Out of My Mind (3 page)

There are people who never forget a birthday or wedding anniversary and others who never remember one. Some tidy people keep track of these dates in other people's lives in little black books. They spend more time remembering than is called for by the unimportance of many of
these occasions. While it may be fitting to make an event out of a fifth, tenth, twenty-fifth or fiftieth wedding anniversary, those like the sixth, eleventh or forty-third would be better forgotten. I resent the remembers.

The idea of making a joyous event out of getting a year older doesn't make sense. We all hate our age. Not only that, we find it ridiculous and humiliating not to be able to blow out the burgeoning number of candles on a cake. And we shouldn't be eating cake anyway.

There are a few people who never mention their birthday because they don't want to call attention to it. This seems more sensible than setting off bells and whistles to proclaim to the world that you're a year closer to the end of your life. I'm more apt to be depressed than elated on the occasion of mine.

We've always tried to soften the blow for people getting old in every way except by ignoring the fact. Old age is called “the golden years,” but anyone old enough to fall in that category knows there's nothing golden about them.

Then there's the commonly accepted notion that wisdom comes with age, as if this made aging an occasion for joy. We all know, however, in our heads if not in our hearts, that this is not true. We are as dumb at sixty, seventy, eighty or ninety as we were at twenty-one. We may know more but our brain doesn't work any better, and probably less well, than it ever did. Like the look of our face or the shape of our feet, we're stuck with the brain we came with and it functions with less and less agility as the years pass.

Annual celebrations probably ought to end the day a child blows out the candles on his or her twelfth birthday cake. We leave little monuments of special occasions throughout our lives but there isn't time to stop and celebrate all of them and we should stop trying.

We ignore some of the most important dates in our lives because they're not sentimental occasions. Depending on the state we live in, the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth and twenty-first birthdays are vital because it is on those days we become old enough to marry, drive, vote or drink. They don't bring funny cards from friends.

What I most want is a couple of weeks during which there are no days to celebrate. That would be worth celebrating.

There are times when I yearn for a czar or dictator. It would have to be me because I'd disagree with the dictates of any other.

Today I'm thinking how badly we need someone with absolute power in charge of controlling the buildings people erect. I'd not only want to control new construction, I'd also want the power to tear down some of the buildings already up. I'd like to have the power to drive through our small town in Connecticut and mark certain homes and commercial buildings for demolition.

There are monstrosities in every city and town in America. The construction of many of these buildings could have been prevented if we didn't have this perverse notion that people can build anything they want as long as they own the land they put it on. Clearly there should be a law against some buildings. Fair-minded people who object might ask who would decide what could be built and what could not. I'll decide, that's who.

The accepted idea is that what someone does with an empty lot is strictly his or her own business but that isn't true. It's the business of everyone who lives anywhere nearby. An unattractive building intrudes on their lives every day they pass by and are forced to look at it. You could say no one is forced to look at an ugly building but this ignores the magnetic attraction anything unlovely holds for our eyes.

The construction of a home or business in a town should not be taken lightly. Buildings last. An ugly house is practically immortal. Badly built office towers often stand for a hundred years and the rent is still rising. A house may get painted, added to or subtracted from but once one is built, it's there for good as far as our lives are concerned.

There's not a community in America that doesn't have buildings so unattractive that they should be leveled and carted off to the dump in small pieces to raise the value of others in town. (It is incumbent upon me to say here that our house might be considered by some to be a candidate for destruction on grounds of its aesthetic shortcomings.)

“Developer” is a dirty word. Developers are moving in on open fields, wooded hills, vacant lots and even back yards everywhere. In many
wealthy communities, they're tearing down perfectly good $500,000 homes to put up $5 million display houses. We need de-developers to undevelop places that were developed badly. As building dictator, I would prohibit the intrusion of one brick or 2-by–4 on a back yard for the purpose of enlarging an existing home. A back yard is more important than any additional bedroom or two-car garage.

The disappearance of back yards in city and suburb followed the demise of the front porch fifty years ago. There was a time when half the population of small-town America sat on its front porch watching the passing scene from a comfortable position in a hammock, swing or rocking chair. No longer. The inaction has moved inside to a position in front of the television set in the living room. People don't live in the living room, they watch there. It has become the watching room.

A city back yard is an oasis cordoned off from the parade of machinery passing by in the street out front. There can be quiet, grass, flowers, peace and tranquillity just a short distance from the frenetic world of moving machinery. In a back yard, flowers do not rush to grow, grass does not have a horn to blow, or radio to blare out. As the population multiplies and the demand for space increases, back yards, like front porches, will become a thing of the ancient past. They'll be replaced by brick and steel with no personality but a life expectancy of 500 years unless, of course, I am appointed the first czar of deconstruction.

Growing up, I knew everyone on our block and most of the people around the corner and up the street. The Duffeys were on one side, the McAnenys on the other. The Gordons lived next to the Duffeys and the Buckleys were next to them. Dick Stephens lived across the street. He had a chow named Chummy. The Hessbergs were next to the Stephens. Their German Shepherd was called a “police dog.”

We have lived for more than fifty years in our present house. Don't ask me to name more than four of ten neighbors who live within 100 yards of us—or any of their dogs. People move more often than they used to. Neighbors have gone out of style in America. No one borrows a cup of sugar.

We are no longer active in many of the hometown organizations whose meetings we once attended regularly. Attendance at the meetings of all local organizations is dramatically lower. A notice in our current town bulletin says, “The Town Meeting scheduled for June 27 was canceled for lack of a quorum.”

