Not That You Asked (9780307822215) (5 page)

Getting their diplomas gives the graduates a feeling of success at having achieved their goal of four years as well as a sense of relief. They're wildly excited with anticipation of a future free of the artificial deadlines and work loads that school has imposed on them all their lives. It's fun to be with them on that day because their enthusiasm is infectious.

I've been to two graduations where the students should have been spanked instead of graduated. They turned what should have been a joyous, civilized event into a near-riot, yelling and screaming at inappropriate times, intruding on tradition and being generally badly behaved. They drank from whiskey bottles hidden beneath their black robes, sprayed champagne on everyone, threw bottles, seat cushions and parts of their clothing. I don't know why they wanted to ruin so important a day in their lives for themselves and for everyone else and I don't think the college administration should have stood for it.

One year I sat for two hours in cap and gown in a steady rain on the raised platform behind President James English as he handed out 516 diplomas and shook 516 wet hands at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

You might think it was a dreary experience but it was a wonderful one. Every face that came forward was a life about to be lived. I found myself guessing who'd be successful, who not, who happily married, who un. Why did this sweet young girl choose to come forward barefoot, this one in high-heeled black pumps?

Each graduate bounded forward with delight and enthusiasm to reach for the symbolic piece of paper. Yells and cheers came from the crowd as some of their classmates crossed the little stage. One big, awkward blond boy waved his diploma triumphantly and his classmates hooted. You just knew he was the one who almost didn't make it.

It wasn't always clear what evoked the shouts. The person onstage had been involved in some incident memorable only to the shouters. In their minds, the person made their class special—even though every class that ever graduated had one just like him.

Graduation ceremonies aren't what's wrong with the world.

The administration is asking Congress for $6 billion to build a fifty-two-mile tunnel in which to shoot atoms at each other. Two atoms (this is how I understand it) would be started from opposite ends of the tunnel. When they collided somewhere in the middle, the atoms would break apart and scientists would be able to find out what's inside. It seems like a lot of money to spend to break something.

The secretary of energy said the invention and construction of the world's largest research machine would be as scientifically significant as the manned landing on the moon in 1969. This would be damning a project with faint praise to a lot of Americans who can't remember exactly what practical results came from man's walk on the moon.

I'm reluctant to say this $6 billion project is a mistake because I don't understand its implications, but you always have to be suspicious of the people who are coming up with new things. The fact of the matter is, scientists and inventors invent a lot of things the world would be just as well off without and a better machine with which to break atoms might be one of them. For my own amusement, I've been making a list of unnecessary inventions that I've seen in my lifetime:

—Designer telephones in bright colors and strange shapes. Telephones don't seem to work noticeably better since they stopped making them all black and white and one style.

—Elevator music. It suggests all of us have to be entertained, amused or diverted from our own thoughts every minute of the day no matter what we're doing.

—Push-button controls on car radios. Turning two dials, one to find the station and a second to control the volume, was all we ever needed.

—Newspapers printed in color. A headline is a way of getting us to read a story by telling us, briefly, what it's about in an interesting way. It shouldn't be necessary to add color to the pictures or the type. “There it is, in black and white.”

—Froot Loops, bubble gum, cranapple juice, frozen waffles, Diet 7 Up.

—Spray paint in pressurized cans represents very little advance over a can of paint you pry the lid off and spread with a brush.

—Digital watches that can only tell us that it's 8:50, not ten of nine.

—The buzzers in cars that inform you that you haven't fastened your
seatbelt. What we need in a car is a buzzer that tells you where you put the keys.

—Designer jeans. Designers have added very little but price to blue jeans.

—Homogenized milk. There is a whole generation of people who don't know that, left alone, cream rises to the top.

—Cute sayings on license plates put there by state governments for promotional purposes. Maine is
VACATIONLAND
. Maine is also very cold in the winter, but the license plates don't say so.

—Remote-control television. The necessity for having to get up out of your chair and walk across the room to the television set made it more likely that you'd turn the thing off instead of switching from station to station all night, looking for something good that doesn't exist.

—Instant tea. All you do to make instant tea is put a spoonful in a cup and add hot water. All you do to make tea of tea that isn't instant is put a tea bag in a cup and add hot water.

All we can do is hope that this new $6 billion atom breaker-upper is more help to mankind than these items have been. If it's successful, maybe they could develop a machine that would hurl two Twinkies at each other at a billion miles an hour.

“I think we're going to see fantastic breakthroughs in aircraft technology in the next ten years or so,” says Jerry N. Hefner of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Advanced Vehicle Division.

A newspaper story I read recently says that, among other things, new designs could reduce the drag on airplanes by enough to save the airlines $10 billion in gas bills every year.

Sounds good, but don't wait until the airlines pass that savings on to you. I've learned not to get excited about stories that promise “breakthroughs.”

After reading that story my mind ran back to a newspaper article I'd read a long time ago so I went searching for it. The search took me almost all of Thursday but I found what I was looking for in an Associated Press story printed February 23, 1951.

“New strides toward the development of the first atom-powered airplane—a craft that might fly 80 times around the world on one pound of fuel—were disclosed today,” the story began.

“As the climax of four years of intensive research, the Air Force and the Atomic Energy Commission announced jointly that the first phase in the program to produce an atomic plane had now been completed.”

The next phase, the story said, was to be conducted by the General Electric Company at its Lockland, Ohio, plant.

