I WAS VISITING the folks at home, and my stepfather walked outside to hang the week’s wash on the clothesline. I went along for some fresh air.
The winds of early March flapped the sheets and pillowcases and the freshly-washed underwear. Both the sight and the sound were comforting, even reassuring. One of the things that’s wrong with our society today, I thought as I watched my stepfather, is that most people are too pretentious to hang their underwear out to dry on a clothesline that any passerby can see.
Today, people prefer to dry their underwear inside their houses in a gadget called a dryer, which spins the clothes in vicious cycles, pumping electrically-heated air to them. As the clothes tumble, odd sounds come from the machine, and when they’re finally dry, the machine stops automatically and gives out a signal that it desires to be unloaded.
But why would anybody want to be summoned by a machine?
Clothes dried outside by the sun and the wind and without buzzers (in Smith Barney parlance, the “old-fashioned way”) have a certain feel to them. Underwear dried outside, for instance, is less likely to cause itching and, because of the natural freshness, it may not even ride up quite as readily. There’s also a wonderful smell to naturally-dried clothes — the smell of the building warmth of early morning.
Maybe one reason people are more grumpy these days is that their underwear smells like coils and filters instead of like fresh sunshine. And it also rides up more aggressively, and we all know that nothing saps a person’s friendliness and comfort quicker than underwear creeping into certain crevices.
Just think about a society that didn’t mind hanging out its underwear for the world to see: It was a society that accepted the cards it was holding, a society that said, “My privacy is dear, but my refusal to bow to pretense is to be cherished even more.” Or, put more simply, it was a society that said, “I’ll hang my drawers on the line if I want to, and if mine happen to be more holey than thou’s, so be it.”
I wouldn’t want to leave the impression that I spent an inordinate amount of my childhood staring at other folks’ underwear on their clotheslines. I will admit, however, that there was occasional good sport to be had on wash day.
Miss Nellie Bascomb hung her clothes on a line in her easily accessible back yard. She wore those pink bloomers that struck just below the knee and had legs large enough for a fully-grown man to crawl through. When Miss Nellie hung out her entire compliment of bloomers, they looked like flags flapping on a mainsail.
Prissy Betty Ann Hillback, who played piano and sang solos at funerals (and who, you will remember, saved Donnelle Spinks from homosexuality), lived near Miss Nellie. One evening, a commando team of pimply-faced young men, who shall remain nameless, sneaked into Miss Nellie’s back yard and took her bloomers off the line.
The raiders then slipped into Betty Ann Hillback’s back yard and took her cute little step-ins, with the days of the week embroidered upon them, off the Hillbacks’ clothesline and replaced them with Miss Nellie’s pinks. The next morning, when Betty Ann’s mother sent her out to bring in the clothes, the perpetrators of this foul deed strolled up to Betty Ann and made all sorts of hooting remarks, such as, “Hey, Betty Ann, how about loaning us a pair of your bloomers? We need a tent for a camping trip.”
Betty Ann turned pinker than Miss Nellie’s underpants and ran into the house. The Hillbacks, incidentally, were the first family in my hometown to buy an electric clothes dryer.
* * *
Please understand that I’m not indiscriminately opposed to modernity. Some modern inventions and conveniences, I fully condone. Here are a few:
—AIR CONDITIONING: There is absolutely no reason to sweat anymore, unless you absolutely want to, which I don’t.
—AUTOMATIC TRANSMISSION: I still don’t know where reverse is on a straight stick, and remember what an awful time you had with the clutch when you were stuck on a hill in traffic?
—AUTOMATIC ICE-MAKERS: Thank you, whoever invented the automatic ice-maker, for delivering me from those ice trays that froze harder than Chinese arithmetic. The lever always bent when I tried to pry open the ice.
—AUTOMATIC COFFEE-MAKERS: They would be even more automatic if somebody would think of a way to make the thing remember to go out and buy the coffee, too, but you can’t have everything.
—HAAGEN-DAZS ICE CREAM: I know this doesn’t exactly fit here, but I love Haagen-Dazs ice cream.
