Out of My Mind (4 page)

Sure, we have it better. Thomas Edison's light bulb turns night to day with a flip of the switch. We read the newspaper and watch what went on in the world on a picture box across from our chair. We are entertained, enlightened. If we don't like what we see, we can change what we're watching without moving any more than a finger.

We have done an amazing job delivering clean water and electrical power into our homes through unseen pipes and wires. Our waste is spirited away.

Houses that were once warmed in freezing winter weather by the spotty heat thrown off by wood-burning fireplaces are evenly heated by oil, electricity or coal.

I often look at old buildings in New York City that are five and six stories high. Someone had to live on the top floor a hundred years ago. The only way to get to the upper floors before elevators were invented in 1852 was to walk up carrying what you needed. In summer heat, a top floor apartment without air conditioning (invented recently in 1911) often reached 120.

We recently celebrated the 100th anniversary of flight. Travel that once took days or months by foot, horse-drawn carriage or sailing ship, now takes a small part of one day. Great as the Wright Brothers invention has been in providing us with mobility, airplanes do not compare with automobiles in the convenience they provide us moving around our own personal little world every day.

Traveling farther and more often doesn't necessarily add to our lives, but travel helps us get to know more about how others live.

Inventions have created a world our grandparents and great-grandparents could not have imagined. The good old days were not that good. That 's what I should have told the man who interviewed me on radio.

President Bush wants to strengthen the institution of matrimony in America. As one way of doing this, he proposed an amendment to the Constitution that would ban gay marriages.

If Congress is going to consider this seriously, it ought to broaden the search for ways to strengthen marriage and look into all aspects of this custom that has developed in every part of the civilized world. The custom is that two people pair off to live together, love together, have children and help each other through life. Most problems develop when the issue arises about what role the man and the woman play in their relationship. Some men are carried away with their masculinity and some women are not satisfied with their femininity.

The great number of divorces make pretentious wedding vows, organ music and expensive bridal gowns seem silly. It's no longer just death that do them part. They part for dozens of other reasons long before they die.

The divorce rate varies by state. In Oklahoma, 70 percent of all marriages ended in divorce in 2000 . . . must be something in the water out there. Millions of Americans everywhere have been married twice and, while there are no statistics, millions more have been married three times. Someone who gets divorced twice is more apt to get divorced a third and fourth time than someone who's been divorced once. This is my own, homemade statistic.

There are no statistics yet on whether gay marriages will be any more successful than heterosexual marriages. The President feels strongly about the sanctity of marriage and maybe one way he could promote longevity in a union between a man and a woman would be to make divorce illegal. Along with banning gay marriage, the Constitution could be rewritten to ban divorce. If people knew they weren't going to be able to get out of it, they'd be more careful about getting into it.

There are too many happily divorced people for the President to make such an amendment retroactive, but once passed, henceforth and
from that day forward, couples would be forbidden to divorce. There would be no such thing.

At the very least, it would be illegal for a couple with children to get divorced. Any man who left his wife with children to take care of would have to undergo an unpleasant operation to assure society that it didn't happen again. Any woman who had more than one child without being married would be subjected to a comparable procedure. We don't need a lot of children by people who don't know how to take care of them because the children grow up and have children of their own that they don't know how to take care of.

There's something else the President might do besides making it illegal for same-sex couples to marry and making divorce illegal. He could make it more difficult for anyone to get married in the first place. Obviously, when you look at our high divorce rate, you have to conclude that too many men and women are going into marriage without thinking it through first.

Two people who wish to get married should have to take a test to see whether or not they're going to be able to maintain the relationship. No one should be able to get married on a whim. You can't get a driver's license without taking a test to prove you're capable of driving a car. Why can you get a marriage license without first providing some evidence that you're capable of living with someone?

Still another possibility President Bush might consider is to make marriage licenses good for a limited time, perhaps five years. When a marriage license expired, it would have to be renewed. A couple would no longer be married for life.

A marriage board would study the application and approve or disapprove it.

President Bush should think through this whole custom of marriage before we start amending the Constitution.

It's a welcome relief to find yourself performing some job you know how to do. When I come on an easy one, it keeps me from despair over my ineptness at all the others I don't know how to do.

Shaving every morning might seem to a woman like a nasty little job for men. The fact is, shaving is easy, quick and men get a sense of accomplishment from it. He is so familiar with the job that he can preview the day's work while he's doing it without cutting himself. I know how to shave and I look better after I've done it. That's the most you can ask of a job.

Cutting the grass has not been hard work since the advent of power mowers. The operator directs a machine with whirring blades from a comfortable perch in a saddle behind the engine. The swath a mower cuts as it traverses a lawn becomes satisfyingly wider with each pass, and if there's anything at all difficult about mowing the lawn now, it's filling the tank of the mower with gas.

We had four or five inches of snow in Connecticut this week. Shoveling snow is overrated as hard work. All the alarm bells about snow shoveling and heart attacks have added prestige to the shoveler, but I have never once died moving snow with a shovel. I suspect more people die in their sleep on a snowy night than shoveling snow the next morning.

Many of the easy jobs are ones I save for the weekend when I seek the illusion I'm accomplishing something without actually doing any work. Shopping, of course, is the number one time-spending amusement in the country.

To say, “I've got to go to the store” or “I should do the shopping” makes it sound like work, which it isn't. Shopping is almost always an excuse for getting out of the house and away from the work you ought to be doing.

