Out of My Mind (32 page)

The details of the difference in the plans grew unfathomable to me and I do what I always do. Nothing.

Yesterday I read a story about the rivalry between the personal computer business and television interests. A new device called a Moxi is a digital box that goes on top of your television set “designed to serve as an integrated digital video recorder, CD player, DVD player, MP3 music player with an Internet connection and a high-speed wireless home network.”

I am still struggling with channels higher than 13 on the television set. Is the whole world more able to cope with the new technology than I am?

It's a good thing I can type and put down one word after another on a sheet of paper because, if I couldn't, I don't know what would happen to me. I'm copeless.

To save them embarrassment, I'm not going to name the college I attended. Their president resigned and they've sent me a letter saying I'm a candidate for the job.

If this is a joke, I am mildly amused but should tell them that I probably take myself more seriously than they do. If this is some kind of a fund-raising gimmick—nothing is too outrageous for a college fundraiser—I object and may stop giving them “funds,” which I call money.

If the college is serious, I can only say that if nominated, I will not run. If elected, I will not serve. Are they crazy or something? Do they really believe I'm capable of being a college president? Do they think I'd give up my day job to do that even if I was capable of doing it?

Along with the letter informing me that I'm under consideration by the search committee, there's a ten-page outline of the job. On page 8 is a section titled DESIRED QUALITIES and I don't have any of them. According to the outline:

“A viable candidate must:

“Be a good listener.”

Count me out there. I'm not a good listener. If anyone else is talking, I'm impatient until I get a chance to say something.

“Be able to make timely and difficult decisions.”

Not me. Half the time, I can't even make the easy decisions.

“Maintain a strong commitment to openness and consensus building.”

No, I'm not committed to being open-minded. You can carry being broad-minded too far. By this time in my life, I know what I know and I know what I think and it's very damned unlikely that I'm going to change to build what you call a consensus.

The fact is, I'm no more capable of being a college president than I am of being president of this country. Maybe less. The president of the United States gets help from hundreds of capable assistants. A college president is out there all by himself fighting off the wolves.

Being a college president is one of the worst jobs known to man or womankind. Everyone is out to get the president. He has to quarrel with the Board of Trustees. This group is made up largely of business people who know nothing about education but have been appointed on the strength of the size of their contributions to the college.

There's always a faculty contingent that opposes the president on philosophical grounds.

Parents want the president's attention and he doesn't have time to give it. He's not leading an educational institution along a path to greater learning. He's out there raising money more than half the time at an unending series of alumni functions.

Let me ask a couple of questions of the search committee that thinks I might be college president material:

When I'm in office, will it be OK with you if I cut the number of football scholarships to zero?

Will I be able to go over the list of faculty members and see if I can put my finger on the ones who aren't really teaching?

Will I be able to rewrite the schedule for the academic year so that instead of having classes on just 126 days out of the 365, the university would hold classes something like 240 days a year? I'd give students one month off in the summer. Classes would start the day after Labor Day and continue until a Christmas vacation of one week.

There would be a spring break of one week in March or April. There would be classes every weekday and Saturday mornings. Class attendance records would be routinely mailed to parents so they'd know they were getting what they paid for.

If I were president of the college, students would not be treated like young adults. They would be treated like old children—which they are.

Do you still want me?

I call the odometer on my car a speedometer. It rolled past 60,000 this morning. That's when I start thinking about buying a new car. I don't do it right away; I just start thinking about it. I usually get close to I00,000 miles before I actually turn a car in.

Not many of us buy a new car because we need one. A new car is irresistible once you get thinking about it, even though there's nothing wrong with your old one. The tires do it for me. I don't like to spend the
money for a new set on a car I know I'm not going to drive another 50,000 miles.

To pass the time on long drives, I've often tried—and failed—to remember and count all the cars I've owned. I'd list them, but no one under 50 would know the names. Is Borgward familiar to you?

We own four cars now. That sounds silly for two people but I leave two of them in the garage in the country from early October until mid-May. One is my 1987 Jeep Cherokee. It's a good car with about 90,000 miles on it, but the dealer would give me only $5,000 on a trade so I've kept it.

The other part-time car is my great 1966 Sunbeam Tiger with the Ford V–8 engine shoehorned into its little body. I paid $3,600 for the car and wouldn't sell it for $I00,000. It was rebuilt in 1988 and is in pristine condition. I drive it with the top down through the rolling hills around our country house in upstate New York. It makes me feel young again, but I think I can hear people by the side of the road whispering, “Look at that old fool.”

My parents owned a memorable Packard when I was growing up. It was one of the best cars ever built in the United States—one of the best of anything ever built anywhere—and this fact makes me suspicious of the free enterprise system. A company manufacturing such a superior product should not be forced out of business for lack of business. When we used to make the 75-mile trip from home to our summer cottage in 1936, my mother drove the Packard at 70 mph, the same speed I would drive my 2006 model car today.

The first car I bought and paid for with my own money was a 1942 Chrysler New Yorker. I bought it secondhand in Albany, right after being discharged from the Army in 1945. I had sold a book to MGM for $55,000 and was hired to write the screenplay. We bought the car for $2,500 and set out with all our possessions for California. The New Yorker, one of the last cars built before all carmakers suspended production during the war, had been owned by a funeral home and never driven more than 12 mph. The dark blue velvet upholstery was unruffled. It was a beauty.

I am foolishly sentimental about a car. I don't treat it like an inanimate object. I feel disloyal and sad when I turn one in. It's as if I was leaving an old dog with the vet for the last time. I still feel a twinge of regret when I think of my 1980 Ford station wagon, which I pushed past I20,000 miles before abandoning it for the jeep.