—TWENTY-FOUR-HOUR AUTOMATIC BANK TELLERS: Three times a week, I run out of cash at precisely 11:30 p.m.
—BIC PENS: You lose one, so what? For a pittance, you can buy another.
—SCREW-OFF TOPS ON BEER BOTTLES: You never have to worry about keeping a church key handy again.
—OVERSIZED TENNIS RACQUETS: You don’t have to bend over as much to hit the ball anymore. Bending over is something I hate about tennis.
—ELECTRIC POPCORN POPPERS: Remember when you had to shake the pot to get the kernels to pop?
—ROACH MOTELS: They don’t smell up the house like Black Flag used to and they’re quite effective against roaches. I checked my Roach Motel recently and found a dozen dead roaches inside, including three in the lounge and one out by the pool.
—VIDEO CASSETTE RECORDERS: This certainly is a wonderful modern invention. You can tape television programs and watch them later, and you can rent movies and watch them in your very own home. Unfortunately, I have had a video cassette recorder for four years and I still haven’t figured out how to work it. I’m waiting for a fully automatic one that you don’t have to monkey with and that will mail off for X-rated movies on its own.
—THE THERMOS BOTTLE: A truly amazing invention. In the summertime, I put iced tea in my thermos bottle. Thirty minutes later, I pour out the iced tea and it’s still cold. In the wintertime, I put hot coffee in my thermos and thirty minutes later, I pour it out and it’s still hot. In the immortal words of my boyhood friend and idol, Weyman C. Wannamaker, Jr., “How do it know?”
—REMOTE CONTROL FOR TELEVISION: This invention has changed my life. Before, when I watched television, I had to sit through all those commercials because I didn’t feel like getting up and switching channels. With my remote control, I can change channels any time I want without having to leave my chair.
Do you realize what this means? I haven’t had to watch a Drano commercial — the one that shows the inside of that pipe with all the hair and various other sorts of goo inside it — in years. I also haven’t had to watch any commercials advertising feminine hygiene spray or mini-pads. (Has Cathy Rigby reached menopause yet? I certainly hope so.)
And hemorrhoid commercials — I don’t have to watch them anymore, either. Do they still run the one where the woman is talking about her hemorrhoids and underneath her face it says, “Roxanne Burgess, Hemorrhoid Sufferer”?
I used to wonder how they found that woman. It’s not the sort of thing you hold tryouts for, I don’t suppose. How would you keep each contestant’s score?
Do you know what really would be a marvelous invention? A remote control device for life. Whenever you found yourself in an unpleasant situation, you would pull out your remote control and switch around until you found a situation you liked better.
Let’s say you’ve been out half the night with your rowdy friends. You come home singing drunk, and your wife greets you at the door and begins calling you horrible names. Not to worry. You simply pull out your remote control and ZAP!, you’re right back with your rowdy friends drinking beer and telling lies again.
* * *
So, you see, there are a few modern inventions that I enjoy, but there are many more that have weasled their way into our lives and have become great nuisances.
Take airplanes, for example. I realize that they date all the way back to the Wright Brothers, but airplanes didn’t come into my life until after I was old enough to understand that anything going that fast and that high is inherently dangerous.
I fell in love with trains as a small boy. Somebody — it may have been what’s-his-name, the guy who writes the daffy poems — once said, “After spending a day watching trains, baseball seems a silly game.” (I just thought of his name: Rod McKuen, and that’s the only thing he ever said worth remembering.)
Trains make sense to me. The engine moves and the cars attached behind it follow.
Trains are also romantic, especially their names. I mentioned earlier that I wrote a song about a train called the “Nancy Hanks.” It ran between Atlanta and Savannah on the Central of Georgia line. Once, while riding the “Nancy Hanks” from Atlanta to Savannah, I drank fourteen beers, in the club car — which was not that big a deal, but getting up and walking to the restroom twenty-six times on a train that is rocking back and forth may yet be a record for American railroads.
