Alice started it all some years ago by giving me Cyprus for my birthday. I was delighted—and only partly because I had somehow got it into my head that she was planning to give me an orange vinyl tie. For some years, I had been thinking that the task of being a well-informed citizen was particularly onerous when it came to Cyprus. On the Cyprus question, I craved ignorance. I was tired of the Bishop. The history of Greek and Turkish settlement failed to fascinate. Any analysis of the effect a Greek-Turkish conflict might have on NATO caused me to long for the Arts & Leisure section.
Sometimes, Cyprus seemed to disappear from the papers for years, only to surface in an even more desperate crisis, full of pathetic refugees and ponderous United Nations debates. Cyprus had begun to remind me of some dreadful old uncle who is always alarming the family with emergencies that are invariably described as beyond solution: Something must be done immediately before Uncle Jack’s behavior drives Aunt Thelma to violence. How long can a man continue to shoot at postmen with a crossbow before tragedy occurs? Can a fanatic Christian Scientist and a homicidal podiatrist live together for another day? Then, people in the family become distracted by their own problems, everyone forgets about Uncle Jack for months, and suddenly he reemerges—with problems just as insoluble as ever. Who solved the insoluble emergencies in the meantime? Should citizens who already have Uncle Jacks be expected to worry about Cyprus as well?
“DON’T GIVE IT ANOTHER THOUGHT,” Alice’s birthday gift to me had said, printed in colorful letters on a map of the dread island. “LEAVE IT TO ME.”
“Could that really be?” I had asked incredulously. I was almost overcome with gratitude—not to mention a little guilt for having thought, even for a moment, that a woman who could think of such a gift might have stuck me with an orange vinyl necktie.
“You just tell me now at which point you care to be informed,” Alice said. “I can let you know when it appears that they’re going to start fighting again, for instance, or I can let you know when it’s getting to the point at which the NATO alliance might be seriously weakened.”
I thought about it for a while. “Worldwide nuclear conflagration,” I finally said. “If it appears that, because of Cyprus, worldwide nuclear conflagration is imminent, I would appreciate being informed. If not, I’ll just give it a skip, thank you very much.”
After all of those years of freedom from the wretched Cypriots, I found it gratifying, of course, to begin a Christmas Day by presenting Alice with a gift that would lift from her shoulders the daily strain of distinguishing between General Gholam ali Oveissi and General Manuchehr Khosrowdad. I was filled with Christmas warmth as I opened my own gift. It was a map. I recognized it immediately from my research: Iran. DON’T GIVE IT ANOTHER THOUGHT, the printing on it said. LEAVE IT TO ME.
1979
The Fruitcake Theory
This was the year I was going to be nice about fruitcake. “Just try to be nice,” my wife said. My younger daughter—the one who is still in high school, and talks funny—said the same thing. Actually, what she said was, “Cool it, Pops. Take a chill on the fruitcake issue.” That’s the same thing.
They were right. I knew they were right. It’s not that I hadn’t tried to be nice before. It’s not my fault that some years ago I happened to pass along a theory about fruitcake I had heard from someone in Denver. The theory was that there is only one fruitcake, and that this fruitcake is simply sent on from year to year. It’s just a theory.
But every year, around this time, someone calls up and says something like, “I’m doing a story on people who make fun of the holiday symbols that so many Americans hold dear—symbols that do so much for warm family life in this great country of ours and remain so very meaningful to all decent people. You’re the one who maligns fruitcake, right?”
“Well, it’s just a theory,” I always mutter. “Something someone in Denver said once.”
Who in Denver? Well, I can’t remember. I’m always hearing theories from people in Denver. People in Denver are stinky with theories. I don’t know why. It may be because of the altitude, although that’s just a theory.
Anyway, I can’t be expected to remember the name of every single person in Denver who ever laid a theory on me. I’ve had people in Denver tell me that if you play a certain Rolling Stones record backwards you can get detailed instructions on how to dismantle a 1973 Volkswagen Rabbit. A man I once met in a bar in Denver told me that the gases produced by the drying of all these sun-dried tomatoes were causing the Earth to wobble on its axis in a way that will put every pool table in the Western Hemisphere nearly a bubble off level by the end of this century. Don’t get me started on people in Denver and their theories.
The point is that nobody ever interviews the person who gave me the theory about fruitcake, because nobody wants to start picking through this gaggle of theory-mongers in Denver to find him. So I was the one called up this year by someone who said he was doing a piece about a number of Scrooge-like creatures who seemed to derive sadistic pleasure out of trashing some of our most treasured American holiday traditions.
“Well, come right over,” I said. “It’s always nice to be included.”
He said he’d catch me the next afternoon, just after he finished interviewing a guy who never passes a Salvation Army Santa Claus without saying, “Hiya, lard-gut.”
When he arrived, I remembered that I was going to try to take a chill on the fruitcake issue. I told him that the theory about there being only one fruitcake actually came from somebody in Denver—maybe the same guy who talked to me at length about his theory that dinosaurs became extinct because they couldn’t adapt to the personal income tax.
