Not That You Asked (9780307822215) (22 page)

Something's got to be done about slowing down the passage of time. If they can make cereal with ten times more iron than Shredded Wheat, they should be able to make a day last a week or a week a month.

In January I was relaxed and happy because it would be twelve months before I'd be a year older. Now, here it is only a short time later and I've only got seven months left till my next birthday. It's enough to put a person off birthdays for life. And while I'm on the subject, whoever decided that a birthday was an occasion for a party celebrating the day? I can understand kids having birthday parties, but no one past thirty thinks a birthday is any occasion for celebrating.

When a person gets to be eighty-five, then he or she has good reason to rejoice over still being alive. The grandmother who announces, “I'll be eighty-seven in August” shares pride in projecting the next step in age with the kid who answers the question “How old are you?” by saying, “I'm almost nine.” You don't catch anyone approaching middle age, with a birthday six months past, saying, “I'm forty-two and a half” or “I'm almost forty-three.” Right up until midnight of the day before the birthday, that person's going to be filling out forms and answering the question with forty-two.” Never mind the details.

We keep moving things up—that's one reason birthdays come up so often. We're always hurrying time along by looking forward to things instead of enjoying what we have today. I keep hearing radio announcers
saying that Memorial Day is the beginning of summer. Memorial Day is not the beginning of summer. Summer starts June 21. Let's not press it.

Planning isn't good for the passage of time, I'm convinced of that. I just know that planning things a month or two months in advance makes time pass more quickly. You get to those days quicker than you would if you had nothing coming up. In March, I was looking forward to May because I had some interesting things to do on my calendar. Now it's June, I've done those things I planned in May, but I've completely forgotten anything that happened in April. Did we really have April or did we skip it this year? I was so busy looking forward that I forgot to look around.

The days that drag are the days when you have nothing coming up in the future, so that's what we need more of to make time last longer—days that drag.

It seems unfair, but the longest days are the days we're sick in bed, in trouble at work or otherwise unhappy. These are the days we'd like to get rid of in a hurry but they won't go away. The good days, the busy days, are gone before you can taste them.

One of the most puzzling things about the passage of time is what happens in the middle of the night. I generally sleep well, but several times a year I have a bad night. I'll look at the clock at 2:00
A.M.
and then look at it again at 3:30 and swear I haven't been asleep at all. Something strange has happened. I don't remember anything I thought during the hour and a half. The time passed and I was awake but unaware.

When I make my drive of three and a half hours every Friday to our summer home, I dread the thought of staring at the road for that long. I'll note by my watch that I still have two hours to drive, but an hour later I can't remember having driven the last hour.

There must be some condition of the brain in between asleep and awake. You can wake up even though you haven't been asleep. You can suddenly realize you haven't been noticing anything around you and start noticing things again. You've been awake but nothing registered. Your mind has been a blackboard but nothing got written on it. We have so little time, we should savor every minute.

HABITS AND OCCUPATIONS
 

The Inadvertent Reveille

Early risers are good people. They do the work of the world while late risers are still in bed. All the things like cars, television sets, bars and all-night McDonald's never would have been invented if the world had waited for late risers to get out of bed and invent them. The late risers have the ability—they just don't get up in time to start.

Early risers have one serious problem. It has plagued me all summer. The problem is how to keep from waking the whole house when we get up. Being a typical early riser, I'm thoughtful of those who stay in bed and have to have a cup of coffee as soon as they get up. Once they're up, I'm not too nice to them but while they're in bed, I respect their disease. Staying in bed longer than it takes to get the rest you need is a disease.

When I rise at about six on my vacation, there are often other family members or guests in the house. I try to be quiet, but it's not possible.

I slip silently out of bed, trying not to move the springs under the mattress, and I head for the bathroom. I'm careful to open and close the bathroom door gently. I hold the doorknob and ease it back to its normal position, rather than letting the spring snap it back, which would shoot the catch noisily into the hole in the doorjamb designed to catch it.

Up until this point, I've done well every morning, but then come the problems. Being quiet is so difficult in a silent house. The silence is broken the instant I flush the toilet. That's like a public-address announcement. ATTENTION! ATTENTION! ANDREW ROONEY IS NOW UP!

It is not simply that I'm thoughtful. I want to be alone for two hours.
I don't want to interact with my dearest friends or family for a while.

I tiptoe back to the bedroom and silently pull on my socks while the sleepers doze off again after their rude awakening. The minute I start down the stairs leading to the living room, their sleep is interrupted again. At 6
A.M.
the stairs make a racket that Rip Van Winkle couldn't sleep through.

The house is just sixty years old, and I'm sure that for all of those sixty years every time anyone came down those stairs, they have issued forth the same noises. Gingerly I extend the ball of my sneakered foot downward to the next stair tread. Each time I put my full weight down, there are a series of explosive little cracking sounds as the wood changes position in relation to the piece it is up against. I've tried coming down barefoot, I've made my way down placing most of my weight on the bannister and I've tried putting my weight on different places on the steps, looking for a spot that doesn't announce my descendancy. The stairs still snap, crackle and pop.

