Out of My Mind

by Andy Rooney

  This is what came on the screen of my computer: “As more anniversaries and heshe has time to celebrate. Tonight marks I 24th year 16 at I may be wrong about that it maybe Irene 23rd year perhaps even my 26 year frankly I got now or dividend.”

  You can see that IBM is not sympathetic to carpal tunnel sufferers and I’m going to have to find some other way to get my words down on paper. I’d demand my money back from IBM except what happened was probably partly my fault and anyway, I charged the new ViaVoice to CBS.

  If I qualify as handicapped because of my carpal tunnel problem, I won’t need wheelchair access, but they’re going to have to make handicapped bottle tops that I can take off, handicapped doorknobs that I can twist, handicapped shoelaces that I can tie, handicapped shirts that I can button and handicapped newspapers whose pages I can turn.

  A LESS THAN MERRY CHRISTMAS

  Merry Christmas? Well, interesting but not all merry.

  We were fifteen and assembled at our country house in the Helderberg Mountains of New York State, which look toward the Catskills. Two came from London, four from Los Angeles, four from Washington, two from Boston, two from Connecticut and one from Saratoga.

  Everyone came bearing gifts and food. We had eleven loaves of rye, raisin, pumpernickel, sourdough and French bread. Emily and her daughter, Alexis, brought the twenty-five-pound turkey. We brought the ham for Christmas Eve. Martha had fixed beef stroganoff, which she brought from Washington. Les and Ellen got through airport security with an odoriferous wheel of Stilton.

  Ben, Justin, Leo, Martha and I went to a local farm to buy an eightfoot balsam Christmas tree. That’s all the living room ceiling will take. After it was trimmed. Ellen, the severest critic in our critical family, unendeared herself to us by saying it was “the worst tree we ever had.” She always says that. It’s a Christmas tradition.

  Snow started falling early Christmas morning. We opened our presents, merry enough, and by noon faced the snow piling up outside. Before it stopped, we were to get thirty-four inches, a lifetime experience for two young grandchildren who live in California.

  I was determined to get the newspaper at a store 12 miles away. Les, our British son-in-law, volunteered to go with me so we took off in blizzard conditions in my old jeep. It was a bad decision. Halfway there, the snow was blinding and the windshield wipers were icing up so we stopped. I opened my door and stepped out. Under eight inches of snow, there was a sheet of ice. My left foot slipped out from under me and my right foot went under the car. The car door, still open, hit my head as it went over me. Briefly stunned, lying in the snow, I did not notice the car moving until it rolled over my right leg just two inches below the knee. I had inadvertently put it in reverse.

  It seemed certain my leg was broken. The jeep was still backing down a slight incline and Les ran to it and stopped it 100 feet from where I’d been run over. My leg hurt, but Les helped me up. I could hobble and concluded the bone might not have been crushed because of the cushion of snow. We continued to the store, bought the newspaper and made it home.

  As I lay in the downstairs bedroom with my grossly distended right leg, which Cecile had covered with an ice bag, someone called the local rescue crew and, on Christmas Day they arrived in minutes. It was small-town America at its best, ready to help a neighbor who needed it. The trained medic looked at my turgid leg, now twice its normal size and turning black, and announced he was calling the ambulance to take me to the Albany Medical Center thirty-five miles away. Brian and Martha followed in Emily’s Subaru down the treacherous mountain road to the hospital.

  If every visit to a hospital was as good as this one, I’d go more often. Three doctors X-rayed me, poked and prodded my leg and determined nothing was broken. They warned that I’d have severe pain in the night, but by 7:30 I was released. Without the guiding ambulance taillights, we started the thirty-five-mile trip back up the mountain in nearly impossible driving conditions.

  If Brian wasn’t an ABC News correspondent, he could get work as a truck driver. Feeling his way along the road, sometimes at 5 mph an hour with his nose just inches from the windshield, he got us home by 10 P.M. It’s a humbling experience to have a son do something you could not have done.

  By cell phone, we had insisted the rest of the family go ahead with Christmas dinner. When we arrived, we were served ours in style at a small table set up in the living room in front of the fireplace, surrounded by family members alternately telling me to keep my leg up and making rude remarks about the wisdom of going for the newspaper.

  At midnight, we all said “Merry Christmas” one last time and I took my aching but unbroken leg to bed.

  I never did read the newspaper.

  TALKING THE TALK

  We were invited by the producers of a Broadway show to a party in a New York City restaurant that was not really big enough to hold all the people they had asked to come. It was hard to talk to anyone and my mind slipped into its writing mode. I got thinking about party conversations.

  The first person I met was a big, friendly guy who seemed to know me, although I didn’t seem to know him. We shook hands and he started talking about the show. I quickly realized he was one of those people who stand too close to whoever they’re talking to. He kept leaning forward to emphasize a word until his nose was inches from mine.

