Not That You Asked (9780307822215) (30 page)

When you consider all the groups of people who don't get along with each other in this country, it's surprising that the country works at all. You'd think we might have a Beirut or a Belfast here.

Blacks and whites, for example, don't get along. Our growing Hispanic population is alienated from both blacks and whites. There's growing friction between the young and the old. In small towns the Baptists don't have much to do with the Methodists and neither of them speak often to the Catholics. Southerners resent Northerners, and in every major city in the country there are enclaves of Italians, Chinese, Germans and Vietnamese who don't mingle much with anyone who doesn't speak their language. The farmers are mad at everyone, and doctors and lawyers aren't looking each other in the eye on the street because of all the malpractice practice.

Just when I get most depressed about all this, something happens to revive my confidence in the goodness of people, the greatness of our country and our common interest in things that are right.

Last Tuesday after work, I stopped by the Whitney Museum in New York City because there was an exhibition of Shaker furniture that I'd been wanting to see. It had been there for several months and was closing soon. I thought I'd be wandering around the museum more or less alone. It wasn't as if the Shakers were a rock group.

The Shakers were a religious sect of no more than six thousand people who lived in a handful of eastern communities in the 1800s. Not many groups that small have made such a lasting impression on some area of our culture.

Shaker furniture is some of the simplest, most interesting and graceful ever designed. The Shakers didn't selfconsciously set out to design anything. Design grew out of necessity. They made pieces of furniture and tools that did what they needed to have done. It wasn't design, the way we talk about design in overblown terms today. It wasn't built to sell—it was built to use.

Their furniture is beautiful because it is so instantly recognizable as useful. A small sewing table of cherry provides a good work space and it has a curly maple front edge an inch wide that is a yardstick. A Shaker woman measuring a piece of cloth never had to move. The yardstick
is its own decoration. They applied nothing to furniture that was merely decorative. If Shakers had built cars, they wouldn't have put chrome on them.

Shaker craftsmen didn't turn out furniture to be bought by strangers and fitted into a strange place in a strange home, either. No two pieces of Shaker furniture are alike because each was built for a specific purpose to be put in a specific place.

You wouldn't think a wheelbarrow could be a work of art, but the museum displayed a Shaker wheelbarrow that would compete for any crowd's attention if there were a Rembrandt hanging next to it.

Impressed as I was with the Shaker furniture, I was even more impressed with the people who had come to the museum to see it. It is a small, unpretentious exhibit and yet here, on a hot summer night, several hundred Americans … Presbyterian, Chinese, black, white, lawyer, doctor, young, old … crowded into the Whitney Museum to stare thoughtfully at and enjoy, with a common sense of appreciation, the work of people from another age who had done something good.

In the subways beneath the same street, there was filth. At the very moment people gazed on a Shaker chest made of maple, cherry and butternut, there might have been a mugging in a nearby street, but here, in this one civilized place, there was evidence enough of intelligence, humor, compassion and respect for other human beings to sustain anyone's belief in the fundamental goodness of people for a long time.

It was exhilarating. The world, I thought, is not going to hell after all.

PLACES
 

The Living City

It's kind of nice that most Americans who live in a city are proud of it. They like their city and they want the rest of the world to like it too. New York is the only exception to this.

If you visit any city for a few days, you're left with an impression of what it's like and whether to turn left or right in a few places, but your impression probably doesn't have much to do with what the city is really like.

I have pleasant impressions of dozens of cities and unpleasant impressions of others but my opinions come from events or sights that were probably not typical of the place. Maybe I had a terrible breakfast in the hotel I stayed at that turned me against the city; maybe I asked directions from a stranger who was so pleasant and helpful that I went home thinking everyone in that city was the same way.

This comes to mind today because I just spent two days in Boston. I was reminded what a good place Boston would be to live in. A good city has a core where there are lots of people doing different things, and Boston's core is centered around the rebuilt Quincy Market downtown. (I'd be more comfortable if I was certain how to pronounce their historic old “Faneuil Hall.”)

I could live happily in Boston, San Diego, Seattle, Pittsburgh, San Antonio or Madison, Wisconsin. There are some cities you couldn't make me live in but I'm not going to mention them in case a newspaper in one of those cities runs my column. Why go out of my way to anger a space salesman?

Here are some things for anyone thinking of moving to a city to look for:

—Check to see if the downtown parts of the city close up and move to the suburbs at 5:30
P.M.
You want a city where there are still people on the streets after dark.

—The presence of one or more colleges is a good sign. You can't beat having a good educational institution in town for livening up the city.

—If the biggest cultural event of the winter season is the basketball game with the traditional rival, you might want to have second thoughts about moving there.

