Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin

by Calvin Trillin

  There was also a nice priest named O’Reilly in the movie—a friend of the little girl’s who was always there for her after her parents died and her older sister started spending so much time on the front porch. He was either a big priest played by a Ward Bond–type or an elfin little priest played by Barry Fitzgerald. I’m not absolutely clear on that point, because the print of this movie was not in perfect condition, and my television set tends to get snowy unless a warm body is right next to it. I was too tired to get out of bed and go stand next to the television set, and after a rather unpleasant scene the week before, I had promised my daughters that I would no longer attempt to keep the reception clear by strapping their cat to the antenna.

  So it’s true that I wasn’t getting a perfect picture. Also, I wasn’t paying as much attention as I might have. That was partly because of the jalapeño peppers: Reaching over regularly to grab a handful of them from a bowl I had next to the bed may have caused me to lose the thread of the plot now and then. Still, I was pretty sure I heard this odd bit of dialogue between the plucky little girl and the priest. At the time, the priest and the little girl were at the rail of the track, watching the trotter do a trial run. The priest had a stopwatch in his hand. As the horse crossed the finish line, the priest flicked down his thumb, read the watch, and turned to the little girl with a jubilant expression on his face. Before he could say a word, though, the little girl asked him, “I suppose your personal position on abortion is identical to the position of the church?”

  Well, the priest was taken aback, of course. He pretended he hadn’t heard—unless he really hadn’t heard, or unless I had only imagined that I had heard. He just went right on and said that Bold Ben—that was the horse’s name, unless it was Old Len or Gold Ken—had come in under the track record.

  Then, suddenly, Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom loomed up from behind a pillar and told the little girl that if her horse didn’t have a strong interest in being turned into dog food it had better slow down in the stretch. I expected the little girl to say something plucky, but what she said was, “The fault is really not yours. So many people who exhibit antisocial behavior are products of impoverished homes, of mothers and fathers who have never shown any interest in their children, of—”

  “Hey, watch how you talk about my mom,” Slapsie Maxie said. He didn’t seem threatening, though. In fact, as he walked away, he looked as if he might cry. “Nicest old dame there ever was,” he was mumbling.

  The priest seemed undecided about whether it was appropriate to offer comfort to a hireling of the crooked gamblers, but before he could make up his mind he found himself confronted by the little girl. “Well,” she said, “do you think a woman should have control over her own body or don’t you?”

  The priest tried to remain calm and friendly, although I could see that he was upset to learn that the little girl even knew about such things. He told her that this was a subject she might want to wait to discuss until she was older and in a different kind of movie. I thought he had a pretty good point. It had been a long day for me—one of those days when the cares of the world seem to be with you every second, as if you’re plugged into an all-news radio station. I figured that about all I could handle at that hour was having my heart warmed a little bit, by a combination of the movie and the jalapeño peppers, so I could be lulled into dreamland.

  But the little girl wouldn’t stop. “I suppose you think I’m also too young to talk about whether the church is playing ball with some of the most repressive dictators in the world,” she said.

  The priest just looked sort of uncomfortable at that, and I found that I was mumbling, “C’mon, little girl. Give us a break.”

  Just then, the older sister and John Agar walked up—all excited because they had just found out that Cold Glenn was at twenty-to-one, meaning that if he repeated his practice performance they’d all win a packet and save the farm. I was greatly relieved. I figured we were back to the horse movie. But then the plucky little girl said to Agar, “Don’t you think that in the final analysis pari-mutuel betting is just another terribly regressive tax, aimed at those in our society who can least afford it?”

  Well, that’s not really the sort of thing that John Agar had ever had to think about in a horse movie, so I couldn’t blame him for looking dumbfounded. Actually, he looked worse than dumbfounded. He looked as if he had just caught a horseshoe upside the head.

  The priest, who had been looking troubled all this time, turned to the older sister and said, “My dear, if there’s ever a time when you need someone to talk to, I hope …”

  I couldn’t imagine what he was talking about. Then I realized that he thought the little girl’s question about abortion had to do with her older sister. Being a forties-movie priest, he thought that you could get pregnant from spooning on the porch.

  “… for the church teaches that all life is sacred,” the priest was saying, “and that life begins the moment …”

  Here’s a priest who has been in fifty movies without uttering a sentence of doctrine—I hadn’t even known that he was Catholic—and this kid’s got him started on the sacredness of life.

  “Now look what you’ve done, kid!” I said. “It wasn’t enough that you made poor Maxie cry!”

  She turned to me. “Although an informed citizenry is the cornerstone of democracy, the average American watches six hours of escapist television programming a day,” she said, “most of it no better than this movie.”

  “You’re the one who ruined the movie, you rotten little prig!” I shouted. “I hope Moldy Wen pulls up lame!”

