I wondered-if she was the President of the United States, what extraordinary measures would they be taking for her? How could I get them for her? She is not President, she is only my mother. The doctors and nurses cannot know that this frail, dying old woman did a million kindnesses for me. They wouldn"t know or care that she was girls" highjump champion of b.a.l.l.ston Spa in 1902 or that she often got up early Sunday morning to make hot popovers for us or that she drove her old Packard too fast and too close to the righthand side of the road. No stranger would have guessed any of those things looking at her there and perhaps would not have cared.
There is no time for each of us to weep for the whole world. We each weep for our own.
Grandfatherhood It seems to me that grandfathers are a lot younger than they used to be before I got to be one.
When I had a grandfather, all grandfathers and grandmothers were born at that age. It seemed as though they had always been what they were, grandmothers and grandfathers. They were kindly old folks and their grandchildren could do no wrong in their elderly eyes. I guess I haven"t taken naturally to being a grandfather. I have no interest whatsoever in being a lovable, gray-haired old codger who approves of everything his grandchild does.
Up until last week, I thought of Justin as my daughter"s son. I had seen him for a day or two five or six times a year since he was born six years ago, but I"d never spent an extended length of time with him. Either his father or his mother had always been present when Justin was at our house.
Last week was different. Margie and I had this cute little blond, brown-eyed person with us all week. I seemed to have him more than Margie when I was there because he wanted to do what I was doing. I was trying to enjoy what little"s left of my vacation in my workshop. If I hammered, he wanted to hammer. If I sawed, he wanted to saw. It"s onehundred-percent impossible to accomplish anything in a workshop with dangerous tools and a grandchild who insists on being there with you.
"Are we going to do our work?" he asked as soon as he got up every day. Some work.
I kept waiting to feel like a regular grandfather. I kept waiting to excuse him when he did something dumb or thoughtless. Instead, I found myself treating Justin more like a person than a grandchild. I was liking him more and more as a little friend.
The only thing this kid seemed to remember me for from last summer was that I got up early and made him pancakes for breakfast. Naturally, everyone else thought that was cute so I had to get up early this year and make him pancakes for breakfast, too.
Elephants and grandchildren never forget.
I spent quite a bit of time with Justin, trying to break him of his eating habits. He must have gotten them from my daughter Martha, or his father, Leo. He never got them from me. I never saw a young boy so interested in fruit and vegetables and so uninterested in candy, soft drinks or junk food. I don"t know what"s wrong with him, anyway.
He doesn"t want ice cream. The next thing he"ll be telling me is he doesn"t want anything for Christmas. I queried Martha about his aber [image]Giving granddaughter Alexis Perkins a tow from the tractor in Rensselaerville, New York rant behavior in regard to food, trying to determine how in the world this kin of mine ever got off on the wrong foot by not liking ice cream. Can they get government help for a condition like this?
I remember enough old Art Linkletter shows to know that kids ask a lot of cute questions, but I was unprepared for those Justin asked.
During a long drive over country roads to the grocery store, the sun shone in his eyes. I had a baseball cap with a long peak on it in back of the car and I suggested he put it on. First, he put it on straight but the sun was still hitting his face so directly that he pulled the cap down over his eyes and was looking through the woven fibers of the dark blue material.
"Hey, Granddad!" he said suddenly. Even though there were only two of us in the car, it took me a minute to realize he meant me.
"What"s all these colors?" he asked. "I see all colors. What makes all the colors, Granddad?"
I knew instantly I was about to fail my first quiz as a grandfather. I know that the light from the sun contains every color in the spectrum and I know that under certain circ.u.mstances it"s possible to bend light beams so that the colors break down and separate. The process is called refraction. I know that but I can"t explain it.
I can"t figure out how Justin learned how to be a grandchild faster than I learned how to be a grandfather.
Simple Pleasures A Trip to the Dump T he President says this country is in desperate need of a moral revival. He isn"t the first one to say it, either. Almost anyone who says anything has been saying it for years. The trouble is, no one knows how to revive us morally.
