Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin (41 page)

All of which leads me to turn the tables on this talk about whether I can recognize a mountain when I see one: It may be that the people who are always saying that they saw the mountains did not really see them. People are like that. I think it’s possible that a lot of people—the same sort of people who say they see belts and pots and all sorts of knickknacks in the sky—just look squinty-eyed through the fog toward the mountain and say, “Hmmm. Yes. Lovely.”

Maybe some of them don’t like to admit that they missed the mountain. Let’s say that a man named Thistlethwaite returns from the trip to Japan that he has looked forward to for years, and his brother-in-law—the boorish brother-in-law who’s always saying that Thistlethwaite paid too much for his car and went to the wrong discount store for the grass edger—says that Mount Fuji must have been quite a sight, even for someone who might well have been preoccupied with having paid the straight coach fare to Tokyo when he could have put together a charter-and-excursion package through Honolulu. Is Thistlethwaite really going to say “Actually, we didn’t see Fuji, what with the low-lying clouds”? Does he want to hear his brother-in-law say “Hey, Marge—did you hear that? Did you hear they dropped a bundle going over there to Japan and missed the main mountain?”

I think not. I think Thistlethwaite is more likely to shake his head in wonderment and say “Yes, quite a sight, quite a sight.” What does he have to lose? He isn’t likely to be questioned closely on what the mountain looked like, and even if he is, it’s the simplest thing in the world to fake: “Tall. It was tall. And pointy at the top. Tall and pointy.”

I want to make this clear right now: I am not complaining. You won’t find me grabbing people by the lapels at parties and saying “Why is it that everybody gets to see the mountains but me?” For one thing, it is not true that everybody gets to see the mountains but me.
My wife, for instance, doesn’t get to see them. She is usually with me, standing in the fog. I’m not complaining and I’m not being defensive. There is nothing defensive about pointing out that all the inspirational stuff about mountains does not apply in this case. The nun in
The Sound of Music
keeps telling everyone to climb every mountain. Well, fine. But you can’t climb them if you can’t see them, Sister. Also, there is the matter of George Mallory, the great English mountain climber, who answered the question of why he wanted to climb Mount Everest by saying “Because it’s there.” But what if he had been asked what he would do if the mountain was not, in fact, there? He’d have said “Well, then, I wouldn’t climb it, you silly twit! Is this your idea of a joke, or what?” So much for the inspirational stuff.

1984

“I’m telephoning, sir, to inform you that you have been preselected by computer to win a trip to Hawaii for only $1,198, including air travel and hotel room—that’s double occupancy—and a free Mahu Lahani cocktail upon arrival.”

“How nice of you to call! As I was just saying to a gentleman who phoned to tell me I’d been chosen as someone who could benefit greatly from a cattle-ranch mutual fund, it’s always comforting to hear the telephone ring around dinnertime and know that people with a large computer at their disposal have been thinking of me.”

“Then I take it, sir, that you’d like to redeem your exclusive, limited-time offer to take advantage of this special award?”

“And you’ll be interested to hear that, by coincidence, my Uncle Harry has this weird obsession about visiting places that end with the letter
i
. I’ll admit that the young woman who phoned last night to tell me that I had been selected for a specially priced series of tango lessons didn’t seem absolutely entranced by Uncle Harry’s travel theories,
but then, she wasn’t in the trade the way you are. You see, Uncle Harry’s from Missouri, and he got the idea that it would be appropriate to visit any place whose name ends similarly.”

“Sir, if I could just get your decision on this, you can charge it conveniently on your MasterCard or—”

“Oh, there were some he collected right away, of course. He and Aunt Rosie drove through Bemidji, Minnesota, one summer on the way to the lakes up there. And it wasn’t long before he managed to score what he called his first double: Biloxi, Mississippi. It’s on the Gulf Coast—but I guess you knew that, being in the travel business. Although, you’d be surprised: The man who phoned the other night to tell me I’d been preselected for eight days and seven nights in Cancun had never heard of Biloxi.”

“This offer is for Hawaii, sir, and it includes—”

“Biloxi’s just down the coast from Gulfport, which has a lovely motto: ‘Where Your Ship Comes In.’ ”

“Sir, Hawaii is a land of enchantment, where many cultures have—”

“You might say I collect mottos, the way my Uncle Harry collects places that end in
i
. Do you collect anything yourself?”

“Uh. Well. Actually, I do have a lot of poodle-dog ornaments. But about this Hawaiian trip, sir—”

“Underrated dog, the poodle, and I suppose that goes for the ornaments, too. But you didn’t phone to discuss poodle dogs. Listen, my Aunt Rosie, who considers Biloxi just about far enough from home, called all worried one day to say that Uncle Harry was talking about the two of them going to Africa so he could visit Mali. Well, I told her that Uncle Harry just likes to talk about the more exotic places—Haiti, say, or Bari, Italy, or Lodi, New Jersey. So she didn’t have to worry about dragging herself all the way over to Bamako. That’s the capital of Mali, by the way: Bamako. I had a friend who was sent there by the foreign service. I remember at the going-away party somebody sang a song called ‘I’ll Be Your Bamako Baby, You Be My Mali Dolly.’ It must be interesting doing what you do—calling people around dinnertime and finding out capitals of foreign countries that happen to end in
i.
”

“Sir, when I say this offer is a limited-time offer, I really have to—”

“I know: You really have to get to the point. Of course. I can see that. The point is this: Uncle Harry has always talked about going to Hawaii, a one-word double. He figured that even if he didn’t get to Tahiti and Fiji and Funafuti while he was out that way, he might spend his time in Hawaii in the town of Kahului on the island of Maui. I think if he did that, Uncle Harry would be a happy man. Although I have to say that Aunt Rosie disagrees with me. She says that no matter where he went, Uncle Harry would be a stubborn, mean-tempered old coot. Of course, Aunt Rosie—”

“Sir! Sir!”

