Not That You Asked (9780307822215) (10 page)

Some of my battered and abandoned suitcases in the upstairs hall closet are themselves repositories for keys. I often find two or three hotel keys for rooms I checked out of seven years ago floating around the bottom of a suitcase along with the other flotsam and jetsam of long trips. All the keys say on them
DROP IN ANY MAILBOX, NO POSTAGE NECESSARY
. I feel terribly guilty but I never get around to returning those keys.

People make a big deal out of locking their cars with keys. More than a million cars a year are stolen in the United States and I bet all but about four of those are locked tight with the ignition key in the owner's pocket when the car thief comes along. The lack of a key doesn't seem to deter the car thieves.

I have a feeling that if we all threw away the keys, our kingdoms would still be there in the morning.

“Delicious,” I heard the flight attendant say to the passenger behind me. “It's really delicious,” she said.

“OK,” I thought to myself, “I'll take that as her opinion even though I can't see what she's talking about.”

“I tasted it,” the flight attendant continued, “and it's really delicious. I never had anything so delicious. Delicious.”

This was five “deliciouses” I'd heard in the space of twenty seconds and it was irritating. I'm easily irritated in flight.

“I'll try some,” I heard the passenger say.

“You'll love it,” the flight attendant said.

“It's really delicious,” I said quickly to myself, mocking what I anticipated the flight attendant would say next. She didn't disappoint me.

“It's really delicious,” she bubbled for the sixth time.

I reached in the pocket for the bag provided for passengers who think they're going to be sick. If I wasn't a sweet, mild-tempered person I'd have stood up and whacked this young woman over her pretty head with my seat cushion and yelled, “All right already … so it's good.”

Is it my imagination or are people repeating themselves more than they once did? I'm continually hearing people say the same thing not twice but four or five times.

It's hard to know what brought this on. It seems as though people either enjoy hearing themselves say these things or they don't trust people to hear what they've said the first time. They want to make sure.

This morning I happened to be outside my office door when the man who delivers the newspapers showed up. He also delivers to Charles Kuralt just down the hall and the personnel office next door.

“I'm going to leave their papers with you too,” he said. “I can't get in so I'll leave them with you. The door is locked there and I can't leave them so I'll leave them here.”

There's a subject for someone's doctoral thesis here somewhere: “The Theory and Practice of Repetition in Everyday Conversation.”

There are phrases people use that have repetition built into them. I have a friend who often says something like “I just had a small little breakfast this morning.”

He always uses the words
small
and
little
together as if one improved on the other.

I don't know whether he invented it himself or whether it was written for him, but for a reason I can't figure out, back in 1984, President Reagan started using the phrase “a new beginning.”

Are there any old beginnings? It's repeating the same thing over again, twice, repeatedly.

There seems to be a proliferation of unnecessary talk everywhere. I can think of several possible reasons for it.

The first reason may be that there's so much unnecessary noise in the world that in order to carry on a conversation, people have to shout and constantly reiterate. The chances of anyone hearing everything they say the first time they say it is minimal. There's either a radio or a television set blaring away or someone's running a lawn mower or power saw or the street-maintenance people are working with a pneumatic jack hammer nearby.

I often take a cab in New York. Invariably the driver has his radio on too loud and, in addition, he has a two-way radio with someone on it competing with the other sounds, trying to give him the name and address of a customer. When I tell him where I want to go, I notice I often repeat the address to make sure he heard it.

And then there's another reason for all the verbal repetition. I don't want to get over my head in psychology, but I think people are uncertain about so many things in their lives that they get some sort of primal satisfaction from saying something that doesn't call for any thought.

If we expressed an idea just once, telephone calls, interviews and everyday conversations could be cut in half.

If it came from a gift shop, please don't give it to me. There is a whole category of things that I don't want for Christmas and most of them come from gift shops. Don't get me a tie rack, for instance.

There's something wrong about a place that specializes in things to be given away. It can't be as down to earth as the everyday store that you'd go into to buy something you need for yourself. Most of the items in gift shops are things no one has any use for. I am uncertain about why they have been categorized as “gifts.” Why would anyone decide to give a friend something that the store owner, by designating it “gift,” has declared to be something the person wouldn't want for himself?

The only kind of gift to give is something you'd like to own yourself. You aren't dying to have a set of hand-embroidered pot holders, a bag of fragrances for your underwear drawer or a copper-plated watering can.

There are some nice gift shops just as there are nice cups of tea. The people who run them tend to be struggling entrepreneurs who aren't
making much of a living. I like the people and I feel sorry for them but they're in the wrong business. We don't need any more gift shops. No one really likes anything that has the look of a gift about it.

The worst gift shops in the world are those terrible places at airports. If you fly into St. Louis, the gift shops at the airport feature caps and T-shirts saying
ST. LOUIS CARDINALS
on them and coffee cups bearing the likeness of Charles Lindbergh's plane, the
Spirit of St. Louis
.

The names on the caps and T-shirts are about the only distinguishing feature in airport shops across the country.

The shops usually make a failing effort to have some local products. In an airport in Burlington, Vermont, you'll be able to buy maple syrup. The airport in Orlando will send a crate of oranges home for you, and one in Chicago will have ashtrays, highball glasses and key chains featuring the Chicago Bears football team. In San Francisco there are redwood-tree plaques saying
HOME SWEET HOME
. Everywhere you can find seashells, pictures of movie stars in cheap frames, fancy candles and expensive little calendar books.

