Not That You Asked (9780307822215) (26 page)

Jim had this system. He took his age and added the last four digits of the telephone number of the last girl he dated. He called it his lucky number … even though the last four digits changed quite often and he'd never won with his system. Everyone laughed at Jim and said he'd never win the lottery.

Jim put down $40 on the counter that week and the man punched out his tickets. Jim stowed them safely away in his wallet with last week's tickets. He never threw away his lottery tickets until at least a month after the drawing just in case there was a mistake. He'd heard of mistakes.

Jim listened to the radio all afternoon the day of the drawing. The people at the radio station he was listening to waited for news of the winning numbers to come over the wires and, even then, the announcers didn't rush to get them on. The station manager thought the people running the lottery ought to pay to have the winning numbers broadcast, just like any other commercial announcement.

Jim fidgeted while they gave the weather and the traffic and the news. Then they played more music. All he wanted to hear were those numbers.

“Well,” the radio announcer said finally, “we have the lottery numbers some of you have been waiting for. You ready?

“The winning number,” the announcer said, “is eight-six-zero-five-three-nine. I'll repeat that—eight-six-zero-five-three-nine.” Jim was still a loser.

I thought that with all the human-interest stories about lottery winners, we ought to have a story about one of the several million losers.

At some point in life, everyone wants to learn how to play a musical instrument. My mother bought me a brass bugle for $5 when I was nine. I treasured it, polished it and tried to learn to play it. I learned how to get some noise out of the bugle but never what you'd call music.

Jew's harps became the fad one year. Every kid had one. It was like whistling—either you could do it or you couldn't. I could play a recognizable version of “Turkey in the Straw” on that, but another year Uncle Bill gave me a good Hohner harmonica for Christmas and I never mastered the trick of sucking in and blowing out at the right time.

I took one piano lesson in college and Bill Chernokowsky stepped on the back of my hand in football practice the next day and that permanently concluded my efforts to become a world-renowned musician.

The world must be filled with unsuccessful musical careers like mine, and it's probably a good thing. We don't need a lot of bad musicians filling the air with unnecessary sounds. Some of the professionals are bad enough.

Instruments come and go in popularity and some go and never come back. I hardly ever hear an accordion anymore. The lute, the mandolin, the ukulele and even the harp seem to be instruments of the past. The saxophone is still popular but the trombone seems to be disappearing. It's too hard to hold up, probably.

The most enduring musical instruments are the violin and the piano,
although people don't have pianos in their homes the way they once did. Most pop-music groups don't use either pianos or violins but the instruments will outlive the kind of music that's popular with young people now.

The violin and piano take more work and ability than many modern musicians have the time or patience to master. They want something they can bang on. Their idea of music is a noise so loud that nuances of sound are lost in the cacophony of reverberations produced on the eardrum. The favorite instruments of the rock musicians aren't made to be played so much as beaten. Drums are favorites and, while jazz drummers like Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich were artists, most modern-music drummers might as well be swinging a baseball bat.

The change of the guitar's standing among musical instruments is one of the most interesting recent developments. From the choice of the romantic, blanket-robed, gay
caballero
on horseback, the guitar has gone in two opposite directions. It has become a favorite of a group of serious musicians who hear in it sounds its Spanish inventors never dreamed of. And then, of course, electrified and plugged in, it's the weapon of choice for the modern rock singer who needs something to hold on to.

If all you read about music were the billboards on the concert halls, you'd think every good musician was well known and making big money. Our neighbor Ed Wright is a superb guitarist who plays in what I think of as the Andrés Segovia style. If Ed ever makes it big, he'll have good stories to tell about how hard it was getting started.

Four years ago Ed gave us a cassette of Christmas music he'd recorded on his own equipment, and it's a gem. It has every Christmas carol you've ever heard, played with clarity and finesse. Just for fun, I played it for myself on the Fourth of July last year, and I play it often at Christmas. I don't get tired of his sophisticated, understated style, but Ed's never going to get rich giving cassettes to his friends, and no business is tougher to break into than the recorded-music business. It's not so much how you play as who you play. I have the feeling you could be Arthur Rubinstein your whole life and not be discovered if you didn't get some kind of lucky break.

If I'd stuck with the bugle or the harmonica, do you think I'd be playing in the New York Philharmonic today?

Is there anyone reading this who hates to start a job but loves to finish one?

If there is, I'd like to get in touch with you because I've got at least a dozen jobs I've started that I never got around to finishing. Maybe we could get together. As a matter of fact, I'd love to have you living next door. We could make beautiful music together, with you finishing all the jobs I start and then abandon.

See if any of these appeal to you:

The air conditioner in one of the upstairs bedrooms doesn't fit in the window very well, and in the winter a lot of cold air seeps in. I started to fix it by buying one of those rolls of felt you stuff in the cracks. I also got some insulating material and special tape to do the job after looking it over carefully. Unfortunately, that's as far as I got. If you'd like to drop by to get the satisfaction of finishing it, you're welcome.

I got a good start on my taxes too. I was determined not to be in such bad shape next spring at income-tax time so several months ago I marked a folder
IMPORTANT
—
IRS
and started putting receipts, bank statements and canceled checks in it. It was a good start but I didn't keep it up. I notice, for instance, that since April 30 I haven't made any new entries in the diary the IRS tells you to keep.

If you like accounting and would enjoy finishing this kind of bookkeeping work, I'd love to have your help. In exchange, I'll come over to your house and start a lot of things and then not finish them for you. That's where I excel.

