Out of My Mind (34 page)

As I lay in the downstairs bedroom with my grossly distended right leg, which Cecile had covered with an ice bag, someone called the local rescue crew and, on Christmas Day they arrived in minutes. It was small-town America at its best, ready to help a neighbor who needed it. The trained medic looked at my turgid leg, now twice its normal size and turning black, and announced he was calling the ambulance to take me to the Albany Medical Center thirty-five miles away. Brian and Martha followed in Emily's Subaru down the treacherous mountain road to the hospital.

If every visit to a hospital was as good as this one, I'd go more often. Three doctors X-rayed me, poked and prodded my leg and determined nothing was broken. They warned that I'd have severe pain in the night, but by 7:30 I was released. Without the guiding ambulance taillights, we started the thirty-five-mile trip back up the mountain in nearly impossible driving conditions.

If Brian wasn't an ABC News correspondent, he could get work as a truck driver. Feeling his way along the road, sometimes at 5 mph an hour with his nose just inches from the windshield, he got us home by 10 P.M. It's a humbling experience to have a son do something you could not have done.

By cell phone, we had insisted the rest of the family go ahead with Christmas dinner. When we arrived, we were served ours in style at a small table set up in the living room in front of the fireplace, surrounded by family members alternately telling me to keep my leg up and making rude remarks about the wisdom of going for the newspaper.

At midnight, we all said “Merry Christmas” one last time and I took my aching but unbroken leg to bed.

I never did read the newspaper.

We were invited by the producers of a Broadway show to a party in a New York City restaurant that was not really big enough to hold all the people they had asked to come. It was hard to talk to anyone and my mind slipped into its writing mode. I got thinking about party conversations.

The first person I met was a big, friendly guy who seemed to know me, although I didn't seem to know him. We shook hands and he started talking about the show. I quickly realized he was one of those people who stand too close to whoever they're talking to. He kept leaning forward to emphasize a word until his nose was inches from mine.

I tried to edge away, but every time I took half a step back, he took a full step forward. As a defense, I extended my left leg in front of me and leaned way back on my right leg. He leaned forward. The next person I met had a familiar conversational style. He repeated himself. He didn't think he'd made himself clear the first time, so he rephrased his statement and said it again: “This is a mess in Iraq. We got ourselves in a real mess over there. We never shoulda got in this mess.”

There are other people who end almost everything they say with a question and insist on an answer. “Don't you think that's true?” “Do you agree with me on that?” “You know what I mean?” Yes, I know what you mean. Now can I go and talk to someone who doesn't ask a lot of dumb questions?

Several times a year, we go to some event in a hotel ballroom where they're giving awards and they have an orchestra on stage. There may be people at your table you'd like to talk to, but conversation is impossible. I don't know why orchestras don't understand that no one wants to hear them play loud music incessantly. We not only don't want it loud, we want them to stop playing altogether once in a while and give us some silence so we can chat.

There was no orchestra at the New York party, but I still had trouble talking to several people. One man I know only because he's so rich that
his name appears in the newspaper regularly, greeted me in a friendly way. We shook hands and he said something. It may have been a question but I couldn't hear it. He always mumbles. If you're rich, you don't have to talk loud to get people to listen to you. I always think that what someone says quietly is more important than what someone else shouts.

When I noticed that this quiet-talker had stopped because I didn't see his lips moving, I leaned forward and said, “I'm sorry, I didn't hear what you said.”

He repeated it but I couldn't hear him the second time, either. There are just so many times you can rephrase, “What?” so I just smiled and nodded. I hope I shouldn't have shook my head in the “no” gesture. I had briefly considered several responses to what I couldn't hear. “Very much,” I could have said if I thought he was asking if I enjoyed the show. Or I could have said, “
60 Minutes”
if I thought he was asking where I worked. “Andrew, but people call me Andy,” if it was my name he might have been asking for.

If I had to write down everything I heard in the two hours we spent at the party, I wouldn't be able to come up with two sentences.

Often about 5:30 in the afternoon, I sit at my desk and try to remember where the day went.

I usually go to bed by I0:30 P.M. because I get up early. I don't know how anyone with a job watches Letterman or Jay Leno. My alarm is set for 5:27 A.M., but I wake up before that and turn it off. That 's about seven hours. Spending a third of the day sleeping seems like too much.

I'm in the bathroom for maybe fifteen minutes. I shave with an electric razor. I used to shower before I shaved, but I read where a beard cuts better if it isn't soft, so now I shave first.

My dermatologist said you shouldn't use real hot water and you shouldn't stay under it for long so I don't linger. I dress in five minutes.

