by Andy Rooney
There are chronically poor people who would laugh at what I went through because it wouldn’t seem very bad to them. My wife and I were never hungry. My father was retired but he had made a comfortable living even during the Depression, and my wife’s father was a doctor. They wouldn’t have let us get to the point where we were out on the street and without food, but you know how that is. There’s an unwritten code. There are people you don’t ask for money and my father and my wife’s father were two of them.
I don’t know who makes those rules but we all know them. Certainly if I’d asked, either would have given me money. Maybe that was it. They’d have given it to me, not loaned it to me. They would have been disappointed that I had to ask.
My father’s brother was a salt-of-the-earth lawyer in a small town in New York State, fighting petty political corruption and providing free legal services to people who couldn’t afford to pay him. He and my aunt never had children and I was the closest thing to a son he had. When he came to visit us when I was a child he would often slip me a five-dollar bill as he was leaving. You don’t forget an uncle like that.
In desperation one year, I went to him and asked for five hundred dollars. One of the terrible memories of my life is that I never repaid him. He died three years later without ever having been able to take pleasure from thinking that his favorite nephew was a responsible person. He didn’t need the money but he must have looked for some token payment from me and I never made it. I always meant to but I never did.
About fifteen years ago we were doing better but we needed $2,500 to help pay for one of the kids’ college tuition and my wife went to the bank for a loan. Banks are a better place to go for a loan than an uncle is. They aren’t disappointed if you don’t pay them back. They get you.
By this time I was making enough money so we weren’t in desperate need of the loan, so as the joke goes, we didn’t have any trouble getting it. The interest was probably 7 percent.
A year or so later I asked my wife if we were going to pay off the loan in a lump sum, or just continue paying the 7 percent interest each year. Being in no way a business tycoon, I had the feeling we should pay it off. She does all our bookkeeping and banking, and she didn’t think we should. She was right. I’m not sure to this day if we ever paid off the loan.
Now, of course, I appreciate that it’s the only good joke we ever played on a bank. We won because interest rates rose. If we have the $2,500, and it’s invested, maybe in the same bank’s money-market fund, and we get 9 percent interest, we are beating the bank for 2 percent on $2,500. It is not at all like failing to pay back my uncle.
This all occurred to me today because yesterday an old friend asked me to loan him money. Of course I’ll loan it to him but I wish he hadn’t asked. It breaks the unwritten law. It changes our relationship. I don’t want to think about it every time I see him and I don’t want him feeling uneasy about it when he sees me but that’s what will happen.
Being broke is a terrible feeling but it’s probably an experience everyone ought to have once in a lifetime. If you’ve never been really broke, you can’t possibly understand how nice it is to have a little money in the bank.
A Cash Standard 125 A Cash Standard
T here’s something about having a thick stack of money in your pocket that gives you a feeling of wellbeing. I smile more when I have money in my pocket. Even too much change will do it for me if the change is mostly in quarters and quite heavy.
It occurs to me to mention this today because I’ve noticed that the more money I make, the less I use. I’m talking about actual cash, green paper money. Earlier in the week I took an overnight trip from New York to Washington. Before I left, I cashed a check for a hundred and fifty dollars. When I got back to New York late the next afternoon, I still had more than a hundred dollars. The surprising thing was that I had that little left because I hadn’t really paid for anything. The fifty dollars went out in petty cash for tips, taxis and newspapers. I charged my airfare, my hotel room and my meals.
Like most people, when I sign for something on my credit card I consider it to be free. Paying for the item is postponed to some indefinite time in the future. The bill will come in a lump sum and will bear no relationship in my mind to any service or goods that I actually got for that amount.
The trouble with doing all these things with numbers instead of with real money is that it takes the fun and the satisfaction out of the exchange process. What’s rewarding is to work hard to make money and then to take that money and buy something with it that makes life pleasant or easier.
There used to be a joke about a wealthy recluse who went to his bank once a week and made them show him his money. He wanted to make sure it was still there.
We all know our money isn’t really in the bank, it’s in the bookkeeping machinery, but I feel the way that old guy did. I’d like to see my money in real life once in a while. Those numbers they send me aren’t any fun at all.
I can’t get over how little I see of my money these days. One summer when I was in college I worked at a paper mill for forty dollars a week. Every Friday afternoon they gave me my pay in an envelope and I’ve never made money that was as satisfying to me as that. I don’t care how big my check is, it can’t match that forty dollars I got in cold cash.
Today the company mails my check directly to the bank. After a while, the bank mails me a slip of paper saying the check has been deposited. When I owe someone something, I write out a check and my bank deducts that from my account. It’s all terribly unsatisfactory. Collecting money or paying it out can be a rewarding experience but bookkeeping is no fun at all. If I had my way, I’d have every penny I earned turned over to me in cash and I’d pay most of the people I owe with the money in my pocket.
