Out of My Mind (39 page)

What we all have to conclude when we vote is that the success of our country depends, not on any system, but on having honest, smart people running it. They may be there but they're hard to find among campaigning politicians.

Bill Gates is the richest man in the world. I wonder if he thinks about that in the middle of the night when he can't sleep because of worrying about something other than money?

Forbes
magazine, once owned by one of the richest men in the world, Malcolm Forbes, publishes as annual list of the richest people. About two years before he died, Malcolm Forbes invited me to have lunch
with him in the small dining room in the magazine's offices in New York. That's about as close as I've ever come to hanging out with someone really rich.

I have met seven of the 587 people on the Forbes list, including No. 1, Bill Gates, and I liked all of them. It's probably easier to like them if you don't have to do business with them. But considering that rich men are usually the bad guys in any movie they're in, they all seemed nice and normal to me. I don't know whether they're proud and pleased to be on the list or would prefer prosperous anonymity.

There are fifty-three women on the richest list, although some of those inherited their money from fathers or husbands. One of the great exceptions is J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books. (Her name is Joanne Kathleen Rowling. I never heard why she uses just her initials.) Her books have sold 250 million copies and, at about $I8 each, that begins to add up even without what she makes on the movies.

Eight of the ten richest people are American, including an incredible five Waltons of Arkansas and one from Texas, owners of the Wal-Mart stores. Forbes doesn't publish a list of the 587 poorest people in the world, although some of them probably live in Arkansas, too.

Next to us, Germany has the most people on the richest list. There are a surprising number of Russians and a lot of potentate types. (It is important to know that 1 billion is I,000 million, not merely 100 million.)

There are a lot of interesting things about rich people. For one thing, if a man is really rich, he doesn't carry much cash around in his pocket. You'd think he would but he doesn't. I guess if you know how much money you have, you don't have a whole lot. My rich friend Steve Slesinger would go into a restaurant he'd never been in before, order meals for four people and when the waiter came with the check he'd say, “I don't have any money. Send me a bill, will you please?” I was reaching for my wallet to see if I could help out, but the restaurants always accepted his request to bill him.

I grew up during the depth of the Depression and it has influenced my attitude toward money all my life—when I didn't have much and now that I have quite a bit. It was good for me. I'll drive several miles
out of my way to buy gas for a few cents less a gallon. I'm annoyed with grandchildren who go to the refrigerator, take out a soft drink, take a few gulps from the can or bottle and then leave the rest of it on the kitchen counter to die un-drunk.

The funny thing about my attitude toward money (when I step back and look at myself) is that I'm more careful with small amounts of money than with large amounts. It irritates me that women spend so much on shoes. I don't get used to how much my own grown children spend on things I'd do without. Emily stayed with us last weekend and did some shopping. Last night, I opened the refrigerator and found a pint of raspberries for which she paid $4.30.

I'll bet Bill Gates doesn't spend that kind of money on raspberries.

I save things. It comes from a time when we didn't have as much money as we needed. The Great Depression had its effect on me even though my father made $8,000 a year during the I930s, which was a lot in those days. That made me the rich kid on our block, but I was aware of my friends who were not so lucky. My bad years, during which I had my own personal depressions, were 1949 and 1956.

My car takes 89 octane gas. When 87 octane gas costs $3.25 a gallon, 89 octane costs $3.39 and 93 octane costs $3.5I, I sometimes buy five gallons of 87 octane and five gallons of 93 octane which gives me ten gallons of 90 octane gas at about $3.38 a gallon.

Money is not the only thing I save. I save things. I save any piece of paper I've written on. It's the writing, not the paper that I'm saving. I dream of immortality for anything I write, even if it's drivel. I save elastic bands, paper clips, coffee cans and big envelopes that came with something in them which I threw out.

Why do we throw out perfectly good manila envelopes that have been used once? There are convenient labels with glue that easily conceal
any previous address and a once-mailed envelope is almost as good as new.

I refold and save big, brown paper bags, cardboard boxes, empty Altoid cans and old jelly jars with screw tops. I keep the boxes new shoes come in—sometimes for longer than I keep the shoes.

Our refrigerator is loaded with things I've kept—commonly known as leftovers. I spend generously on airtight plastic bags and the freezer contains a treasure trove of half-eaten meals. More than a year ago, my stingy little heart almost broke when a storm caused a power shortage that warmed the contents of our refrigerator and turned all the good things stored inside into a compost heap fit for nothing but the garbage pail. Never mind the leftovers I even lost an unopened pound of butter.

It is inconsistent, even paradoxical, that while I save pennies to the point of being cheap, I almost always buy the most expensive brand, style or kind of anything. I equate high price with quality, even though this isn't always the case. Poor people pay the most for the worst. If there are two items that appear to be similar but one costs several dollars more, I buy that one. A high price is to me is a guarantee that it's best. I carry this belief to ridiculous lengths. If a store had identical pairs of socks, one priced at $6 and the other at $8, I'd pay the $8 because of my unfounded conviction that expensive is better.

Even though I buy expensive things, I save so much, I think I'm gaining on them.

One of the things I wish we'd get over is the idea that someone who works with his hands and does what is known as manual labor cannot possibly have a good education. There has always been a vague stigma attached to those who work with their hands.

Because the time seems to be coming, or may already have arrived, when plumbers, house painters, carpenters, mechanics, electricians and
bricklayers make more than teachers, sales clerks, poets, editors or insurance salesmen. Then the social distinctions will probably disappear.

We have a great need for more people who know how to do something more important than selling something. We have to encourage more bright young people with an education to get into the hands-on jobs. Putting a new bedroom over the garage takes as much brains as managing an office payroll.

