters today would say simply, “219th, 1988.” Why do we complicate it by dividing the year into twelve months that have varying numbers of days? According to my calendar, it is, as I write, Sunday, August 7. I still would not be lamenting the passing of July if August 1 had been merely Number 213.

  Variety makes a vacation seem short, too. It might be better if we all did the same thing every day of our vacation. We’d stay in the same place, see the same people and maintain a steady routine. Instead, we go places, take little trips, invite people to stay with us for the weekend and generally break up our days away from work into little patches of time. When you look forward to doing something the day after tomorrow, today and tomorrow pass quickly and so, of course, do the days on which you actually do something different. We nibble away at our vacation this way until there’s nothing of it left for just doing nothing.

  It’s difficult to understand why we never get used to how fast the days of our lives go by. From the information that experience feeds our brains, we seem to learn everything else we need to know. We know when we’re hungry, how much food to buy for ourselves. When we’re tired, we know we’ll have had enough sleep if we get six or seven hours, so we set the alarm for that. We know it takes half a glass of water to satisfy our thirst. We know all these things without even thinking about them, so how come we never learn how quickly our vacation goes by?

  One of the most unfair things about vacations is that the people who do the least work and get paid the most money for it take the
longest vacations. Everyone, though, is stealing more vacation time than they used to. It used to be they got two weeks and that was it. Now, more and more people are getting three weeks or a month and then taking extra days at other times during the year. I may steal a little myself during August. I’m not satisfied. I want a little more. I’ll take a Friday here and there or use up all of Sunday and not come in until late Monday. I’ll give the company its money’s worth by coming in early and working late.

  Plotting to steal a few long weekends for the next six weeks makes it easier to accept the fact that my real vacation is over.

  After Many a Summer

  Summer dies hard. We try to keep it alive for just a little longer.

  Even though we’re back at work and back at school, we try to hang on to a little of summer. We keep doing a few of the things we did on vacation, just as though it weren’t really over. We do summer things on weekends. We continue swimming, playing outdoor games, wearing summer clothes. We wash the car and water the lawn but it isn’t the same. The end is in sight. When Monday Night Football starts, can Fall be far behind?

  It has been chilly in the house on several mornings recently. I can feel Fall coming. Driving through the hills Friday, I saw the first suggestion of some color other than green in the trees.

  There’s no sense pretending it’s still summer when it isn’t, but few of us can resist it for the first few weeks of Fall. The official end of summer comes about September 23 but we all know the Tuesday after Labor Day is really the day summer ends.

  If the world were perfect, the seasons would be clearly defined. One season wouldn’t blend gradually into another. We wouldn’t have any warm summer days in October and cold winter days in April.

  The problem is that the Earth got a bad deal when it was created billions of years ago. It wasn’t put in orbit around the sun at the right angle. It’s kind of cocked. The Earth’s axis is tilted in relation to the sun, not facing it directly as it turns. The only times the sun hits the Earth straight on at the equator is in March and September, as I understand it … which isn’t very well.

  I’m not complaining about Fall. It’s just that, like most people, I’m a little sad to have summer gone so soon. It isn’t the weather I miss, it’s the barefoot attitude everyone has in July and August. People aren’t pressing so hard to get ahead. During the summer months, we’re content to tread water and stay almost where we are.

  People are divided about what they call this time of year. Autumn is more official, but I seldom use it. It seems too much like a poet’s word for me. It’s often used as a descriptive word to create a visual image of the season. You envision colored leaves when you hear the word autumn. I shouldn’t think they’d use the word much in Florida or California.

  Don’t ask me why, but Fall is the only word for a season that I capitalize. I know it’s inconsistent but it seems as though it needs a capital F. Spring could use a capital too, but I wouldn’t think of capitalizing either summer or winter.

  The best case that can be made for using autumn instead of Fall is that the word Fall has so many different and complex meanings in the English language. I’d hate to be starting out trying to learn English. Using Fall as the name of the season is way down on the list of definitions in both my dictionaries.

  Fall means so many things. It isn’t until definition number seven that it says “the season between summer and winter,” Among other meanings for the word Fall are:

  “To drop from a higher to a lower place.”

  “To take a proper place in formation; i.e., when a soldier ‘falls in.’ ”

  “When something comes or descends as ‘the night falls.’ ”

  “To happen; i.e., ‘Election Day falls on Tuesday.’ ”

  “To retreat or fall behind.”

  “A cascade of water coming down a bed of rocks.”

  “To quarrel or fall out with.”

  “One who receives the blame, slang; i.e., ‘The fall guy.’ ”

  “In wrestling, the throwing of an opponent on his back.”

  “In religion, the disobedience of Adam and Eve, The Fall.”

  No definition explains the use of the word Fall for the season. Presumably it comes from what the leaves on the trees do.