  I jumped out of bed and turned off the television, but I was too upset to fall asleep. I thought I could still hear a little girl’s voice from the direction of the darkened set (“It’s not surprising that a cat torturer would shout at a child. Studies show that most child abusers …”). Finally, I got up and switched the set back on—to another channel. The program was a debate between two experts in Washington about whether our society will be destroyed by a nuclear holocaust or by the economic disasters stemming from ever-increasing budget deficits. What they were saying was pretty familiar stuff for someone who had spent the day plugged into the cares of the world—global warming, widespread bank failures, that sort of thing. It was so familiar, in fact, that I found it rather soothing. After a while, as my eyes began to close, I thought I heard one of the experts say, “But golly, everything would be all right everywhere if only Holding Pen wins the big race.” And it lulled me off, finally, into dreamland.

  1985

  Weighing Hummingbirds: A Primer

  A hummingbird weighs as much as a quarter. I learned that early this summer, while I was listening to a radio interview with a hummingbird expert on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The CBC interviews interesting people just about all day long, at the same time that American stations are playing the sort of music that makes middle-aged people snap at their children.

  I live in Canada in the summer, so by around Labor Day I know a lot of things like how a hummingbird compares in weight to small change. People who live in Canada year-round know even more than I do. What I know tends to drain away over the winter.

  The other day, somebody called me in Canada from New York to ask what I thought about the fact that the number one and number two bestsellers in the United States are books about how dumb Americans are. I said, “Hey, wait a minute! I know how much a hummingbird weighs. What’s so dumb about that?” I did admit that I’d probably be forgetting whatever I knew about hummingbird weight by around February (“Let me see, was it thirty-five cents, or maybe half a buck?”). The person on the phone said that one of the books included a list of things that Americans ought to be familiar with but aren’t, and that hummingbird weight wasn’t on it. Apparently the list runs more toward things like Planck’s constant and the Edict of Nantes.

  If the people who put together that list came up to Canada and asked a Canadian to identify the Edict of Nantes, the Canadian would just
ask if he could answer at the end of the week, figuring that by then the CBC would be interviewing a Nantes specialist from the University of Western Ontario or somebody who just came back from a relief mission to Nantes or maybe the ambassador from Nantes to the United Nations, and the Edict would obviously come up during the conversation. Then the Canadian would say to the list gatherers, “By the way, did you fellows know that a hummingbird weighs as much as a quarter?”

  A Canadian quarter. As far as I know, bird weights mentioned on the CBC are always given in Canadian currency. For an American living in Canada, that was, of course, a question that came to mind right away. I find that facts learned from the CBC can start an entire chain of questions. For instance, the first thing I asked my wife about the hummingbird fact was this: Do you think a hummingbird also weighs the same as two dimes and a nickel?

  Now that I think of it, that particular question didn’t start a chain, because she said it was a stupid question and left it at that. But then she asked a question of her own: How do they weigh a hummingbird? Hummingbirds move around a lot, and my wife was concerned that someone who was intent on weighing one would have to dispatch it first.

  “Not at all,” I said, happy to be able to put her mind at rest on this question. “You’ve seen those TV documentaries where they shoot a dart into a wildebeest to put him asleep long enough to outfit him with a radio transmitter. Well, this is the same sort of thing, except that the dart is exceedingly small, about half the size of a common straight pin. It’s surprisingly easy to hit a hummingbird with the tiny dart. The difficult part is slapping him gently on the cheeks to bring him around after the weighing. That takes a delicate touch indeed.” I hadn’t actually heard that on CBC, but it sounded like something you might hear on CBC, which is almost as good.

  1987

  All the Lovely Pigeons

  I suppose it’s still faintly possible that those who engineered the mysterious snatching of four thousand pigeons from Trafalgar Square had only the best interests of the pigeons at heart. There is that ray of hope to cling to.

  I can imagine many people in England trying to reassure one another with such thoughts as they read increasingly grim speculation about the pigeons in the morning papers. “Don’t look so glum, Alfie,” Alfie’s wife says, as she puts the eggs and grilled tomato and thick-cut bacon in front of him. “Maybe this was some nice gentleman who has a home for older pigeons in a lovely part of Sussex where they don’t have to be around those nasty foreigners.”

  It may be, of course, that Alfie was looking glum because, breakfast traditionally being the only edible meal in England, he knew his day had already peaked well before nine in the morning. But he was probably thinking of those pigeons. The English are known for having almost unlimited sympathy for animals that are unromantic or even animals that Americans might describe as having a bad case of the uglies. The United Kingdom is a country in which the monarch harbors corgis.

  Apparently, there was, at first, hope that the pigeons had been taken by some poor lad who desperately wanted to race pigeons but lacked the wherewithal to buy his own flock. Alfie was able to imagine the Trafalgar Square pigeons soaring gracefully over the Somerset moors or being pampered by a kindly pigeon fancier like that nice detective on NYPD Blue.

  But I heard on the radio that the pigeon-racing authorities dismissed that theory, explaining that Trafalgar Square pigeons are too old and out of shape to be competitive racers.

  “I was thinking they might have special races for older birds,” Alfie may have said when that news came out. “Like the over-50 division in tennis.”

  I have to say that I was pessimistic from the start. Any sensible analysis of the case has to start with a brutal but undeniable fact: People eat pigeons.