Anyone who owns a home has to laugh when someone talks about not being able to find work. The hard job for a homeowner is finding anyone to pay who knows how to do anything. If someone can't get a job, the chances are he or she is looking for the wrong job. If more people knew how to do what we all need to have done, there wouldn't be any unemployment. More English majors ought to buy themselves a tall ladder in addition to a computer when they graduate from college and learn how to fix a leaky roof. They can read Shakespeare or browse the Internet when they get home at night.

There are I0,000 little jobs that are short of people who know how to do them. The gutters on the roof by our kitchen door leak and it's hard to find anyone to fix them. I have a suit sitting in my closet because I caught the pocket on a doorknob and tore it. It's easier to buy a new suit than to find a tailor. The gas cap on my new car won't stay closed. When I took it to the dealer, there was an attendant outside showing me where to get in a line of fifteen cars waiting to be checked in before they were serviced.

The people who know how to do anything are all so busy they can't take a small job. Real estate agents ready to sell you a house are more numerous than people who fix gutters. No one wants to repair anything. Throw it away and buy a new one. There's no shortage of jobs. There's a shortage of people willing and able to do them.

I don't even know what happened to kids who used to make pocket money after school cutting grass in the summer, raking leaves in the fall and shoveling snow in the winter. They don't come to our front door looking for work. I guess they're all home now on the Internet accomplishing nothing.

Our inventors, in collaboration with our manufacturers, have produced a great number of labor-saving machines, tools and other devices. But no machine is ever going to replace the guy who has a capable pair of hands and knows how to use them. Machines produce new things but they aren't good at fixing old ones because every fix-it job is different. A machine doesn't know how to handle a problem it has never seen before. That's why there's never going to be a time when we don't need people who know how and are willing to work with their hands.

There is no meter, no mechanical gauge by which we can judge satisfaction, but it seems certain that it is as satisfying to complete a physical job as a mental one.

We need different qualities in different people. We need more plumbers, carpenters, mechanics and electricians than we need poets, but we need poets, too. From the poetry you see in periodicals, it appears to me as if there are more bad poets than there are bad electricians or bad carpenters. I wish we could encourage the bad poets to turn their attention to fixing leaky toilets or cutting broken limbs off high up places in big trees on our front lawns.

The free enterprise system may be best but it sure is heartless.

Like most Americans, I enjoy spending some of my easy-earned money going to the store to buy something I don't need. It's one of life's simple pleasures and a form of entertainment.

When I was a small boy, my mother often sent me to Evans grocery store around the corner from our house. Customers didn't wander through the store and pick what items they wanted off the shelves themselves. You told Frank Evans what you wanted and he got it for you. If it was on a high shelf, he used the long stick with pincers on the end to reach up and bring it down.

Once a month, we got a bill and my mother sent me to the store with a check. I liked doing it because when I got there, Mr. Evans always gave me a Baby Ruth or a Mars Bar.

Evans' store is long gone, but more than twenty years ago, all the grocery stores I shopped in began to change. Year after year, the big ones were taken over by something bigger. And then the bigger ones were taken over by something bigger still.

There are still a few high-priced little food stores where you can pay extra in exchange for not having to stand in the long line at the checkout counter in the supermarket.

After the grocery stores were gobbled up, locally owned drugstores started to go. Growing up, I walked the two blocks to Graves drugstore, although I more often bought ice cream than drugs. Drugstores all sold ice cream. They had counters with stools where you could sit and sip soda. They had a few small, round, white tables with three-legged wire chairs, which were triangular so that four of them fit together, like pieces of a cut pie, under the table.

If my mother sent me to buy something like cough syrup, I went to the back of the store where Mr. Graves worked in the white smock that distinguished him as the druggist. He must have made more on ice cream than on drugs.

One by one, drugstores like Graves were eaten alive by Duane Reade, Rite Aid, CVS and Walgreens.

Like most communities, we no longer have our own hometown drugstore. For ice cream, now we have to go to an ice cream store.

The owners of bookstores were special. Invariably, Mr. Clapp had read the book we came to buy and was explicit about its virtues. Bookstore owners were not only sellers of books, they were lovers of them. Borders and Barnes & Noble have driven them out. Clerks now are most familiar with the price of a book.

And what of giants like Home Depot? They have to mind their backs because COSTCO has come. COSTCO has most of what ShopRite, Rite Aid, Borders and Home Depot has—and for less.

What do I do as a loyal customer of the local grocery store, the hometown druggist, the bookstore and the handy hardware store? Why, I go to COSTCO, which is bigger and cheaper than any of them. If I want a diamond ring, a lawn mower or a bag of potato chips, I can get it there.

I just have to keep in mind that it's wholesale and whatever I get I have to buy twelve of.

Our government is collecting something like 2 trillion dollars from us in taxes this year. There are a thousand billion in a trillion, and a thousand million in a billion. Two trillion has 12 zeroes. It looks like this: $2,000,000,000,000.

I don't object to that figure except I know darn well Congress ends up spilling about a quarter of the money. They sneak in riders to bills.

The riders are designed to bring money into the district that elected the member proposing them. One member of Congress will initiate a perfectly sensible bill, then another congressman will attach some ridiculous paragraph that brings boondoggle money into his or her district. Congress passes the bill, rider and all, because no one wants to vote against the good parts of it.

For several years now, Congress has said it was trying to simplify our tax laws, but it has not. I wanted to look at some of those laws, so I borrowed the two-volume “Internal Revenue Code” from an accountant I pay to make out my tax form. There are 7,283 pages of tax laws, and I don't think the person who wrote them could explain what most of them mean.