It takes me an hour getting to and from work every day. I think or listen to the radio. You can't do both. Driving home, I listen to two men who do a terrible sports show. They are so annoying that hating them makes the time pass faster.

I estimate that I spend about an hour and fifteen minutes eating on an average day.

I make coffee in the office in the morning and have a grapefruit at my desk but it takes only ten minutes. The same with lunch. I hardly ever go out. In the evening after I get home at six, we spend a pleasant hour having a drink and watching television news.

We have a dining room but don't eat in it more than ten times a year. We eat in the kitchen or the living room. When I get dinner, doing the dishes takes longer. I figure an hour for dinner and cleanup. Dinner in a good restaurant takes longer, but we don't eat out often.

After dinner, I read the parts of the paper missed in the morning. Someone should publish a digest of the morning newspaper. There's too much in it.

I watch some television at night. I'll assign an hour for that. You can do two things at once if one of them is television, so I go through a pile of mail while I'm watching, separating the wheat from the chaff. It's mostly chaff.

Everyone complains about television but there's often more I'd like to see than there's time to watch.

The telephone both saves time and wastes time. There are people who enjoy talking on the phone but I'm not one of them. I'm not lonesome. Even so, I suppose I spend half an hour a day on twenty calls. I talk to one or more of our four kids every day.

Most of the day, I sit at my keyboard, writing. I write quickly but hardly ever get it right the first time and usually have to do it over, so it's a slow process. I start to write a lot of things that don't work out too, so I'm at it at least five hours a day. People ask me how long it takes me to write
my newspaper column and my
60 Minutes
comments. I always tell them if it's any good, it doesn't take long but if it isn't good, it takes all day.

I waste time. I must waste at least an hour a day pretending I'm doing something necessary that isn't. Instead of working, I'll clean out a desk drawer, rearrange the bookshelves or wash the car. It's the little time that's hard to count. The elevators in the building where I work are slow. I wait ten minutes a day. Friends drop in and we talk. I wait in line at the store. I decide to cut my fingernails. I sit and stare.

Now, all that comes to a little over nineteen hours. What I want to know is, what did I do with those five missing hours?

Rummaging through a box of odd bits and pieces of paper I've saved, I came across a column by Dick Burdette in a yellowing old clipping from a newspaper. The column is headlined, “These are a few of my favorite things.” I don't want to steal his column or lose my image as a complainer so I'll go in the other direction. Here are a few of my least favorite things:

My life is one of unread books. I don't have the time or space to name all the books I have not read. In recent years, I have overcome the shame I once felt when asked if I'd read something and had to answer “No,” by converting my shame into pride. When asked now if I've read
The Da Vinci Code
for example, I say, “No, I never read novels. I like my own real life too much to want to be transported into someone else's fictitious world.”

This is not really an intellectual answer to the question but it sounds thoughtful if you don't think about it and people nod. It is true, too, that I never read fiction. I started not reading fiction in about the ninth grade when an English teacher assigned our class the novel
Lorna Doone
I got away with not reading “Lorna Doone” by reading a brief resume of it and have never felt uneducated for having skipped it. I have plans to read
Silas Marner
when I get on in years.

Over the years, I have broken my rule about fiction ten times. I read
Slaughterhouse Five
because Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote it, is a friend of mine and I didn't want to have it come out inadvertently, when we were talking, that I was ignorant of his masterpiece. I have not read
A Farewell to Arms
or
The Sun Also Rises
by Ernest Hemingway, because I knew Hemingway, too, and thought he was a boob.

Putting my mind to fiction I have read, I come up with ten great books:
Lord of the Flies
,
Heart of Darkness
,
Death Comes for the Archbishop
,
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
.
Winesburg, Ohio
,
Darkness at Noon
,
Brave New World
,
The Catcher in the Rye
,
From Here to Eternity
and
Lolita
. I should really leave out
Lolita
because I read that years ago as a dirty book, not as literature, although it's both. Half of those titles were assigned by a teacher when I was in high school or college.

Reading fiction is a form of entertainment. You read nonfiction for information. Someone famous said that those who read nonfiction read to remember, and those who read novels, read to forget. I read the newspaper or a magazine for about an hour a day. That seems like as much time as I should spend on someone else's words.

Not reading novels doesn't make me special. There are something like 290 million Americans, and a popular book like Tom Wolfe's
I Am Charlotte Simmons
may sell 400,000 copies. That means about one of every 725 Americans bought a copy. I'm one of the ones who don't read bestselling novels, so I'm not alone. I'm being generous, too, suggesting that everyone who buys a book reads the book. I suspect that a lot more books are bought than read.