It's hard to put your finger on what's wrong with gift shops. They often try too hard to be clever but, worse than that, nothing in the shop is of much use in the real world. The only purpose served by a breadboard with flowers painted on it is as a gift. It's a gift and nothing more because the chances are it never will be used to cut bread on.

What does anyone do with a gift shop gift? No one wants an apron with a crossword puzzle on it or a glass paperweight that gives the impression it's snowing when you turn it upside down.

Our houses are filled with this useless kind of stuff and we don't dare throw anything away because we don't know when the person who gave it to us is going to show up again.

If you've got to bring home a gift from your trip, make sure you buy it in town before you hit the gift shop at the airport. I actually had a friend years ago whose marriage ended in divorce over something he brought his wife from Kennedy Airport in New York.

My friend was about to board the plane when he realized he hadn't bought anything for his wife. Feeling guilty, he rushed back into the terminal and went to the gift shop. From there he brought her a bronzed thermometer in the shape of the Empire State Building.

She was apparently already in sort of a bad mood when he arrived home late, and when he gave her the gift shop gift she took one look at it, threw it at him and left home forever.

I didn't say so to my friend at the time but I thought she had a good point.

They've finally gone too far. The American Civil Liberties Union, one of my favorite organizations in spite of President Bush, is defending the right of people to play musical instruments in New York City subway stations as a means of begging for money.

Some of these young musicians are pretty good. You see them on street corners as well as in subway stations all over town. A friend has a son who walks up and down the lines of people waiting to get into popular movies on weekends, playing his violin. He has a basket attached to his chest for people to drop money in.

Begging like this is the young man's only source of income and his father and mother say he does quite well. Their attitude is strange. I don't think they're proud of him but they don't try to hide it and they seem somewhat amused by it. It's my personal opinion that their son ought to be spanked and put to bed without his supper—or his violin—even though he's thirty years old. I don't say that to them.

Most of these street musicians are inoffensive but I don't believe they have the law on their side and I can't understand why the ACLU has come to their defense. What about the rest of us who like silence, ACLU? Where do our rights start? Why does my friend's son have the right to dominate the sound and atmosphere of a movie line? What if I'm standing with someone I enjoy talking to? If he has the right to play on the street or in the subway, do I have the right to stand next to him with a siren and drown out his noise with a noise of my own?

When one person's freedom to do something infringes on another's, the question of freedom gets into deep water.

Another friend of mine had the best time of his life on a New York subway the other day. He was sitting there reading his paper, when three young punks got on the train with a radio blaring loud rock music. My friend was thinking about moving to another car because, in addition to not liking the noise, he didn't like the looks of the three young men. At this point another passenger, wearing blue jeans and a cap pulled down over his eyes, asked the young men to turn off their radio.

My friend didn't want to be in on any confrontation about something as small as a loud radio, so he kept his nose buried in his paper,
but his ears were tuned to the scene down the car. He half expected to be witness to a bloody incident.

“Hey, man,” one of the young radio-players said, “why don't you …” He uttered a comment that can't be repeated.

“I said, turn off the radio,” the man in blue jeans said firmly. The three youths started toward him. At this point the man whipped out his New York City police badge, revealing his pistol holster as he did so. At the next stop the undercover cop handcuffed the three together and took them off the train.

Where would the ACLU stand on that?

Several weeks ago I was lying in bed ready to go to sleep when I heard music wafting in the open window. It was loud, incessant and unusual for the neighborhood. I lay there getting angrier by the minute until I couldn't stand it any longer. I got up, pulled pants on over my pajamas, put on a shirt and sneakers with no socks and headed for the sounds.

As I approached the source of the commotion, a woman, dressed as hastily as I was, came walking toward me.

“What's going on?” I asked.

“Oh, it's a high school graduation party,” she sighed. “They have notices posted on the trees saying they'll move inside at midnight.”

I turned and headed for home. I wasn't going to be a graduation party pooper. In a case like this, the only thing to do is surrender your freedom to have silence to a group of young people who, for one night, want to be free to have noise with their fun.

I've had more comfortable flights in a B-17 bomber over Germany during World War II when we were getting shot at than I've had on some commercial airline trips recently. Deregulation is about as successful for the airlines as a kindergarten class would be for kids without a teacher. It's a dismal failure. The airlines are going the way of our railroads.

Anyone planning a vacation trip for pleasure is going to get off to a bad start because there is no longer anything pleasant about a commercial airline flight. You hold your breath until it's over. People ought
to stay home if they don't have to go somewhere. Businessmen and -women should do their long-distance business by computer. Flight is torture.

The same thing has happened to U.S. airlines that has happened to most American industry. The money-changers are in charge. The professionals, who used to get their satisfaction out of trying to make theirs the best airline in the business, are gone. Pilots who used to be proud to work for Pan Am, Eastern, Delta, TWA, American, United, are now bad-mouthing their own airlines, and for good reason.

Ticket agents, flight attendants and pilots seem not only good but exceptionally good by any standard you use to judge employees. They aren't the problem. Service has deteriorated because there aren't enough of them.

The women who do the dirty work on board the aircraft, the flight attendants, formerly “stewardesses,” are a remarkably capable, interesting, intelligent and attractive group of all-American women. They perform the service of waitress, nurse, bartender, psychiatrist, hat-check girl and cocktail-party conversationalist and still maintain their pleasant manner in the face of rude, dissatisfied, unruly passengers like me.

There have been numerous instances of violence by passengers on board airlines and there are going to be more. You often read of a passenger who is arrested when the plane lands.