Out of My Mind

by Andy Rooney

  I couldn’t remember when Mary was queen of England. I lived in London for a year. I like London and the British people, but the idea of a grownup country having a king or a queen is ridiculous. Even in a college history course, I never mastered all their names.

  My almanac lists two Marys who were queens of England. The first was known as “Bloody Mary” for good reason. She must not have been the queen the majestic Queen Mary sitting outside my window was named after. There was another Mary, undistinguished, who co-ruled with her husband, William, who came to the throne in 1689. It seemed unlikely the ship was named for a co-queen, either.

  The naming of the original Queen Mary may have been a fluke. The story is that in 1934 Cunard officials wanted to name their new ship Queen Victoria after Britain’s longest reigning monarch. They went to King George V and said, “Can we name our ship for Britain’s greatest queen?”

  George, whose wife’s name was Mary, said, “Certainly. My wife would be delighted.” So they named the ship Queen Mary after a woman who was only a queen by marriage.

  To me, the name written as Queen Mary 2 has no class anyway. At the very least, they should have used Roman numerals and called it the Queen Mary II. One of the biggest liners before the Marys and Elizabeths was called The Leviathan after the legendary water giant from Greek mythology. A better name.

  When I was five, my aunt and uncle lived across the river from where the big ships dock and they always took me to the cliff overlooking the harbor when one of them came in. The ships always had three smokestacks. The Queen Mary 2 doesn’t seem to have any smokestacks.

  In about 1965, I sailed on the original Queen Mary with the great, though almost forgotten, Garry Moore. Cruising on a big ship is a luxurious way to cross the ocean, but dull. You just look out at the water, sleep and wait for the next meal. Fortunately, we ran into a monster storm. The propellers were coming up out of the water as we rolled over waves the size of mountains and that made things exciting. The captain said it was “the worst storm he had encountered in thirty-seven years at sea,” but afterward, when I told someone about it, he said captains always say a storm is the worst they’ve encountered in thirty-seven years.

  I had an unusual experience with the Queen Mary several years later after it had been retired and parked in Long Beach, Calif., as a tourist attraction. We were filming the United States from a helicopter for a documentary and thought the docked Queen would make a good picture. It was warm and the sun was hitting me sitting in the bubble next to the pilot.

  As we banked over the Queen for the cameraman, I dozed. I had a still camera, binoculars and a tape recorder in my lap. As I slumped over, my arm hit the latch and the door flew open. I didn’t go out, but my camera, binoculars and recorder dropped like rocks into the water next to the old ship. I had removed a jacket with my wallet carrying my credit cards, licenses and cash. That went out but it was light enough so it floated over land. As the pilot landed the helicopter, a truck roared up next to the Queen. The driver was laughing and waving my jacket.

  “I got it,” he yelled. “It drifted out over the road!”

  Looking out at the new Queen Mary from my office window, I had a lot of memories.

  A STAR-SPANGLED TRIP

  France is one of the best names to drop when you want to impress people with where you’ve been. I have just been to France. The reason for my trip was the sixtieth anniversary celebration of the D-Day landings in Normandy. My special interest in the event stemmed from my own arrival on the beach June 10, 1944.

  I entered Paris for the first time in the early morning of Aug. 25, 1944, as U.S. and French armored and infantry divisions took back the city from the Germans who had occupied it for four years. It was one of the great moments of my life and going to Paris is still exciting for me. I know just enough French to make a fool of myself.

  Like most Americans, I’m ambivalent about the French. They can be maddening one minute and lovable the next, but one thing is certain: they are more French all day long than Americans are American. They live better than we do because they work to live. They don’t live to work. They direct their lives toward simple pleasures. It accounts for why their food is incomparably better than ours.

  I was surprised and pleased by the French attitude toward American veterans. Walking down the street in Bayeux, less spryly than I used to, and obviously old enough to have been there sixty years ago, two young Frenchmen came up to me, held out their hands and said, “Thank you.” I was moved and I don’t move easily.

  There were a few scattered demonstrations. One small group held signs saying, “WE LIKE AMERICANS BUT WE DON’T LIKE GEORGE BUSH.”

  Tom Brokaw, the NBC News anchor, was staying in Bayeux and graciously invited this lower level CBS employee to a small dinner at the famous Lion D’Or restaurant. At the table were two Medal of Honor winners, Tom’s attractive wife, Meredith, Jimmy Buffett the singer, Tom Hanks, the actor, and Steven Spielberg, the producer. This is not a circle I travel in and I was greatly impressed with myself for being there. I was further impressed by how easy Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg were to talk to. Jimmy Buffett’s wife was on my right, but I talked more to Tom Hanks because I was afraid of revealing that I was not very familiar with Jimmy’s work.

  We ate late and at about I0:30 there was a flurry of activity as two NBC producers came in and whispered to Brokaw. Tom immediately stood, raised his wineglass and said, “President Reagan has died. To the President!”