—The number and importance of country clubs is something to watch for. If everyone seems to belong to one, don't move there.

—Be wary of a town that allows diagonal parking.

—Don't move to a city in which the best restaurant is in a hotel.

—Watch out if there are too many churches and not many bookstores.

—If the mayor has been in office more than eight years, consider another city.

—Don't move to a place whose principal shopping center is called “The Miracle Mile.”

—Make certain the railroad station hasn't been turned into a boutique.

—There should be at least one good hotel that isn't part of a big chain.

—It's not a good sign if all the police are in cars and none are walking the streets.

—Look for a bridge that leads into the main part of town. Bridges are a good sign. A bridge often means the place was worth going to some trouble to get to.

—Check to see how many intersections have signs reading
NO RIGHT TURN ON RED
.

—Make sure there's at least one bakery that bakes good bread.

—Perfect symmetry in the layout of the streets is not good. A city should be a little irregular, suggesting that its growth was somewhat haphazard.

—There should be at least one good news store that's open twenty-four hours a day.

—Make sure the city has a good newspaper. It's even better if it has two newspapers, one of which you hate.

—Don't dismiss a city that has a dishonest local government. Some of them are interesting.

—It's not a major city if you can see the water tower with the city's name on it from the center of town.

It's about time the United States gave a party for Canada.

No country in the world has a better neighbor than the United States has in Canada and our friends up there are having sort of a tough time. The Canadian dollar is worth about 72 cents, unemployment is high and Canada isn't getting any favorable mentions for paying people millions of dollars to lobby for them in this country.

It would be a good time to do something nice for Canada to let them know how much we appreciate their good neighborliness. For too long now, we've taken Canada for granted. Just look at some of the facts of our friendship:

—We share the longest undefended border between two countries in the world, 5,500 miles long and not a military weapon pointed in either direction.

—There are 70 million border crossings a year. Every once in a while a border guard will look in the trunk of a car to see if someone is smuggling something or hiding a criminal but most of the 70 million people go without much checking.

—We are each other's best customers. Canada sells us two thirds of everything it exports and we sell more stuff to Canada than to any other country. Canada buys twice as much from us as Japan does.

—I hadn't realized, before I looked it up just now, that Canada is bigger than the United States. It's close, but Canada has 3,849,670 square miles and the United States has 3,623,420.

The trouble with that figure is that a lot of Canada's land isn't usable. Most of the 25 million Canadians live in the narrow strip just above our border because if they go much farther north it's simply too cold to live in the winter. They cuddle up to us for warmth. There are places in Maine where the border with Canada is all but invisible. You can enter Canada without knowing it on a lot of dirt roads.

As a result of the way its population is distributed, a lot of Canadians have more in common with their American neighbors to the immediate south than to other Canadians a couple of thousand miles away to the east or west. For instance, Windsor, Ontario, is all tied up with Detroit because it's so close. The people from Windsor probably don't know
any more about Canadians from Saskatchewan than the people from Detroit do.

For an American to go to Canada or for a Canadian to come to the United States isn't like going to a foreign country. It simply isn't any big deal. Canada gets so cold that a million Canadians head for Florida for some part of every winter and at least that many American tourists go to some part of Canada in the summer.

It must be hard for Canadians not to resent us sometimes. You can tell they're a little nervous about the possibility of having their economy, their language, their traditions and their culture flooded out by ours. How would we feel if we lived in the shadow of this benevolent giant? How would we feel if we were swamped every day with books, movies and television from the country next door?

On the other hand, Canada is sitting pretty. It knows no bully can come along and fool with it while it has this big strong neighbor on its side. Canada also has the luxury of taking the best the United States has to offer in culture and products and rejecting the bad things it doesn't want from us. In that sense, Canadians live in the best of two worlds.

If you think you know Canada, try naming their states … which they call provinces. I'm cheating. I'm looking in the almanac: Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, Quebec and Saskatchewan.

Good names and I say, “Hurray for our friends, the Canadians.”

Some other time I want to talk to you about Mexico.

Sugar City is a little east of Ordway and north of Rocky Ford, Colorado. Otherwise, it's out in the middle of miles and miles of not much of anything in the plains of southeastern Colorado.

If Sugar City were a patient in a hospital, doctors would list it as critical. The patient on the critical list is the American farmer and if the farmer goes, so will the hundreds of little farm towns like this one.

We might as well face the sad fact that the farmer, whom we always have known and admired, is a disappearing breed.

Every farmer has a theory about what's wrong. There's something
true about every theory but the problem is bigger than any one of them, and none of the theories matter anyway. All that matters is that most of the farmers are going broke. They're going to have to abandon their farms. There's no sense saying they'll have to sell their farms because there are no buyers.