  It’s all enough to make a person use the word autumn.

  I don’t care what anyone says about its beauty, though—Fall is a little sad. A. E. Housman referred to it as “The beautiful and death-struck year.”

  PLEASURES

  The Art of Outdoor Cooking

  This is the story of the fall of two of my heroes. Craig Claiborne and Pierre Franey write about food and I’ve always admired them greatly.

  Now they’ve written a terrible article about outdoor grilling. I will never again accept their word for things about which I know nothing, because I’ve read their article on something about which I know a great deal and they’re wrong. Imagine how crushed I was to realize that I know more than they do about cooking out.

  Grilling anything outdoors is not an exact science. An outdoor fire isn’t like an oven that can be set at a fixed temperature. Every fire is different and every piece of meat, fish or any other food to be cooked over it has to be treated differently.

  Claiborne and Franey referred in their article to an “outdoor gas grill.” Will someone please tell me why anyone thinks cooking over a gas grill outdoors is any different than cooking over a gas grill indoors? Outdoor cooking, Craig and Pierre, is done over wood or charcoal, not over gas.

  These two experts quoted a third, a chef friend of theirs, as saying the use of wood wasn’t important. I agree that mesquite chips or little bags of hickory chips bought in a gift shop are ridiculous but you can’t beat cooking over hard wood.

  The outdoor grill I cook over most often is built into the stone wall just outside the dining room. It is fortuitously situated within a hundred feet of six big shagbark hickory trees. Every time there’s a strong wind, a few twigs and occasionally some major branches fall to the ground. I regularly pick up after the hickory trees and store their droppings in my wood box.

  It’s most convenient to start an outdoor fire with the store-bought “charcoal” that comes in those big bags. I put the word charcoal in quotation marks to indicate that it isn’t really charcoal. It’s coal dust that has been compressed with a large amount of clay that doesn’t burn at all. I dislike it but it’s convenient and it does hold its heat longer than wood.

  Once I have a good fake charcoal fire going I add a few small pieces of wood. You can’t use pine because the resins in it produce an unpleasant taste.

  If I’m cooking meat, I put the meat on right away while it’s smoking and before the wood catches fire. When the wood bursts into flame, this is where the experience counts. You have to judge how much flame to give the meat. You don’t want it really charred, but cooking meat quickly at first seems to help it retain its moisture. If I’m trying to cook a thick steak or even chicken, I often put the meat in the oven first, at low temperature for fifteen minutes, to warm it through.

  The big trouble with most grills you can buy in a hardware store is that they aren’t adjustable. You simply must be able to move what you’re cooking closer or farther away from the fire at different times. I keep four bricks handy and I’m always setting them up in different combinations to rest my grill on so that I can move the food away from the fire when it’s flaming or closer to it if it dies. When I’m ahead of the cook in the kitchen doing the vegetables, I want to put the meat on hold for a few minutes.

  Like most Americans, we’re eating less meat. It isn’t something we decided to do. It isn’t diet or religion. Huge pieces of meat just don’t appeal to us as much as they used to. Last night I cut two small zucchinis in half lengthwise and poured a combination of olive oil and safflower oil over them. I sliced big new potatoes half an inch thick and took the heavy stems off a big head of broccoli. I boiled the slices of potato for about five minutes and blanched the broccoli.
I put some of the oil over the potatoes and the broccoli and put everything on the grill, the broccoli last and very briefly.

  I thought to myself, “Craig and Pierre are probably grilling caviar on an electrically operated spit. I wish they were here to try this vegetarian dinner grilled over real wood.”

  Experience Is a Slow Teacher

  I’d be a lot better going to school now than I was when I went to school. I wouldn’t mind starting all over in about the seventh or eighth grade. That’s when I began to lose it a little.

  Miss Shute would stand in front of the class when she was teaching arithmetic and say something like this: “Seven. Multiply by three. Subtract nine. Divide by two. Multiply by eight. Add two. Andrew?” she’d say, looking quizzically at me for an answer.

  Charles Gibson and several of the brighter boys had their hands up waving at Miss Shute to call on them because they had the answer.

  “Fifty,” they’d shout when she pointed at them.

  The best I ever could do was guess. I don’t think I ever got the right answer to one of Miss Shute’s exercises.

  Miss Boyd taught us English. “He cooked the steak a deep dark brown,” she’d say. “What part of speech is the word ‘deep’?” she’d ask, then pause. “Andrew?”

  They were always calling on me, and I was always letting them down. I didn’t know then what part of speech “deep” was in that sentence and, to tell you the truth, I’m not even sure now.

  That’s why I’d like to start over. I’d like to take advantage of an education. I’d work a lot harder.

  I took Latin, algebra, biology and French in high school, and then in college I took good courses in American and English literature. I took lots of history and philosophy but, for the most part, I was more interested in passing than learning.