Not That You Asked (9780307822215) (37 page)

Crime and Punishment
by Dostoyevsky. I don't really want to read this book but I'm tired of feeling guilty for not having read it every time it's mentioned by my intellectual friends.

War and Peace
by Tolstoy. See reason above.

The Bible. I get into a lot of arguments, and having read the Bible thoroughly would help me win more often. I've heard there are a lot of good parts in it too. I've talked to people who claim to have read the Bible but I've never talked to anyone who convinced me they'd really read and understood it all.

On the Origin of Species
by Charles Darwin. It seems as though everyone should have read a book as important as this one.

Don Juan
by Lord Byron. I read this in college and was surprised to find out how good it was. I loved it. It was so interesting and complex that I'd like to read it again.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
. I'll pick this up toward the end of the evening when I'm winding down and want to relax and have a little fun.

The Sun Also Rises
. I'm also ashamed of never having read Hemingway's classic.

Finnegans Wake
by James Joyce. I couldn't make heads or tails out of this when I tried it twenty years ago and I'd like to try again.

Word for Word
. This is the name of the book I wrote in 1986. I'd like to have a copy of it in my cell just to give me a little class with the guards.

By the end of my imaginary year in prison, I will have lost thirty-seven pounds because the food was so bad; I'll have read nine important books and I'll have written the novel and the play I've been meaning to get at.

Now, if I can only think of some nice, harmless crime to commit that will get me a year in the prison of my dreams.

While we're thinking about it, this might be a good time to make some Christmas resolutions for the coming years. Here are some proposals:

—Ban all recorded Christmas music in stores. Christmas music is too good to be used commercially. I sometimes have to flee a store and resume shopping at a later time because I can no longer take the repetitious sounds. It seems as though the people who work in those stores where the same recorded Christmas music is recycled time after time after time all day long could be driven crazy.

If a store had a band of school kids singing or live musicians playing, this would be perfectly acceptable. Some exceptions might be made for a store that didn't replay the same song more than twice a day.

—Appoint an inspector general of Santa Clauses. He would have the authority to ban all seedy Santa Clauses. Every Santa Claus would have to look right and sound right.

Department-store Santa Clauses have been pretty good over the years. The inspector would see to it that all Santas met this standard.

—Prohibit all Christmas advertising before Thanksgiving. Someone is always jumping the gun and filling a store window with Christmas presents in early November. They should be enjoined.

Most good stores voluntarily hold off until after Thanksgiving. It isn't fair to them when the schlock merchants start pushing too early.

—Stop fly-by-night Christmas-tree entrepreneurs who often steal the trees, bring them to town in a rented truck and set themselves up in an empty lot. They undercut the responsible places that sell Christmas trees from the same location year after year.

Every year tens of thousands of trees are cut and brought to town. When they don't sell, they're dragged to the local dump or burned on the spot. Any place that sells Christmas trees should have to pay a $5 fee for each tree they have left over by Christmas morning. There's no sadder sight than a lot full of unsold Christmas trees the day after Christmas … trees whose lives were shortened unnecessarily.

—Make it against the law to use Christmas music in any television commercial or newspaper advertisement. Santa Claus was never meant
to be a salesman; it lessens his believability when he's used as a symbol for kids.

—Encourage recipients of gifts to give those gifts a chance before rushing the day after Christmas to return them to the store from which they were bought. Not liking a gift is not sufficient reason to return it. That's between the giver and the receiver. If it doesn't fit or you already have one, those are legitimate grounds for returning a gift.

—Make it mandatory that every Christmas card mailed out has both the first and last name of the sender. It never seems to occur to people that any one of us might know two or more people named Edith, George or Linda. There's nothing more frustrating than getting a Christmas card and not knowing who it's from.

—Ensure that every major religion in America finds a way to make Christmas its own. There is no other time of year during which so many people feel so good and so friendly toward so many other people. The spirit of Christmas exceeds the narrow beliefs of any one religion.

A few Christmas cards are still drifting in from friends who didn't get at sending them out until it was too late. There's just so much you can expect from the post office. I understand these cards because that's when we send ours out.

I like sending and receiving Christmas cards but there are certain things about the tradition that make me uncomfortable. For example, I wish I had the names and addresses of all the good old friends I ever had so I could send them cards. Someone ought to devise a system that would make it easier for all of us to keep track of old friends when our paths diverge.

There are eight or ten categories of Christmas cards.

Christmas cards are a wonderfully friendly tradition. I hope greeting-card manufacturers don't ruin the idea. Anytime there's money involved, someone usually carries the idea too far.

