Not That You Asked (9780307822215) (13 page)

In most noisy cities, car horns are part of the orchestra. The fire engines clang past, little noted. The sirens of the ambulances wail notice of their approach, pass and diminish in the distance. A car horn attracts no attention whatsoever except from the driver who gets some kind of perverse satisfaction from blowing it.

If it would be dangerous to eliminate the horns on cars altogether, and probably it would, then at the very least horns ought to have meters attached to them. A meter could be tied into the odometer. Every driver would be given two free horn honks for every hundred miles of driving. Any horn blowing in excess of that would cost a driver a use tax of $25 per honk.

The most annoying horn blowers are the repeaters. They are the drivers who hit the horn three or four times every time they hit it at all. No quick beep for them. A horn-use tax would hit these drivers hardest.

Automobile horn blowing is one of the principal causes of noise pollution in America. A horn-blowing tax might not help solve the national debt but it would have a great quieting effect.

Is it just a mood you get in once in a while or are a lot of things not as good as they used to be?

—The streets in our cities and the roads around them have certainly deteriorated. No major highway twenty years old is in good condition and there's so much traffic on them that they can't be closed and
rebuilt the way they should be. As a result, the original concrete gets a little cosmetic dab of asphalt once in a while.

—Most brands of paper handkerchiefs (I'm avoiding saying the name we all call them) are smaller and less substantial. You need two where one used to do the job.

—“Wash and wear” shirts look good when you buy them, and you can wash them but you can't wear them. All the synthetic fabrics itch in hot weather and are not nearly as comfortable as shirts were when they were made of cotton. Today, you have to search for “all cotton.” Synthetic fabrics are progress at its worst.

—Our lakes, our rivers and our beaches are no longer any fun to go to for a vacation. If they're any good and have clean water, they're too crowded. Most of them aren't any good, don't have clean water and are too crowded anyway. We have ruined most of our great water, and why it isn't more of a concern of government I don't know.

—And don't think you can climb a mountain and enjoy the pristine beauty of nature, either. Climb the highest mountain and you'll find an orange peel and three empty beer cans.

—Breakfast in a good hotel used to be one of the great luxuries. Forget breakfast. The chef doesn't come in until 11
A.M.
and then he starts to prepare lunch.

Most breakfast menus advertise “fresh orange juice,” but it almost never is fresh, especially in Florida.

Ellen stayed in the Hilton in Boston last week. The menu said “fresh-squeezed orange juice.” Ellen has knowing taste buds. She challenged the waiter, then the head waiter. (Like father, like daughter.) The head waiter insisted it was fresh orange juice.

“If you don't believe me,” he said, “I'll show you the bottle.” Fresh orange juice, as John McPhee once wrote, “is juice that's still in the orange when you order it.”

—Tomatoes are a joke except for about three weeks a year. Tomatoes used to be dark red, juicy and full of flavor. Now they're used like food coloring or parsley. They're merely decoration. They're pink, hard, dry and tasteless.

—House paint is not as good as it once was. It peels. One reason is that manufacturers are no longer allowed to use lead in their paint because small children, who ate loose paint in deteriorating houses, became ill.

It's probably a necessary law that prohibits the use of lead, but it sure makes poor paint and it's too bad we couldn't stop kids from eating paint instead.

—Postal service is a joke compared to what it was twenty-five or thirty
years ago when everyone got two deliveries a day. Can you imagine that? Two deliveries a day? You're lucky to get one some days.

I hope it's just things, not people, that are deteriorating.

Hotels are on my mind because I slept in one for a week recently in Atlanta.

Atlanta is a good hotel city. Architect John Portman started the trend toward those huge atrium lobbies. He thinks a hotel should be an experience, not just a place to sleep. Portman has changed the look of big, expensive downtown hotels in America and made them more interesting. They're no longer big boxes with a lot of little boxes inside.

I stayed in one of Portman's hotels, the Westin. It was a very nice hotel and although I'm impressed with his work, I'm not as interested in an experience as I am in a night's sleep. In his successful effort to be interesting, Mr. Portman sacrifices some convenience for the guests. Many hotels have little scorecards they leave for guests to fill out. They ask a guest to rank the hotel's various services. I never fill them out, but here are several comments I have that would apply to most hotels in America:

—I wish the bellman carrying my bags to the room would stop asking those same questions: “Did you have a nice flight?” “Have you stayed with us before?” and “How long are you going to be with us?”

—There is too much knocking at your door in most hotels. I'm not doing anything sneaky, but I don't like hotel employees knocking at the door to check on something all the time.

—They can turn down the bed if they want to while I'm out for dinner, but please stop leaving me those two little chocolates on the pillow.