In deference to their sleeping habits, I don't get my breakfast first thing. Coffee making is quiet enough but squeezing oranges or even opening and closing the refrigerator door can create an impression in sleepers that the kitchen is going full blast and that they ought to get up.

Now I take the car and go get the newspaper. If the running water and the creaking stairs haven't permanently awakened everyone in the house, raising the garage door usually does. When I reach down and give the handle a jerk, the garage door starts up, and the sound of the little metal wheels in their metal tracks is like a drum roll echoing through the house. I open the car door quietly enough, climb in and close the door. Closing a car door is another one of those loud and inevitable sounds. There is no way to close a car door quietly. Car doors are built to be slammed. Slamming is what activates the little catches that hold a car door tightly shut.

What I need is a sound engineer to come into the house and find a way to muffle my morning. Or maybe I'm just going to stop worrying about it. I know late risers wouldn't be thoughtful if I were still in bed.

What I hate most about late risers is, they lie.

“I hope I didn't wake you,” I say.

“Oh, no,” the late risers say. “We were awake. We were just about to get up anyway.”

How come, if I admire neatly dressed people so much, I didn't do anything about it this morning when I noticed I'd put my left sock on inside out?

It's still inside out as, sitting at my typewriter, I look down at it now. The ribbing looks a little different but not any worse, as far as I can see. To tell you the truth, it's hard to describe exactly how you can tell when clothes are inside out. They have a different look but not necessarily a worse look. I don't think anyone will notice.

That must be the difference between someone who dresses neatly and someone who doesn't. I put something on that isn't quite right and I just shrug and say, “Who's going to notice?” My collar may be a little frayed, there may be a small spot on my necktie and my pants are baggy at the knees. I wear them.

Being a neat person isn't something a person should get credit for. Neat people can't help it. They're neat, that's all. It isn't a decision they make every day. They can't help themselves. They wouldn't dream of leaving the house with one sock on inside out.

One reason I'm not better dressed than I am is because I get attached to some of my clothing. If a pair of shoes, a shirt or a necktie has been with me to a lot of interesting places, I hate to throw it away after it's seen its best days. These shoes, these very shoes I wear today, are a little down at the heels but I happen to know they have walked the streets of Moscow, were on board the U.S.S.
Guam
off Beirut and stood in the little garden by our house when Emily and Kirby were married. Could I throw them in the trash can as if they were something I hardly knew? I could not. This kind of sentimentality adds to the image I have of not being a very neat or well-dressed person.

I see Dan Rather in the halls once in a while. He's faultlessly neat. His pants always have a razor-sharp press, his hair is nicely combed, his shoes are shined, his shirt fits and there are no spots on his necktie. It all seems to come so easily to him that I resent him for it. He'd look perfect leaving a picnic in a rainstorm.

It may be that anchormen have neat minds that lead them to being neat dressers, because Peter Jennings is always faultlessly attired, too. Like Dan, he looks just right in his clothes.

This may be more than you want to know about my dressing habits but I assume that you will draw some interest from them as they parallel or diverge from your own. Last week I looked in the drawer in which I keep my shorts and undershirts and there were only a few pairs.

I asked Margie if she knew what happened to the rest of them.

“I threw them out,” she said. “They were rags. You can't wear those.”

Has there been a ruling from the Supreme Court on this? Does a wife have the right to throw out her husband's underwear simply because it's tattered? Have I no rights? Are not my dresser drawers sanctuary? Does another person have any business invading the privacy of what I wear under my outerwear?

If I let her get away with this, first thing you know she'll be throwing out my old flannel pajamas that are a little gone in the elbow; she'll be tossing out the ties that are worn at the knot and sorting out the shoes that are down at the heels.

When you can't be what you'd like to be, there's no sense eating your heart out about it. The best and easiest thing to do is simply change what you want to be. I've always wanted to be a neat dresser but it is apparent to me, after all these years, that I am incapable of being one. I am therefore altering my desire. I am convincing myself that my manner of dress is casual, informal, low-key, relaxed and homespun. The word “slob” will never cross my mind again.

We have to rethink breakfast in America. No one in years has put any thought into the first meal of our day. How many times have you read in a cookbook or in the Sunday supplement of your newspaper a good new recipe for something to have for breakfast?

Once the recipe writers have run through pancakes, waffles, eggs Benedict and blueberry muffins, they're finished with breakfast.

There are reasons why we haven't paid any attention to breakfast, I suppose. For one thing, we're busy in the morning. Eating is part entertainment, and at breakfast we don't want entertainment, we want nourishment. We want to put something warm into our digestive tracts to get things going down there. People aren't interested in reading breakfast recipes.