They're having a terrible time getting anyone to come to Parent-Teacher Association meetings. Even organizations like the American Legion, the Rotary, the Kiwanis and the Knights of Columbus have lost 25 percent of their membership in many communities. Most of the people listed as members no longer go to church. We don't chat over the back fence. We get in the car and go someplace, or stay inside and watch television. Not as many kids are playing Little League baseball.

If we needed a quart of milk, I used to walk down to the grocery store a block from our house. If Tom was in his yard, cutting the grass, I stopped and we talked. Now if we need milk, I get in the car and go to the supermarket.

Margie used to belong to a bridge club, a book club and an investment club. She never missed a meeting. Several years ago, Robert D. Putnam wrote a good book called
Bowling Alone
. He spoke about the virtues of “civic engagement and social connectedness,” saying they produce better schools, economic progress, lower crime and more effective government.

Young people don't get married half the time until they're middleaged, so many of them live in apartments with strangers next door, not neighbors. Gay Americans often keep to themselves, and half of all Americans who marry get divorced. They separate from both spouse and neighbor.

You can't beat a good, hometown newspaper as a cohesive force in a community, but hometown newspapers are having a tough time. The readership of
USA Today
and newspapers like the
New York Times
, the
Washington Post
and the
Los Angeles Times
is a problem for small papers that live in the shadow of their circulation.

Local newspapers have tried to become less local by not excluding neighboring towns with the paper's name. My hometown newspaper is no longer the
Norwalk Hour
. Now it's simply
The Hour
. A newspaper I used to deliver, the
Albany Times Union
, is now the
Times Union
. In the same area, the
Troy Record
has become
The Record
and the
Schenectady Gazette
is
The Gazette
. I wouldn't be surprised to see the
New York Times
drop “New York.”

There isn't time to read everything in the newspaper, and we all pick and choose. I glance at page one to see if we're at war and to check on how many Israelis were killed by Palestinians or how many Palestinians were killed by Israelis.

The business section seems like someone else's business, not mine, and I don't read real estate because I have my house so I quickly turn to the editorials, letters, columnists and the sports section.

I skim the wedding announcements and try to guess, on very little evidence, whether the marriage will work or not. If there's a picture of the couple, they look happy together and the announcement is upbeat, but buried in the story there is often a sign of trouble lurking. When the parents of one of the couple are from two different places, you know that marriage didn't work out and I suspect statistics would bear out my suspicion that children of divorced parents are more apt to divorce.

In the Sunday newspaper I have in my hand, I see these sentences:

“Ms. Kirwan, 29, is keeping her own name.”

“Ms. O'Hara, known as Nell, is keeping her name.”

“Miss Woo, 29, is keeping her name.”

“Miss Heins, 40, is keeping her name.”

“Ms. Scop, 26, will keep her own name.”

“Anna Mills Smith . . . was married to Robert Brett Hickman.

If I was a young woman who had had some success starting a career before I met a guy I wanted to marry, I'd choose to keep my name. I don't know how the custom of the woman taking the man's name ever got started. However, while there are no statistics to back me up, I'd be willing to bet that there are more divorces in marriages where the woman keeps her name than in ones where she takes the man's name.

It seems apparent that the growing trend is for a woman to keep her own name. I approve but I don't know where it leads us. Having a name assigned to every person is a convenience for society and certainly friendlier if not so practical, as if we each had nothing but a number to identify us. Taking both names and inserting a hyphen, as the Hickman-Smiths have, may seem like the answer, but what happens when they have children who want to marry? Say they have a girl named Samantha Hickman-Smith. Samantha meets a boy whose parents merged their names just as hers did. Their name is Billingham-Watson. Their son's name is Rutherford. If Samantha and Rutherford marry, do they become Mr. and Mrs. Hickman-Smith-Billingham-Watson? And if they do, what will ever become of their children's names when they marry?

One newspaper, the
New York Times
, is now publishing news of gay unions. “Thomas John Michael Mirabile and William Edward Doyle, Jr. celebrated their partnership last evening at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in a commitment ceremony.”

Neither of the men in a gay union ever seems to take the other's name.

Wedding announcements are chock full of miscellaneous facts you don't get any place else.

“The couple was married at the Salsa del Salto Bed and Breakfast in Taos.” I wonder if they slept there that night?

Or, “Her father is vice president for finance at Retractable
Awnings.com
in Miami.”

Too many weddings, like awnings, are retractable.

Sometimes, when I worry about little things like the future of mankind, I deliberately turn my thoughts to how great life could be for us in the future.

I did a morning radio interview last week, and the interviewer asked if I thought things were better for people than they used to be.

I said “better,” but I wasn't articulate explaining why I thought so.

Life is better than it was for our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and ancestors because invention has enabled us to fill our lives with more good things and more interesting times, and with less onerous physical labor. We live much longer because our doctors know more and have better medicine. We're filling those extra years with five times as much living as people living in 1900 got into one year.

One hundred years ago, a woman never left the house most days. She got lunch and dinner ready for her working husband and children. She cleaned. There was no vacuum cleaner, no dishwasher, no clothes washer and drier. She scrubbed the clothes on a washboard after heating water on a wood-burning stove.

After dinner, 100 years ago, people either went to bed or sat in the dark. Some read with difficulty by the flickering light of a candle or oil
lamp. The women knitted, men whittled. For music, they whistled. No word from the outside world entered the house. No radio, no television.