by Andy Rooney
It isn’t easy to organize the meals over a Christmas weekend. Everyone is always complaining about eating too much one minute and out in the kitchen looking for food the next. We might be able to get away with just two meals if we had Christmas dinner at two. I forget why we don’t but we don’t.
We have thirteen people this year. The lull will strike them all but each will handle it differently.
A few will sit around the living room. Someone will decide to tidy up the place by putting all the wrapping paper and ribbons in a big, empty box that held a Christmas present a few hours earlier.
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The Rooney clan with friends, circa 1983; behind Marge (seated) are daughter Martha and son Brian (with moustache); to Andy’s left are daughters Ellen and Emily
I don’t do any of this because I love the mess. As soon as you clean up the living room, Christmas is over.
At one end of the couch, someone will be reading the newspaper. It’s usually pretty thin. There isn’t much news and very little advertising. One of the editors has had a reporter do the story about what the homeless will be having for Christmas dinner at the Salvation Army kitchen, but it’s slim pickin’s in the paper.
My sister Nancy sits there reading out Christmas cards and looking at presents given to other people that she missed when they were being opened.
There are usually a few nappers. Someone will hog the whole couch by stretching out and falling asleep on it. The smart, serious nappers will disappear into an upstairs bedroom.
One of the kids will be working on or putting together a present he or she got. Someone will be reading a new book. (No one watches television in our house on Christmas Day.)
At some point there’s a flurry of phone calls, in and out. We’ll start making calls to other members of the family who can’t be there or who are close but not in our inner circle. Usually one of the twins’ classmates will call to see if they can get together during the few days they’re both in town.
There’s always someone who wants to know if the drugstore is open. They don’t really want anything, they’re just looking for some excuse to get out of the house.
If I’ve been given some new tool, I go down to the basement and try it out on a piece of wood. That’s usually interrupted by a call from the head of the stairs asking if I want to go over to the indoor courts and play tennis. I’m always touched by the fact the kids want me to play tennis with them. It wouldn’t be because I pay for the courts, would it?
By about four o’clock the Christmas Day lull is over. We all congregate in the living room again to have a drink. Nancy has slow-baked almonds and pecans that have been kept hidden from Brian and Ellen all day.
Everyone’s relaxed again now. Dinner’s ready but a Christmas dinner can be put on hold, so there’s no rush. A turkey is better left at least half an hour after it comes out of the oven before it’s carved. Mashed potatoes, creamed onions and squash are all easy to keep warm. The peppermint candy cane ice cream stays frozen.
I hate to have Christmas end.
An Appreciative Husband’s Gratitude
Wives do a thousand little things for their husbands that they don’t get credit for.
Right here I want to give credit where credit is due. A few weeks ago, while I was away, Margie did something for me I’ll never forget.
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Andy and Marge Rooney, at home in Rowayton, Connecticut
She cleaned up my shop in the basement. She got our friend Joe to come in and help and between them they tidied up everything. It must have taken several days because it would have been impossible to put that many things in places where I can’t find them in less than several days.
I confess that the shop would have looked as though it was a mess to anyone but me. To me, everything was in its place. I had little scraps of wood everywhere. If I use six feet of a seven-foot piece of maple, I don’t throw away the leftover foot. I save it. I don’t always put my scraps of wood away neatly in a pile of other scraps, but I know where they are. Now my scraps of wood are in neat piles. I can’t find them, but they’re neatly piled.
I would be the first to admit that I’m not neat. (Come to think of it, I was not the first to admit it. Other people have said it several hundred times before I ever did.)
My wood treasures, pieces of lumber, were leaning against the basement walls or were stashed up in between the beams under the diningroom floor upstairs. Because there were years of accumulated sawdust everywhere, Margie and Joe moved everything. Margie said she was afraid of fire, but if the house had burned down, it wouldn’t have disrupted my shop any more than the cleaning job did.
There were dozens of different sizes of nuts, bolts, nails and screws on my workbench. When I wanted one I pawed through the pile until I found the size I wanted. No longer. Now only the three of them— Margie, Joe and God—know where anything is. Margie’s out shopping, I don’t know where Joe is and God has more important things to do than tell me where they put my dovetail jig.
All those nuts and bolts and screws are in dozens of little jars with tops on them now. When I want one, I dump them out of the jar onto my workbench and paw through them just like before.
Tools like chisels and screwdrivers were lying helter-skelter on my workbench. No longer. Margie put each and every item somewhere. That’s the key word. Everything is “somewhere.”
I go to the bottom of the cellar steps and yell up, “Hey, Margie! Where did you put the chuck key to my drill?”
“I put it right there somewhere,” she yells back in obvious irritation over my lack of appreciation for the work she did.
She hung hammers, saws and extension cords. She put two trisquares down behind some cans on a shelf. I found my level in a box over by the shelves with the paint. Margie and Joe piled my lathe chisels under my workbench and put my drill bits—well, actually I don’t know where they put my drill bits, because I haven’t found them yet.
Listen, it’s just another reason to thank her. Most of those bits were dull anyway, so I went out and bought a set of new ones.
How can I ever express my appreciation for the job Margie did? I’ve been considering some ways. Margie does all our bookkeeping in what used to be the twins’ room. Her papers are spread out all over several tables and desks and piled on the little couch that pulls out and turns into a bed at Christmas when everyone’s home. I think that one of these days I’ll repay Margie’s kindness. I’ll pick up her workroom the way she picked up mine. I’ll pile all her papers, government forms, tax receipts and bank records, and put them in boxes. I’ll tidy up. I’ll try and make
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that room as spick-and-span and free of anything out-of-place as Margie made my shop.