I have a simple idea that might just do the trick. I say we should all take our own garbage to the dump. Every able-bodied person in the country would set aside an hour twice a week to dispose of trash and garbage. There would be no exceptions. The President would pack up whatever waste was produced in the private rooms of the White House and take it to the dump just like the rest of us. A President should keep in touch with reality, too.
Going to the dump is a real and exhilarating experience. It is both satisfying and educational. It makes you acutely aware of what you have used in your home and what you have wasted. There"s no faking it with garbage.
In a family, dump duty would be divided up. The kids would take their turns going to the dump with the adults. A kid can get to be voting age without knowing that the wastebasket or the garbage pail isn"t the end of the line if he or she has never been to the dump. Children A Trip to the Dump 185 185 too young to drive would, of course, be accompanied by an adult to the dump.
The first thing you realize when you go to the dump is that we should be a lot more careful in separating what professional garbage collectors call "wet garbage" and just trash. All garbage is not the same. Trash is cans, bottles, papers, cardboard boxes and broken electrical appliances. "Wet garbage" comes from the kitchen.
Next, you have to get over that natural feeling of revulsion that garbage tends to induce. Keep in mind that coffee grounds, watermelon rinds, potato peels and corncobs were not revolting before we made them what they are today and mixed them together in our garbage pail. Think of them separately and in their original state and make a little game of breaking down the odor into its component parts.
It is possible to be overcome by a sense of your place in history at the dump. You are, at that moment, a part of the future of the universe. You are helping to rearrange the planet Earth. Man has always considered himself separate from Nature but a trip to the garbage dump can make him aware that he is not. In the millions and millions of years Earth has existed, there have been constant changes taking place. You probably live in a city that was once a lake or an ocean. The mountains you see may have had their cliffs sheared clean by a glacier when it moved relentlessly through your area an eon ago, dropping rich, loamy topsoil in the valley when it melted. Now, like the glaciers, you are doing your part to rearrange the location of the elements on Earth.
Little by little, we are taking up material from the ground in large amounts in one place, making something of it, shipping it across the country to other places, using the things, turning them into trash or garbage and burying them in ten thousand separate little piles called dumps in other places. In the process, we often ruin both places, of course, but that"s another story.
If being in on this cosmic kind of cosmetics doesn"t interest you to think about the dump, there are other pleasures. There is a cathartic pleasure to be enjoyed from getting rid of stuff at the dump and there is a camaraderie among neighbors there that doesn"t exist at the supermarket. Everyone at the dump feels he is doing a good and honest thing and it gives him a warm sense of fellow feeling to know that others, many with more expensive cars, are doing the same grubby, down-to-earth job.
Nowhere is morality higher in America than at the dump Sat.u.r.day morning and I recommend a trip there as a possible cure for what so many people think ails America, morally.
Vacation May and June are the months I enjoy my vacation the most. My vacation doesn"t begin until July but looking forward to it is the best part.
Once a vacation begins, I can"t keep myself from counting the days until it ends and that diminishes the pleasure of it. It always goes so fast.
I can remember thinking that when I was eight. In July the sun starts coming up later and going down earlier. There"s a depressing dwindling sense about the afternoon shadows in late July. It"s no longer Spring.
The longest day of the year should be in August, not June. The end of my vacation hangs over my head in July like the income tax deadline in April or a dental appointment in January. As the days dwindle down (to a precious few), it"s depressing to realize that what I"ve been looking forward to for so long is almost over.