I was influenced to get rid of the station wagon by a remark made by a stranger when I was stopped for a light in New York. The car bore the evidence of its age in the scrapes and dents that pockmarked the body.

The pedestrian looked up, recognized me and said, “Aw, come on, Andy. You can do better than that.” I traded the car within the month.

It'll be about a year before I actually buy a new car but that gives me time to anticipate the pleasure and think of ways to get a better price from the dealer.

I had a good feeling on my way home from work last Friday. There were a lot of satisfying little jobs to do around the house and we didn't have any plans for the weekend that would keep me from doing them. Even if you have the money and don't mind spending it, you can't find anyone to do little jobs around the house. I'm not really handy, but I have a lot of tools and I'll take on anything except plumbing or electricity.

Saturday morning, we sat in the kitchen reading the newspaper over a third cup of coffee. If you're looking for a way to delay getting at doing odd jobs Saturday morning, one good way is to make a list. Making a list is a job of its own and it delays actually going to work.

“Don't forget to put the air conditioner in the window in our bedroom,” Margie said. “I wish you'd turn the rug in the living room, too.”

“I'm making my own list of things to do,” I said. Actually I didn't “say”; I “snapped.”

“Well, just don't forget to get rid of that awful-looking mat by the front door. You said it was just for the winter and it's May. I asked you to
take that hook off the door, too. The one we hang the Christmas wreath from. It looks terrible.”

“I'll do it when I have the ladder out to get the leaves out of the gutter,” I said.

The first item on my Things-To-Do-Today list was “Plates.”

The new Connecticut license plates for my car came last week. The plates are a different color than the old ones and I don't like the new color. I never like the new color of license plates as much as I liked the old color.

With nine items on my TTDT list, I got up from the table and announced that mounting the new plates was my first priority.

“Don't waste your time on that,” Margie said. “You've got enough things to do without that. I'll take your car to the gas station Monday. They have a mechanic who'll do it.”

“A mechanic?” I asked, incredulously. “To change my license plates? You're kidding. It's a ten-minute job.”

I backed the car out of the garage so I'd have more room. Some stuff I needed on a shelf on the passenger side is hard to get at when the car is in there. Cars must have been narrower when they built our garage. Or maybe it was a mistake putting those shelves along the wall.

The plates are attached to my car with inch-long metal screws with hex nut heads. Three of the screws came out with a few twists of a pair of pliers. The fourth was jammed. I sprayed the reluctant screw with WD40. Still no luck. Obviously I needed a set wrench. Or maybe WD4I.

I judged the nut to be three eighths of an inch and went to the basement for a wrench. I had a half-inch, a five-eighths, a three-quarters and several larger ones but no three-eighths.

Frustrated, I climbed in the car and drove to the gas station. The mechanic loosened the screw with his three-eighths-inch wrench. While he was at it, he secured the front and back license plates to the car. I said, “Buy ya a beer,” gave him $I0 for three minutes'work, and drove off.

There was no reason to bother anyone with the information that I'd had to go to the gas station to get the license plate off. It was past
noon by now, so I went out to the kitchen and made myself a tuna fish sandwich.

I poured a Coke and took the sandwich into the living room and got watching Serena Williams and Jennifer Capriati. My eyelids started to droop so I turned off the sound on the TV set and took a little nap.

I can do those odd jobs some other weekend.

Because I had never seen any of my college classmates' wives in their nightgowns before, last weekend's reunion was outstanding.

The get-together was with about with thirty classmates in the pictureperfect little college town.

Reunions are bittersweet and sometimes more bitter than sweet. This one was good. It is usually the most successful graduates who return and they are also the most interesting.

I went to college for three years before being drafted into the Army. I was one year short of memories that most of the others shared. However, our son and grandson are both graduates of the same college and this gives me an added affinity with the school.

Some of the people I enjoyed seeing are better friends because of past reunions than they were because of any association we had in college. Some of my friends in college were, for one reason or another—mostly one—sadly missing.

The college, and particularly the part of it known as “the development office,” is alert to the potential of graduates as gift-givers and they are friendly and helpful. Because our class was one of the older of the returning groups, we were given priority consideration for accommodations at the Inn, which is owned by the university. The Inn is a three-story wooden hostelry with forty-six rooms that backstops one end of the town mall.

On Saturday night, we had our class dinner at the Inn. The dinner was an improvement over the food the college had provided at an allclass lunch. (It occurred to me when I sat looking at the lunch that if you wanted to make a television show on bad cooking, our meal would have been a good example.)

At about I0:30 P.M., we decided we'd had enough and went to our third-floor room. Shortly after we got to bed, we were abruptly awakened by the sound of an urgent alarm. I opened the hall door to determine the source and got back in bed with the raucous noise precluding sleep. Two minutes later, there was a loud banging on our door accompanied by a voice yelling, “Fire! Everyone out! Fire! Clear the building!”

I pulled my pants on over my pajama bottoms, wishing I had brought pajamas the top of which wasn't frayed where it buttoned down the front. I looked to see Margie starting out the door barefoot. I yelled over the alarm for her to put on shoes. She grabbed her shoes but continued down the hall barefoot. The three-story stairway looked formidable so, ignoring the small sign with red letters reading, “IN CASE OF FIRE DO NOT TAKE ELEVATOR!”, I pressed the button and we took the elevator. Long experience has taught me that the overwhelming number of alarms, relating to anything, are false.