The best jobs to do are ones that look hard but aren't because you get more credit for doing those. I don't want to alienate women who do a lot of it, but vacuuming is imitation hard work. There is nothing in any way difficult about rolling a roaring wind machine around a room on its
little wheels. The noise it makes seems unnecessary but adds to the suggestion that it's work.

The only hard part of vacuuming the living room rug is putting the damned vacuum back in the closet when you've finished. Vacuum cleaners are unwieldy. If he invented them, Hoover stopped too soon.

Washing the car in the driveway on a spring or summer day is another job that has the reputation of being hard but isn't. The only hard part of washing the average car is getting to the middle of the windshield with a sponge or cloth without getting your shirt and pants wet where you lean up against the car.

This morning, something happened to the computer on which I write. Finally, after a frustrating hour, I called for assistance and the technician came to fix it.

In an effort to help, I brought in a small lamp and put it on the desk near the computer. As I plugged it in, there was that familiar flash indicating the bulb had blown. I went to the closet, came back with a new bulb and screwed it in until it was snug. The bulb glowed. At last, a job I knew how to do: changing a light bulb.

Taking a vacation isn't easy. There are all sorts of ways to do it wrong and I suspect that a lot of you make a mess of your vacation.

First, we all ought to face the fact that planning a vacation is more fun, more satisfying and more restful than actually taking one. It's certainly less expensive. Looking forward to a good vacation is one of the great pleasures of life, yet very few of us can say that about actually being on vacation.

In the first place, planning a vacation doesn't cost anything. Nothing goes wrong when you're planning. There are no endless hours of driving, no lines at the airport, no unexpected expenses, no rainy days to endure when you're in the planning stages.

I am something of an expert on ruining a vacation because I've done it often.

I know what's wrong, but I can't correct my mistake. I have made one of the basic vacation errors. I try to do too many things in too many different places.

Cramming it full is not the way to take a vacation. The things I planned all seemed good to me when I was thinking about them, but now that I'm halfway into my month off, I realize I'm not having a lot of fun or getting much rest because I keep going someplace. Wherever I am, I decide to pick up and go somewhere else.

The places I go all look good from a distance but once I get there, they're pretty much like where I came from but with different people and a different, unfamiliar bed to sleep in. I know now that I should have gone to a nice house we have in the country and stayed there. I shouldn't have done a lot of moving around. It might have been a good idea to have had the telephone disconnected but I'm too insecure for that. I'm afraid no one would have called me and I'd never have known they hadn't.

I'm already planning next year's vacation while I'm still on this one. I know what I'm going to do. I'm not going anywhere. I'm going to stay home, go to bed early, get up when I feel like getting up, watch some latenight television, eat what I feel like eating with no regard for the diet advice everyone is shoving down our throats in books and magazine articles. Next year, in order to have a real, restful vacation, I'd like to be bored for a few days because I had nothing to do. Being busy is never restful.

I hardly ever read a whole book anymore and even the morning newspaper is a challenge if you're on a busy vacation. If you're traveling, you have to read someone else's hometown newspaper and it's never the same as what you're used to. Next year, I'm going to spend two hours over breakfast, drink three cups of coffee and read the whole newspaper, including the Help Wanted pages. I may take a nap after breakfast instead of doing an errand. I'll do a lot of errands on my vacation, though, because buying something can be very relaxing.

I grew up with boats on a lake we went to summers, but boating is one of the most tense ways to relax. Unlike cars, boats very often don't work. There's often something wrong with a boat and boats are certainly one of the most expensive pleasures known to man. A boat is more expensive than a hotel and then you have to pay to put it away in winter.

I often pass a big boatyard or docking area with hundreds of boats just sitting there in the water, doing nothing. There's no single toy Americans own so many of that they use so infrequently, as their boats. The places you can go in a boat are much more limited than the places you can go in a car. There are no four-wheel drive boats.

I keep hearing about other people's vacations. Not many will admit they were terrible, but if you listen carefully, you can detect telltale signs that give it away. We had friends who went to Europe on the Queen Mary. We did that ourselves many years ago on the old Queen Mary. Call it luxurious, call it unusual, call it interesting, but don't call it a vacation. On board, they make you feel as though having a good time is compulsory. There's nothing restful about being on a boat.

A friend gave me a great hammock for Christmas several years ago. Hammocks are a genuine vacation item. They are hard to get into and hard to get out of, so once you're there, you tend to stay. That's vacation kind of time.

There are times other than birthdays, weddings, anniversaries and holidays that mark the personal history of each of us. In the past fifty years, I have bought fourteen new cars and each time was a special occasion in my life. I don't buy a new car lightly.

The price of a new car ought to be firmer than it is. I always have the feeling I could get the same thing for less if I shopped around more. It is
obvious that car manufacturers have deliberately done things to obscure the price so that potential buyers can't figure out how much they are paying for what.

My old car, a 1999 model, had 86,000 miles on it and a few dings that needed paint. I usually drive a car for 100,000 miles before I trade it in, but I needed new tires and didn't want to put out $750 for four new tires on a car with that many miles on it. Tires last about 40,000 miles and I knew I'd never drive it another 40,000 miles.

My new car is from another manufacturer. It's a lot like the old one but three inches shorter. Many of the features on the car I bought—which I'm not going to name—were what they called “optional.” My dictionary says: “Optional: left to choice. Not compulsory.” In the car dealer's lexicon, “optional” means “take it or leave it” because you can't buy the car without most “optional” equipment.