There are some things you can do to lengthen your vacation. Or, at least, give it a sense of length. For instance, it"s best if you don"t have dates when you have to do something or go somewhere. Dates that interrupt a month make a vacation shorter. If it"s interrupted by someone"s wedding in another city or by a dental appointment, it divides your days off into little compartments. A good vacation is one during which nothing happens so eventful that you can remember it when you get back to work and people ask, "What did you do on your vacation?" We start going to our summer house on weekends in May and keep on going weekends right through September but for all of July and for Vacation 187 187 [image]With twin daughters, Emily and Martha three or four days I steal on each end of the month, we"re there seven days a week. No commuting. We have an extra bedroom so we can accommodate guests but I don"t like having guests during my vacation. If we have friends come to visit us, it"s usually on weekends before or after my July vacation. That way, they don"t interrupt my vacation. I like having them, mind you, but not during my vacation.
There"s a big difference in guests. I like the ones who get up when they feel like it without worrying about "what time do you have breakfast?"
I like guests who don"t want to do what I want to do but feel free to wander off on their own. When people are visiting, I don"t want to be a tour director. The best guests do what they feel like doing. After breakfast, they may volunteer to drive over and get the newspapers twelve miles away and not show up until several hours later for lunch. I am very fond of guests who enjoy a nap after lunch. If they want to play tennis towards mid-afternoon, that"s fine. If it isn"t too hot, I"ll join them unless they"re really good-in which case I"ll get someone else to play with them.
Book-readers make good guests. They don"t want you to bother them with suggestions like, "Would you like to walk down to the lake?" or, "There are some good antiques shops in Schuylerville." They"re engrossed in their book. The man who won"t move from in front of the television set while there"s a ballgame on makes a satisfactory weekend visitor.
I"m hoping no one we invite to stay with us is going to read this but I don"t like guests who stand around asking whether there"s anything they can do. If someone asks whether there"s anything he or she can do, there almost never is because the people who ask that question aren"t the kind of people who know how to do anything.
There shouldn"t be many decisions to make on vacation. It"s best when the biggest question you have to answer during the day is "What do you want for dinner?" or "Do you need anything at the store?"
Every year I bring several boxes of letters and miscellaneous pieces of paper from my office to go through. I have never yet gone through them. That"s what a vacation is for-not doing things.
Napping You"re certainly not interested in how I sleep, but I"m going to tell you only because you"ll relate it to yourself or to the people you know well enough to know how they sleep.
There aren"t many things I do really well but when it comes to sleeping, I"m one of the best. If sleeping was an Olympic event, I"d be on the U.S. team.
Coming home from a trip recently I got on the plane, strapped myself in and fell asleep before takeoff. As always, I didn"t wake up until Napping 189 189 [image]Enjoying one of life"s greatest, simplest pleasures the flight attendant shook me to ask if I was comfortable. Keep in mind, the flight was at 9 a.m., and I"d just had a good night"s sleep.
Nothing seems to bother some people when they sleep, and I"m one of them. I can eat dinner, drink two cups of strong black coffee and drop off thirty seconds after I hit the pillow. One of the few things that keeps me awake is decaffeinated coffee.
If the village fire alarm goes off in the middle of the night, I awaken easily, try to determine where the fire is and then drop back off to sleep in a matter of seconds.
Some people sleep faster than others. I"m a very fast sleeper. I can nod off for three minutes and wake up as refreshed as though I"d had eight hours. Some people can lie around in bed for nine hours and get up sleepy. I awaken instantly, going full speed.
We probably ought to sleep more often and not for so long. The trouble is, once the bed is made, we can"t get back in it, and during the day most of us get so far from our beds that it wouldn"t be practical, anyway. It might pay off for a company to have a room with cots where employees could take a nap. Companies have cafeterias and bathrooms, why not a dormitory bedroom? If employees got an hour for lunch, they could divide it any way they liked between eating and sleeping.
Naps are underrated. I don"t know why we dismiss napping as an inconsequential little act. The word itself doesn"t even sound important. I think everyone should get off his or her feet and lie down for a few minutes at some point during a long day.
Staying in bed for eight hours a night, on the other hand, seems wasteful to me. It"s like overcharging a battery. At some point, it doesn"t do any good. Most people who sleep eight hours stay in bed because they don"t want to get up, not because they need the sleep. Taking all your sleep in one piece doesn"t make any more sense than eating too much but only eating once a day.