Nineteen fifty-one? I thought to myself. That was thirty-eight years ago. I don't think I've ever ridden on a nuclear airplane and I know darn well they haven't developed an airplane that can fly eighty times around the world without stopping because they made that big deal about the
Voyager
, the plane that flew around it once without stopping. Maybe they're keeping it secret.

So I called General Electric to ask about the atom-powered airplane. When I mentioned the atom-powered airplane to a pleasant woman I talked to in the public relations office, she broke into gales of laughter.

She said she thought there was a model of the engine they worked on in their little museum upstairs but confessed she didn't really know much about it.

Next I called the air force. A Colonel Greer in public relations said he couldn't remember anything about it but he said he'd go to their historical section and see what he could find. That's where I stand on my report on atomic-powered airplanes … nowhere.

There must be a great breakthrough graveyard in the sky for new developments that sound good but never get beyond their one announcement. I remember one invention I looked forward to with great anticipation. On the cover of the last issue of
Collier's
magazine, there was a picture of a man standing on a small, round platform that could lift him off the ground and take him up and over anything for short distances.

Have you seen one of those in your hometown recently? They don't seem to be selling them in mine even though, back in 1956,
Collier's
promised we'd all have one pretty soon.

World's Fairs are a great place to see wonderful inventions you never see again in real life. When I was in high school I saw the “World of Tomorrow” at the 1939 World's Fair in New York. GE had a walking, talking robot that was going to take over a lot of dirty jobs for all of us in the future. In 1982 I saw another robot that was going to do all those jobs, at the World's Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee, but I don't notice a robot doing the dishes in our kitchen.

Maybe the most promised, least delivered technological improvement
around is the video telephone with which you could see the person you were talking with and be seen too. The first time I saw a demonstration of something called Phone-A-Vision was at another World's Fair, in 1964. It was right around the corner … and it's still around the same corner twenty-five years later.

The moral to the story is, when you read about a new invention, don't hold your breath until it's available.

To return or not to return, that is the question when it comes to class reunions.

This was a reunion year for both my college and high school classes and I attended both.

It was alternately great, terrible, exhilarating, depressing, fun and boring. If, as Thomas Wolfe wrote, “You can't go home again,” it is equally true that “You can't go back to school again.” At a reunion, we're all looking for something that is as gone as yesterday.

I was surprised, though, at how quickly old relationships, both good and bad, were reestablished. The classmates I hadn't liked much in school almost instantly irritated me again and I could see they felt the same hostility toward me. The years hadn't dissipated whatever it was in each of our personalities that rubbed the other the wrong way.

The good part was that when I met the people who had been friends in school, the warmth of our friendship was instantly renewed. It was sweet pleasure to be reminded of why I liked them so much.

You don't talk to anyone for long at a reunion. You envision spending hours reliving old times, but you don't. There is almost no time to listen to anyone else's life story or tell your own.

I saw Carl across the room and headed through the crowd to say hello. We laughed about the Latin class we both failed and then our conversation was interrupted by a classmate. We never talked again, and when I got into bed that night, I remembered that the last time I'd seen Carl was at an Eighth Air Force base in England in 1942, where he'd been a B-17 pilot. Two days later he'd been shot down and spent two years in a German prisoner camp. Such is the condensation of reunion conversations that it never came up.

There were students around, and they had a proprietary air that amused me. It was as though it were their school and we were intruders for the day. Those young students had no way of understanding that we knew the school as well as they did. I looked at the blackboards, the familiar cracks in the marble floors, the locker room, the stairways and a desk I'd sat at for three years and I smiled at the students. It was their turn to be young.

I talked to Walt. We sat next to each other in chapel because his last name began with
R
too. We had been friends but not close friends. He wasn't in my group, I guess you'd say.

“I never did much here,” he said. “I certainly didn't distinguish myself.”

It had never occurred to me before that he had thought that about himself when he was in school.

“What are you doing now?” I asked.

“I'm a heart surgeon practicing in Los Angeles,” he said.

It was one of the depressing moments. I realized how cruel and exclusive a small group of us had been. We thought of ourselves as the leaders and the doers, and as much as half the class was shut out simply because of some quirk of personality that made them less acceptable to other kids when they were young.

What business did we have shutting out of our group a fifteen-year-old boy with the ability inside him to become a heart surgeon?

I don't know whether I'll go to another reunion. Today I wouldn't but in five years I may. I like the continuity lifelong friendships provide but there is something artificial about the reunion setting.

Schools encourage graduates to return to their reunions because reunions generate the kind of enthusiasm for the school that induces alumni to give money. I was thinking that there are some other groups of people I've spent important parts of my life with who I'll never see again simply because there's nothing in it for the organizations to which we belonged. They have no interest in bringing us together and we wouldn't bother on our own.

Maybe just as well.

Well, it looks now as though it's going to be a race against time for those of us past forty years old to see whether we live forever. They keep chipping away at the things that are killing people and it looks as though there's a good chance they'll have everything licked in our lifetime.

The Food and Drug Administration announced that it has approved a new drug, lovastatin, that will lower our cholesterol level. Cholesterol is the one that clogs up your veins and arteries like rust in a pipe and produces heart attacks when the blood can't get through.

I read the headline on that story and went to the kitchen to get a bowl of ice cream, but when I came back to the living room to finish the story and eat the ice cream, I found that the medical experts were saying you should still keep your cholesterol level down for the drug to work effectively.