Then, trying for a little historical perspective, I told him about a family in Michigan I once read about that brings out an antique fruitcake every Christmas—a fruitcake that for some reason was not eaten at Christmas dinner in 1895 and has symbolized the holidays ever since. They put it on the table, not as dessert but as something somewhere between an icon and a centerpiece. “It’s a very sensible way to use a fruitcake,” I said. I was trying to be nice.
“You mean you think that fruitcake would be dangerous to eat?” he asked.
“Well, you wouldn’t eat an antique,” I said. “My Uncle Herbert used to chew on an old sideboard now and then, but we always considered it odd behavior.”
“Would a fruitcake that isn’t an antique be dangerous?”
“You mean a reproduction?”
“I mean a modern fruitcake.”
“There’s nothing dangerous about fruitcakes as long as people send them along without eating them,” I said, in the nicest sort of way. “If people ever started eating them, I suppose there might be need for federal legislation.”
“How about people who buy fruitcakes for themselves?” he asked.
“Well, now that you mention it,” I said, “nobody in the history of the United States has ever bought a fruitcake for himself. People have bought turnips for themselves. People have bought any number of Brussels sprouts for themselves. But no one has ever bought a fruitcake for himself. That does tell you a little something about fruitcakes.”
“Are you saying that everybody secretly hates fruitcakes?” he asked.
“Well, it’s just a theory.”
1988
Oh Y2K, Yes Y2K, How Come It Has to End This Way?
Now every day, to our dismay,
We’re told of yet more disarray
That Y2K may put in play.
A double zero on display
In some computers could convey—
Since they are lacking thought, per se—
A false impression they’d obey,
Concluding in a faulty way
Which century it is that day,
And thus unleash, without delay,
The cyberbug called Y2K.
Then life won’t be a cabaret.
Oh Y2K, yes Y2K,
How come it has to end this way?
If circuits siz
zle and sauté
The cables into macramé,
Those passengers then in Taipei
With reservations for Bombay
Could find themselves in Saint-Tropez
Or on the road to Mandalay.
And ferryboats to Monterey
Would dock on time, but in Calais.
And in a brief communiqué
The Pentagon might have to say
It cannot fight the smallest fray
Because it’s lost the dossier
Of soldiers to be told that they
Must leave the service, come what may—
The list that lists each Green Beret
Who privately has said he’s gay.
Oh Y2K, yes Y2K,
How come it has to end this way?
The lobbyists who work on K
See all their loopholes go astray
And benefit the EPA
And, thinking this is like Pompeii—
A doomsday in the USA—
Militiamen in full array
Go underground, and say they’ll slay
Whoever tries, through naïveté,
To take the food they’ve stored away
Or criticize the NRA.
The ATMs begin to spray.
Fresh twenties fall like new-mown hay.
The traffic lights all go to gray.
A celebrator slurs “Olé!”
As cars begin to ricochet
Like balls caroming in croquet
And, slyly slowing his sashay,
He just escapes a Chevrolet.
There’s darkness on the Great White Way.
Nearby, a fussy, smug gourmet
Who’s had some quail and duck pâté
And finished with marron glacé,
Sips cheap Hungarian rosé
That in the dark the sommelier
Mistook for rare Courvoisier,
And says—in French, of course—“Parfait!”
Oh Y2K, yes Y2K,
How come it has to end this way?
But maybe it will be okay—
As peaceful come this Janvier
As water lilies by Monet,
As lyrics sung by Mel Tormé
Or herds of grazing Charolais.
For just such peacefulness we pray.
We say, “Oh, s’il vous plait, Yahweh.”
But, still, we’re scared of Y2K.
There’s no one who remains blasé.
No awesome monster’s held such sway
Since King Kong grabbed the fair Fay Wray.
We try to keep our fears at bay.
But one fear makes us say, “Oy vey!”
And here’s the fear we can’t allay:
God’s thinking of pulling the plug,
And not with a bang but a bug.
1999
My wife, Alice, appears as a character in many of these pieces. Before her death, in 2001, even the pieces that didn’t mention her were written in the hope of making her giggle. This book is dedicated to her memory.
Also by Calvin Trillin
Trillin on Texas
Deciding the Next Decider
About Alice
A Heckuva Job
Obliviously On He Sails
Feeding a Yen
Tepper Isn’t Going Out
Family Man
Messages from My Father
Too Soon to Tell
Deadline Poet
Remembering Denny
American Stories
Enough’s Enough
Travels with Alice
If You Can’t Say Something Nice
With All Disrespect
Killings
Third Helpings
Uncivil Liberties
Floater
Alice, Let’s Eat
Runestruck
American Fried
U.S. Journal
Barnett Frummer Is an Unbloomed Flower
An Education in Georgia
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, CALVIN TRILLIN is also The Nation’s deadline poet. His bestsellers range from the memoir About Alice to Obliviously On He Sails: The Bush Administration in Rhyme. He lives in Greenwich Village, which he describes as “a neighborhood where people from the suburbs come on weekends to test their car alarms.”
Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin Page 33