“Yes?”

“Maybe your Uncle Harry would like to take advantage of this limited-time offer for a trip to Hawaii.”

“But Uncle Harry hasn’t been preselected by computer. I’m the one who’s been preselected by computer.”

“Well, I think just this once …”

“Oh, he would never be party to anything like that. I guess I’ve told you before what Aunt Rosie always says about Uncle Harry being as flexible as a tree stump. Take his theory that Christopher Columbus’s first New World landing was in Kansas City, near what is now the corner of Eleventh and Walnut. Why, he … Hello? … Hello? …”

1987

NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

“Those who persist in thinking that I don’t take enough interest in my wardrobe are apparently not aware of how much effort goes into the selection of my Halloween costume.”

This Thanksgiving, our family was finally able to sit down together and give thanks over a meal of spaghetti carbonara. It has been several years, of course, since I began my campaign to have the national Thanksgiving dish changed from turkey to spaghetti carbonara—I love spaghetti carbonara—but until now invitations to have Thanksgiving dinner at friends’ houses prevented our family from practicing what I preached. This year, nobody invited us over for
Thanksgiving dinner—my wife’s theory being that word got around town that I always make a pest of myself berating the hostess for serving turkey instead of spaghetti carbonara. In my defense, I should say that my daughters do not believe that our lack of invitations has anything at all to do with my insistence on bringing the spaghetti carbonara issue to the attention of the American public at any appropriate opportunity. They believe it may have something to do with my tendency to spill cranberry sauce on my tie.

I’ll admit that my campaign might have been inspired partly by my belief that turkey is basically something college dormitories use to punish students for hanging around on Sunday. I’ll admit that early in the campaign I brought up some advantages that are only aesthetic—the fact, for instance, that the President would not be photographed every year receiving a large platter of spaghetti carbonara from the Eastern Association of Spaghetti Carbonara Growers. As King Vittorio Emmanuelle once said to his Chancellor of the Exchequer, “Spaghetti doesn’t grow on trees.” I’ll admit that I would love to see what those masters of the float-maker’s art at the Macy’s parade might come up with as a three-hundred square-foot depiction of a plate of spaghetti carbonara. I’ll admit that I’d find it refreshing to hear sports announcers call some annual tussle the Spaghetti Carbonara Day Classic.

My campaign, though, has been based also on deeper historical and philosophical considerations. Nobody knows if the Pilgrims really ate turkey at the first Thanksgiving dinner. The only thing we know for sure about what the Pilgrims ate is that it couldn’t have tasted very good. They were from East Anglia, a part of England whose culinary standards are symbolized by the fact that any number of housewives there are this week serving Brussels sprouts that were put on to boil shortly after the Pilgrims left. Also, it’s all very well to say that we should give thanks by eating the meal our forebears ate, but, as it happens, one of the things I give thanks for every year is that those people were not my forebears. Who wants forebears who put people in the stocks for playing the harpsichord on the Sabbath or having an innocent little game of pinch and giggle? In fact, ever since it became fashionable to dwell on the atrocities of American history—ever since, that
is, we entered what the historians call the Era of Year-Round Yom Kippur—I have been more and more grateful that none of my forebears got near this place before 1906. We had nothing at all to do with slavery or massacring Indians or the slaughter of the American buffalo or the assorted scandals of the Spanish-American War. It used to be that an American who wanted to put on airs made claims about how long his family had been here. Now the only people left for a firstgeneration American to envy are the immigrants who arrived in the last half-dozen years. They don’t even have to feel guilty about the Vietnam War.

Naturally, the whole family went over to Raffeto’s pasta store on Houston Street to see the spaghetti cut. It’s important, I think, to have these holiday rituals. As the meal began, I asked the children if they had any questions about our forebears.

“Was Uncle Benny responsible for the First World War just because he was already in St. Jo then?” my younger daughter asked.

“Not directly,” I said. “He didn’t have his citizenship.”

“Is it really true that your grandparents got mixed up about American holidays and used to have a big turkey dinner on the Fourth of July and shoot fireworks off in the park on Thanksgiving?” my older daughter asked.

“At least they had nothing to do with snookering the Indians out of Massachusetts,” I said. “Be thankful for that.”

Then, as is traditional, I told the children the story of the first Thanksgiving:

In England a long time ago, there were people called Pilgrims who were very strict about making sure everyone observed the Sabbath and nobody cooked food with any flavor and that sort of thing, and they decided to go to America where they could enjoy Freedom to Nag. The other people in England said, “Glad to see the back of them,” and put on some Brussels sprouts to boil in case any of their descendants craved a veggie in 1981. In America, the Pilgrims tried farming, but they couldn’t get much done because they were always putting each other in the stocks for crimes like Suspicion of Cheerfulness. The Indians took pity on the Pilgrims and helped them with their farming, even though the Indians thought the Pilgrims were
about as much fun as a teenage circumcision. The Pilgrims were so grateful that they invited the Indians over for a Thanksgiving meal, and the Indians, having had some experience with Pilgrim cuisine in the past, took the precaution of bringing along one dish of their own. They brought a dish that their ancestors had learned many generations before from none other than Christopher Columbus, who was known to the Indians as “the big Italian fella.” The dish was spaghetti carbonara—made with pancetta bacon and fontina and the best imported prosciutto. The Pilgrims hated it. They said it was “heretically tasty” and “the work of the devil” and “the sort of thing foreigners eat.” The Indians were so disgusted that on the way back to their village after dinner one of them made a remark about the Pilgrims that was repeated for generations and unfortunately caused confusion among historians about the first Thanksgiving meal. He said, “What a bunch of turkeys!”