I understand perfectly well that it wouldn’t be practical sometimes but it would be more satisfactory and, furthermore, if the federal government handled its accounts in cash, there’d be a lot less waste. It’s one thing for a government official to sign his name to a piece of paper transferring a billion dollars from one place to another, but it would be quite different if he had to show up with the actual money in dollar bills and hand it over. Just counting it would make everyone think twice and there’d surely be cameras around to record the event.
Money ought to be more tangible than it is today, not less. We’re treating it too lightly because we can’t see it. I don’t understand the ramifications of a return to the gold standard but I have a feeling pennies ought to be copper, dimes ought to be silver and it wouldn’t do any harm if we had some little fifty- or hundred-dollar gold coins in circulation. We need money that’s really worth something.
The money game is being played with numbers that are too big for most of us to comprehend. Only lawyers, bankers, computer experts and government officials understand money as a statistic. Most of us get no kick at all from a computer printout of a bank’s idea of our net worth. What we want is that lump in our pocket.
Savings 127 Savings
How much of your income do you spend and how much do you save for later?
Some of those people who are always announcing things in Washington announced that Americans saved less of what they made last year than they have in all history. The savings figure the Commerce Department gave was 1.9 percent of income after taxes. That means people saved just $19 out of every $1,000.
The experts have a lot of theories, naturally, on why people aren’t saving. They say, for instance, that car prices were low and good deals on loans were available so people bought cars instead of saving.
To use a word that was popular among my classmates in high school, “Baloney!” People aren’t saving money because when they do, they get taken and end up having less than they started with. The trouble is, there is no longer a good way to save money. It used to be that people put it under their mattresses, in the sugar bowl or in savings banks, but none of these makes any sense now. Neither the mattress nor the sugar bowl pays interest and t
he banks don’t pay much more. Not only that, people have learned that by the time they want to use the dollars they’ve saved, their money is going to be worth less than when they stashed it away.
Banks are smarter about money than people are. People have learned that and they’re bank-shy. Even though people aren’t saving much money, savings banks and other savings businesses are going to make $5 billion in profit this year. That’s because of all that mortgage money they loaned out a few years ago at figures like 14 percent. The savings banks are paying something like 5 percent in interest to the people with savings accounts whose money the banks are loaning out now.
A lot of us have had to relearn what our fathers, mothers and Ben Franklin taught us about thrift. We all grew up on phrases like “A penny saved is a penny earned,” “Waste not, want not” and “Prepare today for the wants of tomorrow.” Savings these days, we’ve discovered, are better for the bank than they are for us.
When I made money delivering newspapers, my mother got me to open a savings account. Every once in a while I’d put an amount like $1.70 in the bank, and at Christmas I’d add the twenty-five dollars Uncle Bill gave me. My mother said I’d need it to help pay for my college education. Over a period of years I saved $189. The bank gave me $6.25 in interest. The trouble was, by the time I got ready to go to college, tuition, room and board were $2,000 and I realized I might as well have spent my newspaper money on the expensive Duncan yo-yo and the pogo stick I always wanted.
That’s what people are doing now. They aren’t saving money, they’re buying yo-yos with it because they know it’s too hard to save.
How do you save? There are thousands of savings institutions keeping a total of $826 billion of Americans’ money, but you can bet not many of the executives of those banks keep their money in a low-interest savings account.
I liked the idea of a savings bank. I liked it when I put that $1.70 away with some confidence that I was doing the right and the smart thing. Fortunately for savings banks, they still have $826 billion of our dollars that they can loan out at 10 percent and pay interest on at 5 percent. This is dumb money the banks have, and they have it because it’s relatively safe and because a lot of people put it there from habit or because they don’t know what else to do.
Many young people today who never had a newspaper route or a piggy bank just say the hell with it. They admit they don’t know how they should handle their money so they spend it.
Our whole economy is based on spending and borrowing. You just know in your bones that it’s wrong. Someone has to figure a way for us to go back to the honest pleasure of saving for our own futures.
Being With People, Being Without 129
The Art of Living
Being with People, Being Without
We’re all torn between the desire for privacy and the fear of loneliness. We all want to be part of the crowd one minute and by ourselves the
next.
I have wended my hot, weary way back from a crowded convention
to the cool, peaceful quiet of my woodworking shop set in the woods
one hundred feet from our vacation home.
Today it is unlikely that I will see anyone at all between breakfast and
late afternoon, when I shake the sawdust out of my hair and go down to
the house for a cool drink and the evening news.
A week ago, I couldn’t wait to get to where the action was. Yesterday,
I went to considerable trouble and some expense to move my airline
reservation up by just two hours.
A week ago, I anticipated the warmth of friendship; yesterday, I
yearned for the chilly silence of solitude. At the convention, I had enjoyed a thousand handshakes, a thousand snippets of conversation on
several dozen social occasions, but now I wish to be alone with myself,
perhaps to finish in my mind those conversations; perhaps to put them
out of my mind completely. The great virtue of being alone is that your
mind can go its own way. It isn’t forced to think along the lines of a
conversation you didn’t start and the contents of which are of no interest to you.