—Hotels have got to wake up to the fact that seven o'clock is too late to begin serving breakfast. Because they start so late, it is often difficult to get into the dining room for breakfast by eight o'clock and room service is all jammed up between seven and eight. It isn't unusual to wait forty-five minutes for toast and coffee to be brought to your room … for $11.95, “SERVICE NOT INCLUDED.”

—Hotels ought to get together on a shower-control mechanism. Most of them work OK if you know how they work but if you've never seen
the type before, they can be difficult. You can either freeze or scald yourself. One problem they don't consider is that about half of all Americans need glasses and you can't wear your glasses in the shower, so you can't read the directions on the shower control.

—The new thing is for American hotels to pretend they have a concierge. The concierge is one of the best things about staying at a hotel in Europe. This man is available in the lobby at all times of day and night. He knows everything and can do anything. If you want reservations at a good restaurant or tickets to the opera, he knows how to get them.

American hotels don't have the vaguest idea what a concierge is and they should be prohibited from giving the word a bad name by using it.

—The price for a good hotel room has gone out of sight. Prices have risen higher and faster than any other single item I can think of. The rooms at the Westin are $130 for one person and $190 for two. Wow!

—Hotels ought to stop putting so much of their own advertising literature around the room. I'm renting the room and they ought to leave the space on top of the dresser and the television cabinet for me, not for their own commercials. And if you put all their literature in a drawer, the maid takes it out and puts it back where they want it the next day.

—The lights near or over the bed are almost always impossible to read by and very often the on/off switch is hard to find or inaccessible from a prone position.

—Hangers are too often cleverly designed so they're hard for a guest to take home, but they're hard to use, too.

Please come back and see us again real soon.

PROBLEMS
 

Withering Away with the Weather

Sometimes I get the feeling the Earth doesn't really want us. It sure makes it difficult to live here.

Last night when I got home just before dinner, I stopped and looked at the thermometer outside the kitchen door. The sun hits it in late afternoon so it isn't really an accurate indicator, but it read 94 degrees. On the radio they were calling it an official 90.

I went upstairs to change into my old sitting-around clothes, but I didn't stay up there long because it must have been 100 in the bedroom. We have an air conditioner but it hadn't been turned on because no one was going to be in the room. I hate to spend money cooling an empty room.

This morning I left the house at 6:10 and the same thermometer that had read 94 degrees last evening was at an even 40 degrees. Do you think some force is using weather to drive us crazy or make us move somewhere else, off Earth?

Driving to work, I got to thinking about how near the Earth is to being uninhabitable. I've never read what temperatures the human body can take for high and low extremes but it seems likely that parts of this planet are close to being outside the range of human tolerance at times. The temperature gets into the high 120's in Death Valley, California, and it has been as high as 134 degrees. That's in the shade and there isn't any shade out there. The Earth's temperature has peaked at 136 in Libya. Muammar al-Qaddafi aside, this is reason enough for me not to book a two-week vacation there.

In Vostok, Antarctica, temperatures have been recorded as low as 126 degrees below zero. Can the same body that would stay alive in
136-degree heat also keep going 262 degrees below that? I remember reading about a place in Montana where the temperature fell from 44 degrees above zero around noon to 56 degrees below zero late that night. That's putting heating systems and the human body to the test.

Somehow we seem to live through extreme temperature changes. Air-conditioning and central heating make it easier, but the human race survived before it had either. I don't see how.

Nature is always making things tough for us. If it isn't temperature, it's another kind of terrible weather or natural phenomenon that makes life difficult. Sunday there was a picture in my newspaper of a row of expensive beach houses that are in imminent danger of being washed away because the ocean has eroded the sand out from under them, leaving the houses precariously perched on top of their telephone pole–like stilt pilings.

At another time of year, that same page of the same paper might have a picture of snow drifts burying a row of cars on a highway near Buffalo or of a house being washed downstream by the overflowing Mississippi in the delta. Just when you think you're lucky to be in the one safe part of the country, something strikes you. I look with some sense of sad superiority at the stories of raging fires coming down the canyons in California or of twisters sweeping the Kansas plains.

While I was worrying about all the bad luck the rest of the country was having last fall, a hurricane struck the East Coast while we were in Maine. We drove home to Connecticut the following day, following detours where the road had been blocked off by fallen telephone poles, and found the lawn in front of our house with enough major branches down so that I had to call a tree surgeon to clear them away.

I am always worried that the Earth will become too warm, too cold, too wet or too dry for humans. We are, after all, fragile creatures. It wouldn't take much of a change to make life on Earth impossible.

Fortunately for me, I have something more important to worry about today. I think my checking account is overdrawn.

I don't mean to be selfish. I don't want to keep the world to myself and a few friends, but there does come a point when a crowd ruins
everything. We have all the people this country needs now. I associate overpopulation with poverty and unhappiness, not with joy and plenty.

If the Bible were rewritten this year with some quotations from God, I think he'd probably want to change that line in Genesis where he's quoted as saying, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth …”