Not That You Asked (9780307822215) (24 page)

For the past few days I've spent most of the time in my woodworking shop making a complicated little oak stool for Emily.

I like the whole process of writing but when I get back there in my workshop, I notice that I'm quite contented. Yesterday I worked until 2:30 before I remembered I hadn't eaten lunch. It even has occurred to me that I could give up writing and spend the rest of my life making pieces of furniture that amuse me. Who knows? I might get good at it.

It's a mystery to me why more people don't derive their satisfactions from working with their hands. Somehow, a hundred or more years ago something strange happened in this country. Americans began to assume that all the people who did the good, hard work with their hands were not as smart as those who worked exclusively with their brains. The carpenters, the plumbers, the mechanics, the painters, the electricians and the farmers were put in a social category of their own below the one the bankers, the insurance salesmen, the doctors and the lawyers were in. The jobs that required people to work with their hands were generally lower-paying jobs and the people who took them had less education.

Another strange thing has happened in recent years. It's almost as though the working people who really know how to do something other than make money are striking back at the white-collar society. In all but the top executive jobs, the blue-collar workers are making as much as or more than the teachers, the accountants and the airline clerks.

The apprentice carpenters are making more than the young people starting out as bank clerks. Master craftsmen in any line are making $60,000 a year and many are making double that. In most large cities, automobile mechanics charge $45 an hour. A mechanic in Los Angeles or New York, working in the service department of an authorized car dealer, can make $60,000 a year. A sanitation worker in Chicago can make $35,000 a year. All this has happened, in part at least, because the fathers who were plumbers made enough money to send their children to college so they wouldn't have to be plumbers.

In England, a child's future is determined at an early age when he or she is assigned either to a school that features a classical education
or one that emphasizes learning a trade. Even though we never have had the same kind of class system in America that they have in England, our lines are drawn, too. The people who work with their hands as well as their brains still aren't apt to belong to the local country club. The mechanic at the car dealer's may make more than the car salesman, but the salesman belongs to the club and the mechanic doesn't.

It's hard to account for why we're so short of people who do things well with their hands. You can only conclude that it's because of some mixed-up sense of values we have that makes us think it is more prestigious to sell houses as a real estate person than it is to build them as a carpenter.

To further confuse the matter, when anyone who works mostly with his brain, as I do, does something with his hands, as when I make a piece of furniture, friends are envious and effusive with praise. So, how come the people who do it professionally, and infinitely better than I, aren't in the country club?

If I've lost you in going the long way around to make my point, my point is that considering how satisfying it is to work with your hands and considering how remunerative those jobs have become, it is curious that more young people coming out of school aren't learning a trade instead of becoming salesmen.

If you have good handwriting, you're lucky and unusual. Mine is so bad that I'm all but lost trying to write something down on paper without a typewriter. I come on notes I've written to myself with little ideas and frequently they are so illegible that I have to throw them away, undeciphered.

Miss Rose, who in my memory looks like Diane Sawyer, taught me to write in the third grade but I can't blame my handwriting on her. I blame it on something called “The Palmer Method,” a system used by many public schools when I was growing up.

I don't know anything about The Palmer Method … even today I hate to write the name … except it was a style totally unsuited to my character and ability.

The rules and manner of writing were drummed into my head so
often that I recall every detail of how it was supposed to be done. I'm not certain whether my failure was because of a physical inability or a temperamental unwillingness to conform to rules that seemed silly to me.

Miss Rose was quite clear how she wanted us to do it. We were to take the pencil and hold it between the thumb and index finger. The thumb had to be completely extended, not bent at all. The pencil stuck almost straight up because it was held against the finger above the knuckle, not down in the crotch of the hand. The little finger was curled underneath and rode on the paper.

Each day Miss Rose went up and down the aisles inspecting our hands as we did push-pulls and continuous circles between two lines on a pad of paper.

Even at that age I recall being impressed by Miss Rose's beauty and being excited when she bent over next to my small desk and gently took my hand in hers to reform it in the manner prescribed by Palmer. She would lean over to see if there was light coming under my wrist, too. You were supposed to have light coming under your wrist. The wrist was not to touch the desk. The whole motion came from the shoulder, and your arm was an arch between your hand and the underpart of the muscle of your forearm. The fingers of the hand were not supposed to move by themselves. It was very unnatural.

I could no more do what Miss Rose and Palmer were asking me to do in those penmanship classes than I could eat an ice cream cone slowly. It was not my nature.

At home my grandfather, John Reynolds, worked with me. He had learned to write in a little school in Redruth, Cornwall, England, and he had a fine, firm, legible hand. When he put a word on paper, it looked as perfect as the model alphabet written over the blackboard in Miss Rose's homeroom. I remember the sample words my grandfather had me write. He thought they displayed the grace of the written word and they were words he himself wrote often. They were
THE BALLSTON SPA NATIONAL BANK
.

I greatly admired my grandfather but I was totally unable to duplicate his handwriting, and it strikes me now that I must have been coming of age because I recall not being very worried about penmanship. I wished I could write as he wrote but I simply felt he could and I couldn't.

My grandfather, I noted later, after I grew up, didn't do any better with his own son William. My uncle became a very successful commercial artist drawing charcoal sketches for
Vogue
magazine. As an artist
he must have had a great ability to control the direction of the movement of his pen on paper, but his handwriting was as hard to read and childish-looking as mine.

It's a mystery to me why some people have good handwriting and why others have writing that's so hard to read. It's probably for the same reason that some people are six feet tall and others are not.

Maybe I'll ask Diane Sawyer to come over and hold my hand. I'll see if she can teach me how to be six feet tall.

Following are some miscellaneous observations on the use of the English language:

—Every few weeks I use a colon but I almost never use semicolons because I'm not sure what they indicate. I like dashes and three dots for punctuation. Three dots aren't officially recognized, though.

—Several times a year I look up the difference between
further
and
farther
. My reference books always say the same thing.
Farther
refers to distance. Everything else is
further
. You wouldn't say “farthermore.”

—There are some phrases that should be given a long rest. Some examples:

The name of the game

World-class

What can I tell you?

No problem.

Have a nice day.

Will that be all?

More heat than light

I'd give up the phrase “having a dialogue” when I mean two people are talking, too.

—I don't use “whom” much, even though I know when I should. I use it sometimes when it's the obvious object in a sentence but I never use it at the start of a sentence even when it's the object. I say, “Who were you talking to?”

A lot of people get hold of a few grammatical points and are proud of themselves for knowing them. They don't miss a chance to point out the error in someone else's speech or writing.

“ ‘To whom are you speaking,' said he, for he had been to night school.”

—In parts of Africa the natives have learned some English from the British and they've adapted it for their own pidgin English. Pidgin English is wonderfully colorful and inventive. For instance, they call one of their own native Africans who is uppity because he's been to London a “beento.”

—Newspapers always put a period after Harry Truman's middle initial
S
even though it doesn't stand for anything more than that.

—An educated person is supposed to be able to use a hundred thousand words. A great language expert named Otto Jesperson once counted the different words in Shakespeare and found Shakespeare only used twenty thousand. He says there are only six thousand words in the Bible.

—One of my good books on English grammar says that when you use a quotation inside a sentence of your own, you don't start the quotation with a capital even though it's a sentence itself. For example: The President said last week that “we're not going to be fooled by the Russians.” It seems wrong to me. I'd have capitalized “we're.”

—I'm suspicious of a writer who uses “launder” when he means “wash,” “inexpensive” for “cheap,” “perspiration” for “sweat” or “wealthy” when he means “rich.”

—I had an interesting ride into the city from the airport with Gloria Steinem. I liked her a lot better than I thought I would. She was talking about someone she knows who teaches writing courses. Gloria says the teacher just makes the students write and write. The teacher doesn't care what it is. Her theory is that if a person writes a lot, the person's natural personality will begin to appear after a while. Not only that, the person will begin to recognize himself or herself.

—People often replace the simple word
now
with something that sounds fancier to them. I don't know why they aren't satisfied with just plain “now.” They say “currently,” “presently” or “at this point in time.”

—It makes fussy grammarians angry but I've forgotten any difference I once knew between
will
and
shall
. The distinction is so fine and so difficult to discern that I don't try. To me “I shall remember this” is the same as “I will remember this.” The same goes for
should
and
would
.

—One of the few British words that American soldiers brought home to use was “queue” for “line.”

The other night I was watching Sam Donaldson, one of the best reporters in the news business, sitting in for Peter Jennings as anchorman on ABC's
World News Tonight
Sam looked kind of pleased all over with himself, as if he'd been promoted. Shame on you, Sam!

Everyone wants a promotion because the money's better, but there needs to be some restructuring done in most companies regarding which jobs are considered most important and which get the highest pay. The whole idea of being boss or manager or anchorman needs to be rethought.

Being boss, for example, is just another job, and while it may be important, it's not necessarily more important than the jobs of other employees who work for the same company. Give the boss three phone extensions, his name on the office door so he can show his kids when he brings them in, and let him have a reserved spot in the parking lot but don't pay him nine times what anyone else gets. I don't notice many companies closing down when the boss doesn't show up for work or when he takes his month's vacation in summer and his ten days in winter.

In television, good reporters like Sam Donaldson are often promoted and made something else. Everyone forgets that Dan Rather, Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw made their reputations as reporters. They were among the very best and, while I don't want to make any of them mad, because they're my friends, I liked all of them better as reporters than as anchormen. Those of us who are not anchormen have a secret disdain for anchormen even though we smile effusively when we pass them in the halls.

Making a good reporter an editor or an anchorman is like making a great chef the maître d' because he can make more money out front. Can't the networks find people who aren't good reporters to read the news? Getting facts and arranging them in an orderly way that will attract and then inform listeners has nothing to do with being able to read aloud. It takes ability to be an anchorman but it's a talent totally unrelated to a reporter's and a lesser one.

Even a lot of the television correspondents you're semifamiliar with are being turned into minianchormen and -women. Because their faces
and styles of speaking are recognizable since they've been on the air a lot, they're considered more valuable as on-camera personalities than as reporters.

Good reporting takes a lot of time, and if correspondents do it all themselves, they have less time to be on the air. More than ever, TV reporters work with so-called producers, who are the actual reporters. The producers go to the location of the story, check it out, get the facts, arrange interview schedules, get the camera crews and then call the correspondent to come in and do twelve seconds on camera and the narration for a two-minute report prepared from information supplied not by the original source, but by the producer. The chef is out of the kitchen again.