It is amazing how the same brain that juggles words and ideas while
fencing with friends in a crowded room can turn its power to figuring
the angle of a cut in a piece of cherry wood that will make the sidepiece
of a drawer fit precisely into the dovetailed front.
The conversion from convention reporter and part-time well-known
person didn’t take long once I got into my old khaki pants. These hands
with which I hit the keys already have bits of wood chips stuck to the hairs on the back of them. I shook out my shirt before I sat down at my typewriter because I didn’t want to get sawdust down in the cracks between the keys. But I am alone now, and after that hectic week, I trea
sure these moments of blessed anonymity.
I love being alone. I don’t feel the need for anyone. I know it won’t
last, though. Dangle an event in Los Angeles, in Florida or in Seattle in
my face again next week, next month or next year and I’ll endure the
standing in lines, the crowded transportation, the inconvenience, noise
and bustle to get there.
There doesn’t seem to be any happy medium between too many
people in our lives and too few. We look forward to our children coming
home for a visit. They come with children of their own and it soon gets
to be a crowd rubbing against itself until there’s the irritation generated
by friction. They’re ready to go; we’re ready for them to leave. I admire people who don’t feel the need to see friends on Saturday
night or even to mingle with the crowd in the line at the local movie. I
associate the desire for privacy with intellect. The people I know who
genuinely don’t want to go to a party are my smartest friends. We are
naturally gregarious creatures and it’s the superior people who are so
self-contained over long periods as not to need the inconsequential
companionship that goes with a party or a night out. We all know a few.
They’re either super-human beings or they’re a little strange. We need
each other and we need to get away from each other. We need proximity
and distance, conversation and silence.
We almost always get more of each than we want at any one time.
Finding the Balance
This morning I was driving to work at about 6:45, enjoying my own thoughts and the warm red glow just below the horizon, when the weatherman on the radio said the sun would be coming up at 7:14.
Finding the Balance 131
“It’s gradually getting lighter earlier,” Herman said gleefully, as though it were good news.
There’s no way to predict what’s going to depress us but I suddenly found myself depressed. There were emanations of the arrival of spring in that earlier sunrise. I realized a new season was coming and I hadn’t finished enjoying this one.
I savor seasons. I enjoy a good, cold winter with plenty of snow. I don’t want a wimpy winter. I don’t want winter to last into March but I’m disappointed when we don’t get enough cold weather to freeze all the ponds solid or enough snow for skiing and sledding.
It struck me, as I drove with less enthusiasm, that Christmas and New Year’s were really over. They’d joined the memories of our past.
We all spend more time preparing for pleasure than we do enjoying it, but still, it’s disappointing that we cease to take pleasure from so many things before they’re over. Often when I’m in the middle of doing something I’ve looked forward to doing for weeks, I suddenly realize the enjoyment is over before the event. I’m thinking about what’s next.
At a party I’m thinking about going home to bed. In San Francisco I’
m thinking about getting back to Connecticut. Monday, I think of the weekend and by Saturday night I’m looking forward to Monday.
At dinner, I often get up from the table before the meal is over to make the coffee because I’ve already started thinking about dessert.
This morning the first thought of the approaching spring was depressing to me because it reminded me, not of warm weather, but of the passage of time.
I like spring because, among other good things, it means I’ll soon be able to get back to my summer workshop, but please, don’t rush me. The idea of spring now, in the middle of winter, does nothing but make me think of how short life is. It seems as though I just left my workshop, went to a few football games, did my Christmas shopping and the New Year’s party. I’m not ready for another summer so soon.
Maybe we’ll get a foot of snow next week that will put these depressing how-time-flies thoughts out of my mind.
It’s difficult to get time to pass at the right speed. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I think time will never move on to morning. Some days, on the other hand, I can’t hold time still long enough to do all the things I want to do.
The trick is to get a good balance of activity and inactivity in your life. You need high points to look forward to and back on but you need plenty of time in between for not doing much of anything. Not doing much of anything can be the greatest pleasure of all, if you know how to do it.
The art of living well has its geniuses just as certainly as music, painting and writing well have theirs. The greatest Old Master in the art of living that I know is Walter Cronkite. You know him as a respected newsman but believe me when I tell you his ability to live and enjoy life exceeds his greatness as a journalist. He fills all the days of his life with events, any one of which would satisfy most people for a year.
Walter works and plays at full speed all day long. He watches the whales, plays tennis, flies to Vienna for New Year’s. He dances until two a.m., sails in solitude, accepts awards gracefully. He attends boards of directors’ meetings, tells jokes and plays endlessly with his computers. He comes back from a trip on the QEII in time for the Super Bowl.