Out of My Mind (2 page)

The essays in this book were written over the past four years. Some of them show their age. I have rewritten small parts of some of them for that reason. Margie, my wife of sixty years, died in 2004 and her name does not appear as often as it originally did because it hurts too much to write it.

—ANDY ROONEY

Last Saturday, I filled the trunk of my car and the passenger seats behind me with junk and headed for the dump. There were newspapers, empty cardboard boxes, bags of junk mail, advertising flyers, empty bottles, cans and garbage. I enjoy the trip. Next to buying something new, throwing away something old is the most satisfying experience I know.

The garbage men come twice a week but they're very fussy. If the garbage is not packaged the way they like it, they won't take it. That's why I make a trip to the dump every Saturday. It's two miles from our house and I often think big thoughts about throwing things away while I'm driving there.

How much, I got wondering last week, does the whole Earth weigh? New York City alone throws away 24 million pounds of garbage a day. A day! How long will it take us to turn the whole Planet Earth into garbage, throw it away and leave us standing on nothing?

Oil, coal and metal ore are the most obvious extractions, but any place there's a valuable mineral, we dig beneath the surface, take it out and make it into something else. We never put anything back. We disfigure one part of our land by digging something out and another after we use it and throw it away. I say “away,” but there's really no such place as “away.”

After my visit to the dump, I headed for the supermarket, where I bought $34 worth of groceries. Everything was in something—a can, a box, a bottle, a carton or a bag. When I got to the checkout counter, the cashier separated my cans, boxes, cartons, bottles and bags and put three or four at a time into other bags, boxes or cartons. Whatever came to her hand on the conveyor belt in a bag, she put in another bag. Sometimes she put my paper bags into plastic bags. One bag never seemed to do. If something was in plastic, she put that into paper.

On the way home, I stopped at the dry cleaners. Five of my shirts, which had been laundered, were in a cardboard box. There was a piece of cardboard in the front of each shirt and another cardboard cutout to
fit the collar to keep it from getting wrinkled. Clipped to the front of each shirt was a cloth tag that identified the shirt as mine. The suit I had cleaned was on a throwaway hanger, in a plastic bag with a formfitting piece of paper inside over the shoulders of my suit.

When I got home, I put the groceries where they belonged in various hiding places in the kitchen. With the wastebasket at hand, I threw out all the outer bags and wrappers. By the time I'd unwrapped and stored everything, I'd filled the kitchen wastebasket a second time, already getting ready for next Saturday.

It would be interesting to conduct a serious test to determine what percentage of everything we discard. It must be more than 25 percent. I drank the contents of a bottle of Coke and threw the bottle away. The Coca-Cola Company must pay more for the bottle than for what they put in it. Dozens of things we eat come in containers that weigh more and cost the manufacturer more than what they put in them.

We've gone overboard on packaging in the United States and part of the reason is that a bag, a can or a carton provides a place for the producer to display advertising. The average cereal box looks like a roadside billboard.

The Earth we inhabit could end up as one huge, uninhabitable dump.

You'd see me there Saturday mornings . . . throwing stuff away.

“Days” don't move me much. Memorial Day is not a day I remember friends who died during World War II any more than I remember them other days. Fragmentary memories of them often come to mind, evoked by something I see, hear or experience.

I enjoy thinking of them for a moment, wince at the thought they're gone forever, then put them out of mind and go about my day. Tears
come to my eyes unbidden ten times a year when I think of my boyhood friend Obie Slingerland, who died on the deck of the Saratoga when he landed his plane with a bomb hung up in its bay.

I don't need a Memorial Day to remember friends like Obie or Bob O'Connor, Bob Post, Bob Taft, Charley Wood or Bede Irvin. They died in World War II having lived less than half the life I've enjoyed.

We have so many “Days.” Memorial Day used to be called Decoration Day when I was a kid. At some point, the name was changed to Memorial Day and set aside to honor all war dead. That seemed like a step in the right direction. Armistice Day, a federal holiday, was changed to Veterans Day in 1954.

It seems to me all these “Days” don't really do much for those they're intended to honor. When my mother was alive, I didn't love her more on “Mother's Day.” I got caught up with the “Mother's Day” pitch by the card, flower and candy promoters but I always resented it. She would laugh if I bought her flowers or candy, dismissing it as silly and something I didn't have to do. However, I always suspected she might have missed it just a little if I hadn't done it. Margie doesn't sit by the phone waiting for it to ring on Mother's Day but when it did ring at 6 P.M. on May 12, she said, “There's the last one.” She'd kept track.

If none of our four children ever called me again on Father's Day or my birthday, it wouldn't make me think they didn't like me. I know them too well.

Columbus Day, St. Patrick's Day and Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday are good rallying days for the Italians, the Irish and black Americans. It's good for them to get together to indicate their pride in their heritage, but I don't think Columbus Day or Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday should be federal holidays. The Irish, at least, have had the good sense to celebrate with their St. Patrick's Day Parade on Sunday when drivers are not trying to get to work.

Washington's Birthday is observed as a federal holiday on the third Monday of February. Twelve states have tried to make sense of honoring Lincoln and Washington by establishing “President's Day” to honor
both of them but it isn't a federal holiday. The silly but good holidays are Halloween, Valentine's Day and Thanksgiving. I don't know how we let Thanksgiving in so close to Christmas. It's good if you don't mind having turkey on two occasions so close together.

The fastest-growing religion in the United States is Islam and you can bet the Muslims are going to demand holidays of their own before many moons.