  We drank a toast and Tom left to go on the air.

  The next day was the actual anniversary of D-Day and there were ceremonies and speeches everywhere, including one by President Bush. I did not attend. Instead, I went away from the crowds and visited places in my memory from the days when I had been a reporter for the Stars and Stripes. There could have been no speech so eloquent as to match the emotion I felt driving alone into the town of St Lo. I had done the same thing under fire with elements of the First Infantry Division sixty years before.

  During my six days in France, I ate in a dozen small restaurants. Each time, as I savored the food, I thought that, just by luck, I had found the best restaurant in town. That ’s the thing about little French restaurants in little French towns. They are all the best restaurant in town.

  At one point, I could hear the far-away strains of “The Star Spangled Banner” floating my way. I hear it played at the beginning of New York Giants football games and am immune to any sensation but listening to it in a foreign country, I always tingle.

  When “The Star Spangled Banner” ended, another band in the distance struck up “La Marseillaise.” I listened intently and had an un-American thought. Not only is French food better than ours, but so is their national anthem. But that’s as far as I want to go being nice to the French.

  THINGS TO DO TODAY

  There are some things I’ve been meaning to do. For one thing, I’ve been meaning to make a list of the things I mean to do:Try to be nicer to people I don’t like.

  Try not to dislike so many people.

  Sharpen all my pencils.

  Do a better job reading the newspaper.

  Clean out the trunk of the car.

  Make bread in the bread maker I bought three years ago and never used.

  Lose eighteen pounds by not eating ice cream.

  Either wear them or take some of the old shoes and old clothes in my closet to Goodwill.

  Go to see my doctor about that problem I’ve been having which goes away when I go to my doctor.

  Organize the stuff in our two-car garage so I can get one car in it.

  Fix the leg on the dining room table.

  See the movie that’s going to win all the Oscars before it wins them and is too hard to get into.

  Put a new washer in the nozzle of the shower so that one errant spray doesn’t get me where I don’t want to be got.

  Pay more attention to things that matter.

  Organize my life.

  Thank Blanche for the o
ranges she sent at Christmas.

  Get a haircut.

  Have the oil changed and the tires rotated on my car.

  Read a book. Finish the book I started two years ago.

  Look at some of the television shows I’ve saved on tape to look at later.

  Buy new undershirts and socks to replace the ones with holes in them.

  Learn how to touch-type. (This has been on my list for fifty years now, during which time I’ve written fourteen books with three fingers.)

  Find out how to get on the Internet and use Lexis-Nexis so I don’t feel like the dumbest guy on the block.

  Get to bed earlier.

  Find out how to program the VCR so I can tape a program I want to see that’s going to be on a week from next Tuesday at I0:30 because I’m going to be out that night.

  Redo my tattered old personal telephone and address book, eliminating all the names of people I don’t talk to anymore because I don’t like them, because they moved away, or because they died.

  Try to be the kind of person who really knows what he’s talking about more often.

  Oil the hinges on the closet door in the bedroom that squeaks.

  Stop drinking so much coffee.

  Call several old friends I haven’t called.

  Buy a supply of stamps to put on the penny postcards I’ve bought over the years that need more postage than when I bought them.

  Keep everything I’ll need for my income tax in one place this year so I’ll have it when I want it.

  Get more exercise.

  HOW TO SLEEP

  Considering how much time we spend doing it, little has been written about lying in bed. If you’re not sleeping, it changes your whole attitude toward being there. Lying in bed asleep is bliss; lying in bed trying to get to sleep is agony.

  It seems like a waste of time to spend seven or eight of every twenty-four of our hours in bed, but that’s what we need. I usually get six or less, but then I get sleepy after lunch and ruin my night’s sleep with a nap. A five-minute nap seems to mean as much as an hour’s sleep at night. I realize I’m luckier than most because I’ve been on the job for so long at CBS that I have a couch in my office. I’d rather have the couch than a raise or another week off in the summer. Naps are one of the best things in life. They have all the good feeling of a night’s sleep without taking so much time.

  It seems wrong that most of us cannot lie in bed in the position that should be most restful—flat on our back. If I lie on my back, my mouth drops open and I snore or gurgle. Even worse, I have bad dreams. I only have bad dreams on my back.

  I am puzzled over how God thought we’d lie down to sleep when he designed our bodies. It’s apparent to me that He didn’t mean us to lie on our backs or He wouldn’t have me snore or have nightmares when I do it.

  He didn’t intend us to lie on our side either because He put our shoulders and our arms right where we would be lying. They fall asleep before we do because we put them in such a position under the body that blood can’t circulate very well.

  There are people who can sleep on their stomach but I don’t know any of them intimately enough to have them show me how, so I have no firsthand knowledge of how they do it without suffocating.

  There are people who are proud of themselves for preferring a hard bed. They call it “firm.” It isn’t firm; it’s hard, and I dislike hard mattresses. One bed I use in our house in the country is mushy soft. Perfect. It’s like sleeping in a hammock.