  When the New American Cuisine began to take hold in northern California, I remember beginning each visit to San Francisco by checking to make certain there were still pigeons in the parks. My fear was that between my trips to the city, all the poor birds might have been snatched up by what I think of as sleepytime restaurants (everything is on a bed of something), smoked, and served on a bed of radicchio.

  I don’t think the Trafalgar Square caper indicates that smoked pigeon on radicchio has replaced bangers and mash in the hearts of the English. The pigeons could be served as anything. As Escoffier, or one of them, may have said, “Chopping up is the great leveler.”

  In fact, a young man, who told The Sun that he had taken fifteen hundred of the pigeons and sold them to a middleman, said, “As far as I know, they go to curry houses all over Britain.”

  We all hope he’s wrong. People who would snatch Trafalgar Square pigeons for restaurant stewpots would snatch almost any animal, no matter how repulsive—although the Queen will be relieved to hear they’d probably draw the line at corgis.

  1996

  The Playing Fields of Mott Street

  For years, whenever I took an out-of-town guest on a walking tour of Lower Manhattan, I always included the opportunity to play tic-tac-toe against a chicken in Chinatown. I try to hit the highlights. The chicken was in a Mott Street amusement arcade otherwise known for the decibel level attained by its electronic games. Next to a game with a name like Humanoid Avenger, there was a glass cage that held an ordinary-looking live chicken. The player pressed buttons on the scoreboard to indicate his own choices, then waited with trepidation as the chicken, pecking at a board in a private area of his cage behind some opaque glass, registered his invariably brilliant countermoves. Backlit letters came on to keep track of the X’s and O’s and to announce “Your Turn” or “Bird’s Turn.” Anyone who beat the chicken got a huge bag of fortune cookies that must have been worth at least thirty-five or forty cents, and it only cost fifty cents to play.

  Years ago, the writer Roy Blount, Jr., told me he’d heard that the chicken had been trained by a former student of B. F. Skinner, the legendary Harvard behaviorist. I used to tell my guests that. It was a way of refuting the false teaching that graduate work is of no value in the workaday world. Blount, as it turned out, was absolutely correct. I later spoke to that former graduate student and to a few other animal trainers in Hot Springs, Arkansas, which had become the small-animal training capital of the world. (It is also Bill Clinton’s hometown, but I like to think there’s no connection.) Mark Duncan, who ran a place called Educated Animals, told me that he offered—in addition to a parrot that rides a scooter, a macaw that plays dead, a raccoon that shoots baskets in answer to mathematical problems (you ask what two and two equals, he shoots four baskets), a rabbit that shoots off a cannon, a Vietnamese pig that drives a Cadillac, and a rooster that walks a tightrope—a chicken that dances while a rabbit plays the piano and a duck plays the guitar.

  “What tune do they play?” I asked.

  “Their choice,” he said.

  If you were my guest, of course, playing the chicken in Chinatown didn’t even cost fifty cents. As the host, I put up the money. Invariably, the guest would take stock of the situation and then say, “But the chicken gets to go first.”

  “But he’s a chicken,” I would say. “You’re a human being. Surely there should be some advantage in that.”

  Then, I have to admit, a large number of my guests would say, “But the chicken plays every day. I haven’t played in years.”

  I suppose you can’t blame people for getting the excuses out of the way before the game begins, and in that arcade it proved necessary. I never saw any of my guests do better than a draw against the chicken.

  Then, in the early nineties, the chicken died. In The New York Times, Michael Kaufman wrote a nice send-off. I said at the time that there have been congressmen laid to rest with less effusive obituaries. I was sad, of course, but I comforted myself with the certainty that those geniuses in Hot Springs could train another chicken to play tic-tac-toe quicker than a rooster can walk a tightrope.

  That was not to be. Apparently, the arcade was getting pressure from the animal people (by “animal peop
le,” I don’t mean people who were abandoned in the woods as children and raised by a pack of wolves; I mean people who are intensely concerned about the welfare of animals). The animal people said that playing tic-tac-toe on Mott Street was demeaning to the chicken. Demeaning? I never saw the chicken lose a game. It might interest the animal people to know that I eventually saw a film clip of B. F. Skinner himself playing the chicken in tic-tac-toe. Skinner is smiling, but it looks to me like a whistle-past-the-graveyard sort of smile. The chicken looks confident, as well he might.

  1993

  ENGLISH AND SOME LANGUAGES I DON’T SPEAK

  “As far as I’m concerned, ‘whom’ is a word that was invented to make everyone sound like a butler.”

  Short Bursts

  Short bursts of language attract me. I’m keen on slogans. I also like mottos—license plate mottos, for instance, like New York’s “The Empire State,” or New Hampshire’s “Live Free or Die.” Not long ago, some residents of Wisconsin started a campaign to change the state license plate motto—they didn’t feel they were truly captured by the motto “America’s Dairyland”—and someone suggested “Eat Cheese or Die.” At one point, I got interested enough in license plate mottos to offer suggestions for states that don’t have any mottos at all. The motto I suggested for the Nebraska license plate, for instance, was “A Long Way Across.” I’m still working on a motto for Arkansas. The one I have so far seems a little verbose: “Not as Bad as You Might Have Imagined.”