I don't like to see days off proliferate. There are five great American holidays: Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's Day, the Fourth of July and Labor Day. We need Labor Day because it's the real New Year's Day and a signal that summer vacation is over.

Minnesota is the best state to live in, according to a book of statistics called
State Rankings
, put together by Kathleen and Scott Morgan, who live in Kansas, the thirteenth best state to live in.

After Minnesota come Iowa, New Hampshire, Virginia and Massachusetts.

The worst states to live in, according to the book, are Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. Florida is ranked way down as thirty-ninth best, which is strange, considering how many people choose to go there from some other state to live.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are now about 300 million people in the United States. I'm glad we didn't decide to have a celebration when we hit 300 million because it's nothing to celebrate. Empty lots have been disappearing under houses, apartment buildings and office structures all my life. The more people we have, the more buildings we put up.

It hasn't been long since New York had the largest population of any state but it's been dwarfed in the last twenty years by California. California, with 34 million people, is almost twice as big as New York, with
18 million. Even Texas is bigger than New York now with 20 million people. Lucky Wyoming has fewer than half a million. There are seven other states with fewer than a million people.

The worst statistic is the number of people in state prisons. There were 1,236,476 people locked away in the year 2000, and that figure hasn't changed much. Most prisoners are men. There are only 93,000 women in the pokey. No one seems to know whether women are more honest or just smarter and don't get caught as often.

It costs approximately $60,000 a year to keep each prisoner. You'd think there might be some way prisoners could be put to work and pay their keep. The trouble with that is, of course, if you give a prisoner a job, someone will complain that this deprives an honest person of a job. It just seems like there's so much work to be done in the world that we ought to be able to find something useful for more than a million and a quarter people to do rather than sit in prison cells all day.

A lot of those prisoners probably were put away for stealing cars. In the whole United States, an amazing 1,165,559 cars were stolen in 2000. You wonder why we go to all the trouble of locking them. What good are locks if we have that many cars stolen every year?

People make the most money in Connecticut, where the average salary is $40,870. I live in Connecticut and make more than that and am surrounded by people who make more than I do. Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York are next. The lowest average incomes are in Mississippi, New Mexico and West Virginia. The average salary in those states is about half what it is in Connecticut.

In Massachusetts, 35 percent of the people have college degrees.

Maine is one of my favorite states but it has some unusual statistics. In almost every category, it's near the top or the bottom of the list. For example, more people vote in Maine than almost any other state. It has the most number of veterans per capita, the highest local taxes but a low crime rate.

More people own their own homes, 77 percent, in Michigan and Iowa, and fewest own them in New York, 53 percent. That's because in New York City, there are relatively few private homes. Most people live in rented apartments.

The financial experts who predict trends in the stock market's rise and fall have something in common with meteorologists who tell us what the weather is going to be: They are both wrong about half the time. This makes their guess as good as ours.

Last week, the weather reports we heard in New York were saying we could expect a dusting of snow over the weekend. By Saturday, the reports were upgraded, and on Monday morning, by which time we'd had 14 inches of snow, they were saying we could have as much as 14 inches of snow. All this was unusual because meteorologists are more apt to err on the side of excess to make their reports sound more interesting. Their guess is seldom less than the snow or rain that actually comes down.

On television, the weather reporters pad their parts by saying things like, “There will be an accumulation of 8 inches of snow on the roads tomorrow morning during the rush hour, so allow yourself extra time and drive carefully.” Has any driver in history ever driven more carefully because of being admonished to do so by a radio or television announcer?

The traffic reporters and weather experts both give a lot of advice. The traffic reporter will say, “There's a four-car pileup with an overturned tractor trailer on I–90, so stay to your right.”

The other advice they like to give, as though they were being helpful, is to travelers: “Kennedy Airport is closed to all traffic, so call your airline in advance for flight information.” Have they ever tried to call an airline? Airlines don't have people answering telephones. You have as much chance of getting information about a flight from an airline as you have of finding out whether we're going to war with Iran by calling the White House and asking to talk to President Bush.

Because I had work to do and knew I wouldn't be able to get into New York from our home in Connecticut Monday morning, I drove to New York on Sunday. New York is good with snow, but there's always one building in a block where the tenants don't shovel and it makes it difficult to get around. Snowplows clear the streets but block the crosswalks in the process.

Taxi cabs are scarce after a snowstorm. Cabs have two-wheel drive and bald tires and can't move in snow. Buses come in clusters of three, then none for an hour.

A friend of mine was in town from Des Moines and couldn't leave because the airports were closed. He called me at the office to ask if I'd have dinner with him. His situation made me question how hotels handled incoming reservations when people already in the rooms couldn't get out. Most of the people employed in hotels probably couldn't get to work. How did they get the beds made, the sheets washed?

Monday night, most restaurants in the city were closed because their waiters, cooks and managers couldn't get to work. Suppliers had not supplied them. We found a good restaurant, but I felt guilty after dinner. At home the morning newspaper had been covered with snow and couldn't be found in the driveway. The oil company had come but couldn't get the tanker into our snowbound driveway. There was no way the mailman could get to the box on our front door.

Margie said she was going to try to get the car out in the morning and go to the store.

I wanted to be as nice to her as I knew how, so I told her to drive carefully.

We are awash in remembrance. We need some special occasions in our lives. It's nice to make one out of some anniversary, but eventually, as we accumulate friends over the years and relatives proliferate, there become more special occasions in our lives than we can handle—or even remember.