  I tried to edge away, but every time I took half a step back, he took a full step forward. As a defense, I extended my left leg in front of me and leaned way back on my right leg. He leaned forward. The next person I met had a familiar conversational style. He repeated himself. He didn’t think he’d made himself clear the first time, so he rephrased his statement and said it again: “This is a mess in Iraq. We got ourselves in a real mess over there. We never shoulda got in this mess.”

  There are other people who end almost everything they say with a question and insist on an answer. “Don’t you think that’s true?” “Do you agree with me on that?” “You know what I mean?” Yes, I know what you mean. Now can I go and talk to someone who doesn’t ask a lot of dumb questions?

  Several times a year, we go to some event in a hotel ballroom where they’re giving awards and they have an orchestra on stage. There may be people at your table you’d like to talk to, but conversation is impossible. I don’t know why orchestras don’t understand that no one wants to hear them play loud music incessantly. We not only don’t want it loud, we want them to stop playing altogether once in a while and give us some silence so we can chat.

  There was no orchestra at the New York party, but I still had trouble talking to several people. One man I know only because he’s so rich that his name appears in the newspaper regularly, greeted me in a friendly way. We shook hands and he said something. It may have been a question but I couldn’t hear it. He always mumbles. If you’re rich, you don’t have to talk loud to get people to listen to you. I always think that what someone says quietly is more important than what someone else shouts.

  When I noticed that this quiet-talker had stopped because I didn’t see his lips moving, I leaned forward and said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear what you said.”

  He repeated it but I couldn’t hear him the second time, either. There are just so many times you can rephrase, “What?” so I just smiled and nodded. I hope I shouldn’t have shook my head in the “no” gesture. I had briefly considered several responses to what I couldn’t hear. “Very much,” I could have said if I thought he was asking if I enjoyed the show. Or I could have said, “60 Minutes” if I thought he was asking where I worked. “Andrew, but people call me Andy,” if it was my name he might have been asking for.

  If I had to write down everything I heard in the two hours we spent at the party, I wouldn’t be able to come up with two sentences.

  MISSING FIVE HOURS

  Often about 5:30 in the afternoon, I sit at my desk and try to remember where the day went.

  I usually go to bed by I0:30 P.M. because I get up early. I don’t know how anyone with a job wat
ches Letterman or Jay Leno. My alarm is set for 5:27 A.M., but I wake up before that and turn it off. That ’s about seven hours. Spending a third of the day sleeping seems like too much.

  I’m in the bathroom for maybe fifteen minutes. I shave with an electric razor. I used to shower before I shaved, but I read where a beard cuts better if it isn’t soft, so now I shave first.

  My dermatologist said you shouldn’t use real hot water and you shouldn’t stay under it for long so I don’t linger. I dress in five minutes.

  It takes me an hour getting to and from work every day. I think or listen to the radio. You can’t do both. Driving home, I listen to two men who do a terrible sports show. They are so annoying that hating them makes the time pass faster.

  I estimate that I spend about an hour and fifteen minutes eating on an average day.

  I make coffee in the office in the morning and have a grapefruit at my desk but it takes only ten minutes. The same with lunch. I hardly ever go out. In the evening after I get home at six, we spend a pleasant hour having a drink and watching television news.

  We have a dining room but don’t eat in it more than ten times a year. We eat in the kitchen or the living room. When I get dinner, doing the dishes takes longer. I figure an hour for dinner and cleanup. Dinner in a good restaurant takes longer, but we don’t eat out often.

  After dinner, I read the parts of the paper missed in the morning. Someone should publish a digest of the morning newspaper. There’s too much in it.

  I watch some television at night. I’ll assign an hour for that. You can do two things at once if one of them is television, so I go through a pile of mail while I’m watching, separating the wheat from the chaff. It’s mostly chaff.

  Everyone complains about television but there’s often more I’d like to see than there’s time to watch.

  The telephone both saves time and wastes time. There are people who enjoy talking on the phone but I’m not one of them. I’m not lonesome. Even so, I suppose I spend half an hour a day on twenty calls. I talk to one or more of our four kids every day.

  Most of the day, I sit at my keyboard, writing. I write quickly but hardly ever get it right the first time and usually have to do it over, so it’s a slow process. I start to write a lot of things that don’t work out too, so I’m at it at least five hours a day. People ask me how long it takes me to write my newspaper column and my 60 Minutes comments. I always tell them if it’s any good, it doesn’t take long but if it isn’t good, it takes all day.

  I waste time. I must waste at least an hour a day pretending I’m doing something necessary that isn’t. Instead of working, I’ll clean out a desk drawer, rearrange the bookshelves or wash the car. It’s the little time that’s hard to count. The elevators in the building where I work are slow. I wait ten minutes a day. Friends drop in and we talk. I wait in line at the store. I decide to cut my fingernails. I sit and stare.

  Now, all that comes to a little over nineteen hours. What I want to know is, what did I do with those five missing hours?