Napping got a bad reputation somewhere along the line and I resent it. For some reason, people who don"t nap feel superior to those who do. Nappers try to hide it. They don"t let on that they drop off once in a while because they know what other people will say.
"Boy, you can really sleep," or, "Look at him. He sleeps like a baby." It isn"t much, but there"s just a touch of scorn in the voice.
People who are awake feel superior to people who are asleep because sleeping people usually don"t look so good. It"s a rare person who looks or acts as well asleep as he or she does awake. You don"t have any control of your face muscles, your jaw is apt to drop open and your hair is a mess. You look just the opposite of the way you look standing in front of a mirror with your hair combed and your clothes all together just before you leave the house for work. You can bet the President doesn"t look too good when he"s asleep. Even Miss America would probably be embarra.s.sed to have a picture of herself taken while she was unconscious.
I"d like to form an organization of good sleepers and nappers. We"d demand the respect we deserve. We are people who dare drop off for a Wastebaskets 191 191 few minutes in the middle of the day. We"re an oppressed minority and we"re tired of it. Nappers of the world, unite!
Wastebaskets What would you say are the ten greatest inventions of all time?
The wheel would have to be high on the list and so would the engine, steam or gasoline. The printing press, radio, airplane, the plow, telephone, cement, the spinning wheel, the automobile and now I guess you"d have to include the computer. How many"s that?
You can make your own list but don"t count discoveries. Discoveries are different from inventions. Nuclear energy, for instance, isn"t so much an invention as it is a discovery, like electricity or fire.
The propeller to drive a boat is a good invention although you wouldn"t put it in the top ten. Someone just suggested the zipper. I reject the zipper. It"s a handy gadget but it"s a gadget.
One of the things you never see mentioned in the schoolbooks when they talk about inventions is, in my mind, one of the greatest developments of all time. It is the wastebasket. I could live without laser beams, the phonograph record or the cotton gin, but I couldn"t do without a wastebasket.
If some historian wishes to make a substantial contribution to the history of mankind, he or she might find out who invented the wastebasket. It is time we had a National Wastebasket Day in that person"s honor.
There are four important wastebaskets in my life although we have nine altogether in our house. The four are in the bedroom, the kitchen, the room in which I write at home and my office away from home.
Day in and day out, I can"t think of anything that gives me more service and satisfaction than those wastebaskets.
I begin using a wastebasket early in the morning. When I"m getting dressed and I get ready to put the stuff on top of my dresser back in my pants pocket, I go through it and sort out the meaningless bits of paper I"ve written meaningless notes on. Those I throw in the wastebasket in order to give my pockets a clean start for the day. I make room for new meaningless bits of paper.
In my writing room, nothing is more important to me than my wastebasket. This essay takes only three pieces of paper, typed and double-s.p.a.ced when it"s completed. You might not think so from some of the things you read in it but I seldom finish an essay in fewer than ten pages. You get three and the wastebasket gets seven.
The kitchen wastebasket is the only controversial one. Margie and I don"t always agree on what goes into it. There"s a fine line between what goes into the garbage can and what goes into the wastebasket.
The young people of today have television but one of the things they"re missing is the experience of burning the papers in the backyard. It was a very good thing to do because it was fun, and while you were doing it you got credit for working.
Most towns have ordinances prohibiting the burning of papers now. I approve of the law but I sure miss burning the papers. Taking the wastebaskets downstairs and out into the garage to dump them into the big trash container that the garbage man picks up is not nearly so satisfying a way of disposing of their contents as burning them used to be.
In recent years there"s been an unfortunate tendency to make wastebaskets more complicated and fancier than is necessary. Many of the good department stores and fancy boutiques have made them into gifts. A wastebasket is not a proper gift item. Many wastebaskets in these places have been decorated with flowers or clever things painted on them. A wastebasket doesn"t want to be clever and it doesn"t want to be so cute or gussied up that it calls attention to itself, either. Wastebaskets should be inconspicuous.