  In the Army, I had to make my bed, and that’s what turned me off bed making. You were supposed to have the top blanket pulled so tight that if you dropped a quarter on it from three feet above, it would bounce. I could never do it. Margie sent me an air mattress when I was at Fort Bragg and that worked for a while. Sgt. Fishuk couldn’t figure out why, all of a sudden, I was able to make my bed so that a quarter bounced when he flipped it. On the third day, he became suspicious. He found that I was using an air mattress and made me throw it away. Is it any wonder I am psychologically incapable of making a bed?

  The only sense in which anyone could call me sexist is, I don’t make my bed. I’ll often get dinner or wash the dishes, but I don’t make beds. If I were alone in the house, I wouldn’t make my bed from one year to the next.

  A bed I sleep in really needs making, too. I tend to bring the sheet and blanket with me when I turn over. During the night, I suppose I turn both ways an equal number of times, but by morning, my bed is a rumpled mass of tangled sheets and blankets. Whoever makes the bed always seems to tuck it in at the foot. I’m in no position to complain about how the bed is made inasmuch as I won’t make it myself, but I don’t want the blanket tucked in at the bottom. Tucked-in blankets give me claustrophobia. At home, my sheets are changed once a week, and I hate the first night in them. After that, the sheets are rumpled and comfortable. I know what I’d like to have, but it would be unconscionably expensive to pay some clean person to sleep in my clean sheets the first night to break them in for me.

  While I like clean sheets once in a while, pillows are another matter. Perhaps I’ll write about pillows some other time. Perhaps not, too.

  A FULL HOUSE

  Our house is full. There’s no longer an empty place to put anything. Whoever designed the house put closets where they thought anyone living there would need one. But no one can decide for anyone else where they need a closet. A house should be built with places to store things that no architect could imagine anyone needing. Some of the closets need closets.

  My clothes closets are hanger to hanger with no room in between to squeeze in so much as a necktie. All my hangers have something hanging on them. If I bought new hangers, I’d buy new clothes.

  My dresser drawers are full of clean shirts from the laundry and frayed shirts to wear Saturdays. I have more frayed shirts than Saturdays on which to wear them. I used to wear clean, un-frayed shirts just once to the office, then they went to the laundry. It costs $I.50 to have a shirt washed now so recently I’ve taken to wearing a shirt twice.

  My sock drawer overflows with eight balled pairs and seven single socks for which I can find no mate. Some of them have been single for years. I don’t throw them out because I still hold out hope that a mate will show up some day.

  I went up to the attic yesterday and it’s filled with clothes too good to throw away but too old to wear. There are suitcases I don’t dare open up here and boxes of Christmas tree ornaments that haven’t been used since I started storing ornaments in the garage eight years ago.

  In the front part of the basement, which I use for an office, three of the drawers in the five-drawer filing cabinet are filled with old tax returns. I know I could throw out 1981 without any danger of being hauled in by the IRS for a review. However, I write for a living and there are valuable tidbits in there about my life that year that might be useful in my biography—which I’ll be writing any minute now. As soon as I clean out my closets.

  The drawers in the dresser in Brian’s room are full, although Brian left home twenty years ago when he got a job in Rochester, and there isn’t much of his stuff left. I noticed a new pair of pajamas in the bottom drawer, which I think are mine. I forget when I bought them, but I don’t need new pajamas. I like old pajamas. I wear my pajamas long after most people would have thrown them out. A missing button in front bothers me but a ragged edge on the sleeve does not.

  In casting about for someone to blame for my storage problem, I’ve settled on architects. Our house was built in 1888, so the architect is long gone. It is apparent that he tried to outguess future occupants about how much stuff they’d have and where they’d put it. Architects think they can plan a place for everything and they think we’ll put everything in its place. That’s not the way things work in anyone’s house.

  In my office, there are boxes of scripts I’ve written over the past fifty years. For five years, I wrote a ten-minute radio show five days a week and the scripts take up five feet of shelf space.

  My advi
ce to young people is, when you buy a house, don’t ask how many bedrooms there are. Find out how many closets it has.

  THE V-E DAY I KNOW

  We all like knowing something other people don’t. I take smug satisfaction every year when May 8 is called “V-E Day” from knowing that Victory in Europe came May 7, not May 8. It isn’t much but it’s mine. Victory in Europe was achieved the minute German Gen. Alfred Jodl signed the surrender papers in a room on the second floor of an undistinguished school building, the Ecole Professionale, in Reims, France.

  May 8 got its official status as V-E Day because Dwight Eisenhower, then a four-star General Eisenhower, promised the Russians he wouldn’t release information of the German surrender to the Allies until after they had also surrendered to the Russians. That was scheduled for the following day and that’s how May 8, not May 7, got to be called V-E Day. If Eisenhower had been in charge, Christmas might be Dec. 26.