  THINGS I LOVE TO HATE

  Rummaging through a box of odd bits and pieces of paper I’ve saved, I came across a column by Dick Burdette in a yellowing old clipping from a newspaper. The column is headlined, “These are a few of my favorite things.” I don’t want to steal his column or lose my image as a complainer so I’ll go in the other direction. Here are a few of my least favorite things:The customer in front of me in the “under 10 items” line at the checkout counter in the supermarket who pays with a check and takes five minutes to do it.

  The trash or garbage collector who leaves more than he takes.

  The waiter who keeps filling your glass with water you don’t need but disappears when you want something.

  When you’re browsing in a clothing store, the sales clerk who hangs over you asking if he can help, as though you were too bashful to ask about buying something.

  Clever messages on telephone answering machines.

  Junk mail that regularly exceeds mail of any value or interest.

  The newspaper story “continued on page 27” just when it gets interesting. If it’s continued in the second section, Margie has that.

  The driver who takes up two spaces when he parks.

  Hitting the “caps lock” key on the computer by mistake when I’m typing and not looking at the screen until I’ve typed two lines in capital letters.

  Fitting two cars in a two-car garage that’s only big enough for one by the time you put your junk in there.

  Car doors that lock automatically.

  Packages I can’t get into without a jackhammer or tops I can’t remove without a crowbar.

  Margarine, skim milk and Diet Coke. I’d rather do without butter, milk or Coke than eat or drink a substitute.

  Semicolons.

  Melting snow.

  My birthday. The last one I enjoyed was when I was eight.

  Sticky windows that are hard to open.

  Yellow cars.

  A melon that was expensive but nowhere near ripe.

  Subscription forms and advertising fliers folded into newspapers and magazines.

  Books that won’t stay folded open when you lay them flat. (I also dislike the confusion among lay, laid, lain, lie and lied.)

  The Super Bowl halftime show.

  Almost all television, with the exception of news, sports, documentaries and a few comedy shows. I don’t have a preference between Jay Leno and David Letterman.

  Impossible books with dedication pages by the author that say, “To my wife, Charlotte, without whose help this book would not have been possible.”

  Astrology.

  The American flag worn as an ornament in a man’s buttonhole.

  PURSUIT OF TRUTH, NOT FICTION

  My life is one of unread books. I don’t have the time or space to name all the books I have not read. In recent years, I have overcome the shame I once felt when asked if I’d read something and had to answer “No,” by converting my shame into pride. When asked now if I’ve read The Da Vinci Code for example, I say, “No, I never read novels. I like my own real life too much to want to be transported into someone else’s fictitious world.”

  This is not really an intellectual answer to the question but it sounds thoughtful if you don’t think about it and people nod. It is true, too, that I never read fiction. I started not reading fiction in about the ninth grade when an English teacher assigned our class the novel Lorna Doone I got away with not reading “Lorna Doone” by reading a brief resume of it and have never felt uneducated for having skipped it. I have plans to read Silas Marner when I get on in years.

  Over the years, I have broken my rule about fiction ten times. I read Slaughterhouse Five because Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote it, is a friend of mine and I didn’t want to have it come out inadvertently, when we were talking, that I was ignorant of his masterpiece. I have not read A Farewell to Arms or The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, because I knew Hemingway, too, and thought he was a boob.

  Putting my mind to fiction I have read, I come up with ten great books: Lord of the Flies, Heart of Darkness, Death Comes for the Archbishop, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Winesburg, Ohio, Darkness at Noon, Brave New World, The Catcher in the Rye, From Here to Eternity and Lolita. I should really leave out Lolita because I read that years ago as a dirty book, not as literature, although it’s both. Half of those titles were assigned by a teacher when I was in high school or college.

  Reading fiction is a form of entertainment. You read nonfiction for information. Someone famous said that those who read nonfiction read to remember, and those who read novels, read to forget. I read the newspaper or a magazine for about an hour a day. That seems like as much time as I should spend on someone else’s words.

  Not reading novels doesn’t make me special. There are something like 290 million Americans, and a popular book like Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons may sell 400,000 copies. That means about one of every 725 Americans bought a copy. I’m one of th
e ones who don’t read bestselling novels, so I’m not alone. I’m being generous, too, suggesting that everyone who buys a book reads the book. I suspect that a lot more books are bought than read.

  The most omnivorous reader I ever knew was Harry Reasoner. When he anchored the CBS Evening News, substituting for Walter Cronkite, he would sit in the chair before the broadcast, and while everyone else around him was frantically tending to last-minute details, Harry would sit quietly reading a novel. When the producer yelled, “Thirty seconds!”, Harry would finish the paragraph, put down the book and look into the camera ready to read the news from the TelePrompTer in front of him.

  I don’t mean to sound proud of not reading novels, nor do I advocate not reading them. I have respect and admiration for people who read fiction. I think of them as culturally and intellectually superior to myself.

  A SHIP AT SEA

  Last Saturday, I looked out my office window, where normally I see nothing but a dull stretch of New Jersey across the North River, and there was the magnificent new Queen Mary practically in my back yard. It looks like a fifty-story hotel laid on its side in the water. One thing that struck me was that there were no portholes, just rectangular windows in every stateroom.