Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit

by Andy Rooney

  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

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  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 Saturday 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

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  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 b
est. 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

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  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 embarrassed 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

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  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-spaced 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

  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 Saturday. 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 f
ront 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.