It's still only May but there are harbingers of heat in the air. (
Harbinger
isn't my kind of word. It sounds like it's a bird. A harbinger is a pretty vague thing and I wish I'd never used it but you know what I mean.)

Harbingers or no, I am one of the world's great haters of hot days. Some people hate cigarette smoke, some can't stand yogurt and others spend their time protesting against companies that do business with South Africa. I hate heat. When it's hot, all I want to do is lie down.

I am not alone. There is no question that the whole human race gets less done where the temperature is regularly above 80 degrees. Look at the world and see where most good things have been accomplished. In Pago Pago? In Tahiti? In Calcutta or the Philippines? They may be nice places to visit but for the men and women who have advanced our civilization, look toward countries with temperate climates. Heat saps ambition.

In the winter a lot of people go to Florida, Arizona, New Mexico and Southern California for the weather. I understand that. It can be very pleasant. What I don't understand is why those places don't empty out about now. I'm surprised some parts of the South don't have to hire guards to patrol their streets in the summer because all the residents have left to escape the heat. Why don't people head for Labrador, Iceland and Greenland in the summer the way they go to Florida in the winter?

There are so many reasons I hate the heat, I can hardly count the ways.

First, I don't like feeling sorry for people, but when it's hot I can't help it. I feel sorry for the policemen out there all day. I don't like seeing street-repair and utility crews digging in the broiling sun. I feel sorry for everyone who can't live in air-conditioned comfort on a hot day.

I'm even more uncomfortable watching how miserable dogs and horses are in the heat. Panting may be a dog's way of perspiring but it doesn't seem to work very well at cooling them down. It makes any caring human uneasy to be in the presence of a panting dog.

I even feel sorry for my car when I have to park it out in the open where I know it will be sitting in the hot sun all day.

There seems to be something basically wrong and counterproductive about having the air-conditioning unit of a car cooped up under the hood of a hot engine.

Air-conditioning itself, essential though it is, is not really lovable. In restaurants you sit where it hits you in the back of the neck and at home you bought a unit that's a little too small to do the job right. And then there's something pervasively unpleasant about the atmosphere in an air-conditioned room. You feel you're breathing old, canned air that has been previously breathed by someone else before it was chilled and pushed out into the room again. After a day in an air-conditioned office, you have a vaguely uneasy feeling somewhere in between a headache and a cold.

Clothes are a terrible problem in the summer heat. My clothes all seem smaller, tighter and less comfortable in hot weather. I wear lightweight clothes all winter and, as a result, don't have much to shift down to when summer comes. Hats shade your head from the sun but they increase the temperature of your head under them, so I usually discard a hat after a short time.

The most idiotic clothing custom in the whole civilized world is that of a man tying a piece of cloth around his neck and knotting it at the throat to make a necktie.

If daytime heat is ever tolerable, nighttime heat never is. I'd like it if I never had to sleep without a blanket again in my life. Beds should be made so that on hot nights we could sleep on firm nets allowing the air to circulate around our bodies. A mattress is like having a six-inch blanket under you.

The temperature reached 90 degrees in a lot of places last week. That's the harbinger I mentioned. I personally hope for a cold, wet summer.

It's wonderful having a summer house to retire to for vacation. If we didn't have a summer house, I wouldn't be having all this fun. For example, yesterday, when I made the mistake of turning on the toaster while someone was using the iron in the next room, it blew a fuse in the box in the cellar. It's a cellar; it isn't a basement. You have to go outside to get to it.

We all head for water on vacation so you can probably imagine what a joy it was for me when I opened the doors over the stone steps leading into the cellar and saw five inches of water down there. The fuse box is at the other side of the oil burner, fifteen feet from the steps. I don't know much about electricity, but I know enough not to wade into five inches of water to do any electrical work. I didn't change the fuse.

I don't want to go into the unpleasant details, but I don't want to leave you with the impression this was spring water in the cellar, either. It had backed up from a clogged pipe leading to the septic tank.

Unclogging the line leading to the septic tank isn't even half the fun I've had on my vacation. On my first day back on the tennis court, I made a clumsy move, tripped and came down with my full weight on my ankle in a turned position. It's as much fun as slamming your finger in a car door.

Then I've been having a high old time meeting people at the Albany Airport thirty miles away too. Martha and Leo were due from Washington at 2:30 on a USAir flight for the July Fourth weekend. It's an hour's drive from here to the airport, so I started at 1:30. It's also an hour's flight from Washington to Albany. When I got to the airport, USAir said the flight hadn't left National Airport in Washington yet. The flight was two hours and twelve minutes late.