The Sunday papers are piling up in the back room. I started reading all of them but never finished. I know there's a lot of good stuff in them so I can't throw them away but I never seem to get at reading them.

There are two articles I want to read in the travel section of May 8 and at least four editorials I started reading but put down when the phone rang. I also meant to look up the story of the fellow I knew at work who got married.

If finishing reading newspapers is your kind of thing, let's work out a deal.

Are you, by any chance, handy around the house? You aren't a careful woodworker who isn't satisfied until everything's just right, are
you? Because if you are, I have a lot of projects I've started but haven't finished.

I began making a little coffee table for the living room last August but then I got sidetracked because I had to make a lean- to for the two big garbage containers out by the garage. To tell you the truth, I haven't quite finished that either, because it was supposed to have doors on it but I haven't put the doors on because I don't have any hinges. Maybe I'll quit what I'm doing and go to the hardware store for hinges.

While I'm there, I could get some varnish for that little table. I took the little table down in the basement one day to sand it but I couldn't find the right sandpaper down there so I just left it and I can't varnish the table until I sand it. Before I sand it, I ought to glue that stretcher between the legs that's loose. It makes the table wobbly.

I'm not sure, though. The table may be wobbly because the floor's a little uneven. I rented a big sander from one of those rent-all places. I thought it might smooth out the bumps in the wood floor. I sanded some of the floor but something came up and I had to take the sander back and I never got at it again. Anyone want to finish fixing the table and sanding the floor?

A lot of people are better at starting a job than they are at finishing it but if I'm ever offered a teaching job at a good college, I'd like to give a course in how to start more than you can finish. You won't find anyone better at that than I am.

By the way, I wrote some letters this morning but never mailed them. Do you like mailing letters?

It always seems wrong for the head doctor in our country to be called the “surgeon general.” Dr. C. Everett Koop wasn't even a general in real life. He was an admiral. Surgeon admiral?

Dr. C. Everett Koop fooled many of his critics who didn't want him put in the job by being a surprisingly good and active surgeon general. It was Koop, more than any other person, who pushed the country to stop smoking.

Smokers are so uncomfortable smoking around other people now that you see more and more people smoking as they walk along the
street. They take any opportunity to do it when they aren't in a room or office with other people they may offend. When I take the train home from work, there is an attractive young woman who gets off at my station who heads for the door ten minutes before the train arrives. She gets her cigarette and her match out so that she can light up the instant the door opens. I look at her and think to myself, “Boy, I'd like to have the life she's throwing away.”

One of Dr. Koop's most persistent themes was that a lot of Americans are eating themselves into the grave with bad nutritional habits.

Like most Americans, I read these remarks, think I ought to take them seriously and then forget them the next time I sit down at the table. If that girl who smokes could see me eat, she'd probably want the life I'm eating myself out of.

The question is this, though: How much time and effort should any of us spend in our lives trying to prolong our lives? My good friend Harry Reasoner is a heavy cigarette smoker with serious lung problems. He still smokes. He can't stop smoking and he justifies it by saying it gives him so much pleasure that he's willing to die a few years early in exchange for it. Dumb.

I've never smoked and if someone has never been hooked on cigarettes, it's easy for that person to think anyone who smokes cigarettes is dumb and careless with his or her life. I'm hooked on food, and I suppose it's just as bad and my attitude is probably the same as Harry's. I enjoy eating so much that, at what seems to me to be considerable distance from death, I'm willing to take the risk.

Last night, I made strawberry ice cream for dessert, ate two dishes of it at the table and then cleaned out the ice cream freezer with a spoon later. Dumb.

Unfortunately, there's no label on homemade strawberry ice cream saying,
WARNING: THE SURGEON GENERAL HAS DETERMINED THAT TWO DISHES OF HOMEMADE STRAWBERRY ICE CREAM CAN BE DANGEROUS TO YOUR HEALTH
!

Doctors do the right thing trying to make us all aware of the everyday things we do that are bad for us, but what would life be like if we all took all the good advice we get on how to live longer?

Even the first moment, being born, is hazardous. Ten of every thousand infants die in their first year of life. Would we take the chance?

If we survived infancy, we wouldn't want to be put in a crib, because there were 5,945 crib deaths last year. Too dangerous.

As children, we'd never get to school. Going to school involves crossing streets. Last year 7,157 pedestrians were killed.

If we were setting out to live as long as possible without taking any chances, we'd avoid steak, butter, eggs and most other food with any taste. We wouldn't travel, have sex or drink coffee, bourbon or beer. We wouldn't even dare drink the water in some places. We wouldn't travel and we'd stay away from dark alleys. We'd sterilize every doorknob before we took hold of it to turn.

We certainly wouldn't go anywhere in a car or an airplane. In 1987, 1,428 people were killed in airplane accidents and 44,822 in automobile accidents in the United States alone. Who needs it?

The medical experts tell you to exercise but you're always reading of some jogger keeling over. Why chance it? You certainly wouldn't get me out on a golf course with the number of people hit by lightning. Eighty-five people struck dead last year.

If we want to last forever, we should stay home, eat whole grains and vegetables, breathe through a mask, boil the water, avoid making close friends. Have a complete medical checkup often. See your dentist twice a year, avoid eye strain and loud noises.

Now to check the refrigerator to see if there's any of that strawberry ice cream left from last night.

PEOPLE