You can make your own list of the ten greatest inventions of all time but leave a place for the wastebasket.
Wood 193 Wood 193 Wood It was almost dark when I got to the country last weekend but I couldn"t keep from going up to my woodwork shop and turning on the lights for a look around before I unpacked the car.
The sliding barn-type door rumbled on its wheels as I pushed it open wide enough to walk in. Even before I hit the light switch, I loved it. The blend of the fragrance of a dozen kinds of wood went down into my lungs with my first breath of the air inside. The smell had been intensified by the whirling saw blade as I"d shoved the wood through it the previous Sat.u.r.day. The teeth had turned the kerf into tiny sawdust chips, and those thousands of exposed pores had been exuding the wood"s fragrance while I"d been gone all week.
My shop is equipped with good tools but there is nothing merely good about my wood. The wood is magnificent. I"ve owned some of it for twenty years and will, in all probability, never have the heart to cut into a few of the best pieces.
I sat for a minute on a little stool in front of my workbench. It suddenly struck me as death-sad that in two weeks, three at the most, we"d close up the house for the winter and I"d have to lock up and leave my wood. It would lie there alone all winter, the great smell that emanates from it gradually dissipating into thin air without ever being smelled by a human being. Such a waste.
I looked at my favorite piece of walnut, the one taken from the crotch of a hundred-year-old tree.
"What are you going to make out of that?" people ask me when I show it to them.
Make out of it? They don"t understand. It already has been made into one of the most beautiful things in the world, a wooden board.
Look at it! Its grain and the pattern of growth are as distinctive as a fingerprint and ten thousand times prettier. Its colors are so complex they do not even have names. Brown, you say? Are there a thousand colors named brown?
My production of tables, chests, chairs and beds has been severely limited over the years because of my reluctance to cut a piece of my wood into smaller pieces. I have nine cherry planks twenty-five inches wide, fourteen feet long and an inch thick. There are any number of things I could make out of them but I like them better as boards than I would as furniture. To me, they"re already works of art that exceed anything I might make out of them.
I wish there were an American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Trees. Too many people are using wood to heat their homes. I hate to see an oak or maple log sawed into eighteen-inch lengths and then split for firewood.
A piece of oak or maple, walnut, cherry, even simple pine is more beautiful to me than any painting. From time to time, I"ve suggested we might replace some of the paintings in our living room with pieces of wood from my collection. I"ve had no luck with the idea.
It would be relatively easy to attach little eye screws to the backs of boards so they could be hung like pictures from the living room walls. I wouldn"t trade my cherry boards for Whistler"s Mother.
When I first began to like wood, I was attracted to exotic species. Wherever I could find them I bought teak, rosewood, padauk and a wide variety of mahogany. My taste in wood has become more sophisticated now, though, and I find those exotic woods to be out of place in America, so far from where they grew. Now I look for good pieces of native American hardwood.
A good piece of wood is beautiful and strong and it does what you wish to do with it. Do you wish to make a chair? A table? Perhaps you are skilled enough to make a violin. Maybe you want to build a house, a seesaw, a boat or a fence.
I turned out the light in the shop, filled the cart with the junk in the car and went down to the house. It"s going to be hard to leave my wood for the winter.
An All-American Drive In 1966 I sold a magazine article for $3,500. It was what people used to call "found money," because I was already making a living, so I splurged with it. I bought a sports car, the aging American boy"s dream. The car was a Sunbeam Tiger and it cost just about the whole amount, $3,500, and it was some hot little car.
Twenty-six years later, my little Tiger, painted British Racing Green, with its huge 289-cubic-inch Mustang engine, will still blow past almost anything else on the road, although I don"t drive it that way. You couldn"t buy it from me for $50,000, because there"s nothing I could get for $50,000 that I"d enjoy so much.