There must be a rule of life here somewhere. I think the rule may be, “It may be a mess, but it is MY mess.”
My House Runneth Over
Let me tell you a heartbreaking story of people with no place to sleep at Christmas.
Once upon a long, long time ago there was a house on a hill owned by a writer and his wife. They had four children and five bedrooms. Three of the children were girls and one was a boy. Two of the three girls were twins and sleeping accommodations in the house were ample.
Ah, but that was long ago. The house still has five bedrooms but since Margie took over one of them as her workroom, the bed that was there has been replaced by a convertible sofa that is only made into a double bed in an emergency and even then the foot of it hits her file cabinets.
Two of the remaining four rooms have single beds. The other bedroom sleeps two. Counting the convertible couch, this makes places for eight sleepers.
Our four children come from London, Los Angeles, Boston and Washington for Christmas. They are no longer little kids and they don’t come alone. The twins, with one husband each and three children between them, come as seven. Nancy, my sister, is with us.
To sa
ve counting, that’s twelve in all . . . twelve people in a house with real sleeping places for eight.
The couch in the living room and the old couch that was retired to the catch-all room in the basement are pressed into service. That’s ten. I’ve never gotten into the details of where the others go. We close our bedroom door and hope for the best. We have two television reporters in the family but we’ve never seen overcrowding in the shelters they do
The Rooney children; from left to right:
Brian, Ellen, Emily, and Martha
stories about at Thanksgiving that can compare with the squalid conditions in our house at Christmas. It’s enough to bring tears to a grown man’s eyes.
There are clothes, open suitcases everywhere. The three bathrooms are strewn with stray toothbrushes, hair dryers and an assortment of beauty products . . . although I can’t tell from looking at any of the six women in the house which one uses them. The refrigerator, the washing machine and the dryer get heavy use. The iron is never cool. Someone is always washing himself, herself, hair, clothes or the car. Because of nighttime sleeping conditions, there is random couch-napping during the day and some of the beds are working more than eight-hour shifts.
One year we rented two hotel rooms and another year we used the house of friends who graciously offered it while they were away for
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Christmas. Neither of these alternatives is popular with the family members who have to leave the chaotic, friendly warmth in our house Christmas Eve to go to sleep in a strange place.
All things come to an end and I dread the end of Christmas at our house. I’m not sure how or when it will come. Someone will probably decide it’s too hard. The friends who loaned us their homes have made the Big Switch. They now go to the home of one of their children for Christmas. It could happen to us, I suppose. One more husband, one more wife or another grandchild might do it . . . but then where does everyone go? Do we break up the family and have separate Christmases in different parts of the country? Would this really be as merry? Am I suffering post-Christmas depression? I’ve thought a lot about it and I’ve decided what I want for Christmas next year.
I’d like Santa to bring me an addition to our house with two more bedrooms and another bathroom, even though they’d be empty 363 days a year.
Mother
My mother died today.
She was a great mom and I am typing with tears in my eyes. There were a lot of things she wasn’t so good at, but no one was ever better at being a mother.
She never wanted to be anything but a good mother. It would not satisfy many women today. If I were a woman it would not satisfy me, but there was something good about her being one that exceeded any good I will ever do.
I think I know why she was a world champion mother. She had unlimited love and forgiveness in her heart for those close to her. Neither my sister nor I ever did anything so wrong in her eyes that she couldn’t explain it in terms of right. She assumed our goodness, and no amount of badness in either of us could change her mind. It made us better.
Mother gave the same love to our four children and even had enough left for our family bulldog, Gifford. One summer afternoon at her cottage in a wooded area with a lot of wildlife, some food was left on the table on the front patio. When we came back later, part of it had been eaten, and everyone but Mother suspected our bulldog.
“It couldn’t have been Gifford,” Mother said. “It must have been some animal.”
From the day she went into the hospital, there was never any question about her living. The doctor treated her as though she might recover, but he knew she would not. I hope he is treated as well on his deathbed.
Something has to be done about the way we die, though. Too often it is not good enough. Some of the people who have heard of Mother’s death at age ninety-three and knew of her protracted illness said, “It’s a blessing,” but there was nothing blessed about it.
For seven terrible weeks after a stroke, Mother held on to life with a determination she would not have had if she hadn’t wanted to live.
Visiting her, at first, I was pleased that she seemed unaware of anything and not suffering. I would bend over, stroke her hair, and whisper in her ear, “It’s Andrew, Mom.” It would not seem as though she heard, but her hand, which had been picking at the blanket in a manner distinctively her own, groped for mine. She did hear. She did know. She was in a terrible half-dream from which she could not arouse herself. She was suffering and in fear of death, and I could not console myself that she was not.
My wife stood on the other side of the bed. They got along during the twenty years Mother lived with us. Mother lifted her other hand vaguely toward her. Dying, she wished to include my wife, who had been so good to her, in her affection.
Something is wrong, though. She has something in her throat, or one of her legs is caught in an uncomfortable position. You don’t dare touch anything for fear of disconnecting one of the tubes leading from the bottles hanging overhead into her. The nurses are busy with their bookwork, or they are down the hall working routinely toward Mother’s room. Other patients there are caught or choking, too. The nurses know Mother will probably not choke before they get there. They’ve done it all before.
The nurses are very good, but without apparent compassion, and you realize it has to be that way. They could not possibly work as nurses without some protective coating against tragedy. We all have it. In those seven weeks Mother lay dying, I visited the hospital fifty times, but when I left, it was impossible not to lose some of the sense of her suffering. I knew she was still lying there picking vaguely at the blankets in that sad, familiar way, but it didn’t hurt as much as when I was there, watching.
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 Ballston 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
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 circumstances 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.