I don"t drive it more than ninety days out of the year because I put it up during the winter, not wanting to subject it to the deleterious effects of ice and salt on the roads.
An enterprising group at my college, Colgate University, organized a reunion last summer of everyone who had ever played football there. I can take or leave most reunions, but this one sounded like fun and Hamilton, New York, is only a few hours from our country home. I set out early one morning to drive the 120 miles in my top-down Tiger.
I haven"t felt so free-as-a-breeze as I felt on that drive in a long time. I had no obligations to anyone. It didn"t matter what time I got there so I couldn"t be late, and I didn"t have to do anything when I arrived except eat, drink, and enjoy seeing old friends.
I went with Robert Frost and chose the road less traveled. I took the small, winding, blacktop country roads for most of the trip.
There are a lot of people with things to sell on our roadsides these days. I suppose I pa.s.sed fifty garage sales, lawn sales or tag sales. We"ve all bought more than we need or can use over the years and we"re looking for a way to unload them on unsuspecting pa.s.sersby who think, as we did when we bought them, that they"re treasures.
There doesn"t seem to be much difference between a garage sale, a lawn sale and a tag sale. I pa.s.sed one sign that said: TODAY! LAWN SALE IN GARAGE IN BACK.
[image]
Andy in his prized Sunbeam Tiger with his grandchildren; Alexis Perkins (front); Ben Fishel (left) and Justin Fishel (right) (back) A great many people must have bought new lawnmowers this year because I pa.s.sed at least fifteen secondhand mowers with FOR SALE signs on them. Even though it was a summer day, there were electric and gas-driven snow-removal machines, too. We had so little snow the previous winter that a lot of people obviously decided those machines weren"t worth the s.p.a.ce they were taking up in their garage.
There were places that had signs out front saying ANTIQUES, but it didn"t look to me as though they had anything very old in them. Most of what they were selling could have been in a tag sale. Half dozen of the so-called antique stores had wagon wheels out front to lend authenticity to their claim of having antiques inside. I went in a few but I didn"t buy anything. Most of what they were selling for antiques would have been called junk if I"d had it in the back of my garage or in the bas.e.m.e.nt.
The towns and villages I drove through were not wealthy, but every one had at least two churches and some as many as four. They had just built a new church in Winfield but I couldn"t see what denomination it was. I don"t think it"s important. Most of the churchgoers in town probably believe pretty much the same thing no matter which church they go to. The difference between a Baptist and a Methodist or a Presbyterian and a Catholic in America"s small towns is more social than philosophical.
It"s too bad religions can"t get together and share a building. They"d have better churches that way. That"s how the great cathedrals of Europe were built. Everyone in town pitched in. Americans like their individual little churches, though, no matter how plain they are and there"s a case to be made for preferring one to a Gothic cathedral.
It was Founders" Day in Sharon Springs. The fire trucks were a.s.sembling at one end of town for a parade with odds and ends of uniformed people. As I drove slowly through town, I pa.s.sed perhaps thirty people seated at intervals on folding chairs, along the main street, waiting for the parade to troop by. I didn"t stay to watch, but it looked to me as though there were going to be more people in the parade than on the sidelines watching it.
I pa.s.sed several hospitals and entertained fleeting sad thoughts about pain, unknown to me, behind their windows. I thought how much better a time I was having than the patients inside. I thought how strange it was that we could be so close and yet so remote in spirit from one another.
Several communities had kiosks set up as you entered town, with signs saying: TOURIST INFORMATION. It has been my experience that the booths that offer tourist information are usually closed.
I was having a wonderful time enjoying America from the c.o.c.kpit of my Tiger. It all looked like a cover on an old Sat.u.r.day Evening Post. Sat.u.r.day Evening Post. I suppose someone else, driving in the other direction, looked at this old guy in his green sports car and fitted me in as part of the Norman Rockwell look, too. I suppose someone else, driving in the other direction, looked at this old guy in his green sports car and fitted me in as part of the Norman Rockwell look, too.