Another time I rode a train called the “San Francisco Zephyr” from Chicago to Frisco. (A “zephyr” is a west wind, incidentally.) Somewhere between Denver and Cheyenne, Wyoming, I met an Italian fellow in the club car. He spoke very little English; I spoke no Italian. I did, however, manage to get his name and to ask, “What do you do for a living in Italy?”
“I am painter,” Oscar said.
See how romantic it is traveling by train? Have you ever had a drink with an Italian artist somewhere between Denver and Cheyenne, Wyoming, while traveling in an airplane? Neither have I.
“And what do you paint?” I asked my Italian friend. “Landscapes, still-lifes, pastels?”
“Houses,” Oscar answered. “I am house painter.”
Okay, so how many Italian house painters have you met on airplanes?
Eventually, my profession led me to travel a great deal. When you write books, you have to go many places in an attempt to sell those books. Also, people will invite you to make speeches in front of large groups (that frankly would rather have skipped the dinner and the speaker and kept the cocktail party going).
It soon became evident to me that either I would have to give up the rails as my primary mode of transportation or get a new profession, such as working in a liquor store.
In a more civilized time, a book publisher would say, “Could you be in Bakersfield, California, by Friday?” They would say that on the previous Saturday.
“Certainly,” you would answer. “I can connect with the ‘Super Chief’ in Chicago and be there in plenty of time.”
But book publishers don’t say that anymore. Now they say, “Can you be in Bakersfield by five this afternoon?”, and they say that at ten in the morning. And you answer, “No problem. I’ll shave and shower and catch the noon flight, and with the time change, I’ll be able to get a haircut at the the airport in L.A.”
Anyway, the guy at the liquor store said he didn’t need any help, so I had to take up flying.
The main reason I’ve never liked flying is that I’m terrified at the very thought of it. My friends have all attempted to make me feel better by pointing out that more people die from slipping in the bathtub than in commercial airplane crashes. If there were any way to travel by bathtub, I tell them, I certainly would do it.
If airplanes are so safe, why do they make you strap yourself in the seat? And why do they always point out, “Your seat cushions may be used for flotation”? If I had wanted to float to Bakersfield, I would have chartered a canoe.
And I still don’t understand how those big suckers fly. I have a friend who is brilliant in the area of engineering and such. One day, we were riding near the airport and a large plane took off over our car.
“What makes those big suckers fly?” I asked him.
“Well, you see, there is the air foil and lift and blah, blah, blah, technical, technical....”
“I know all that,” I said, “but what I really want to know is, What makes those big suckers fly?”
Faced with the option of either flying or drawing unemployment, I searched for ways to control my terror. For the benefit of others who may feel the same, here is how I cope with my own fear:
—I drink a lot before getting on the plane. I’m not talking about having one drink or two. I’m talking about joining all the airlines’ private clubs, where the booze is free, and drinking six or eight double screwdrivers and then calling for one of those buggies they carry handicapped people in to take me to my gate.
—I drink a lot while I’m in the air, and I ask the stewardesses to allow me to mix my own drinks, so they’ll be very strong. The only problem with drinking this much is that sometimes when the airplane lands, I get off and cannot remember what city I was traveling to. So I ask and somebody tells me, but then I can’t remember what I was supposed to do when I got there, so I go back to Delta’s Crown Room or Eastern’s Ionosphere Lounge and have another drink.
—When I have a choice, I prefer to fly with the airline that has had the latest crash. I figure my odds are better on an airline that isn’t due.
—I never fly on the national airlines of Communist countries, or countries where they think cows are sacred and allow them to wander around in the streets.
—I never fly on commuter airlines. If the pilots are so good, why are they stuck flying for Air Chance (“We’ll take a chance, if you will”)? Besides, you know what they serve you to eat on airlines like that? The stewardess passes around an apple and a pocket knife.
—No matter what, I never go to the toilet in an airplane to do anything I can’t do standing up. This eventually may lead to a very embarrassing situation for me, but I don’t want them to pick through the charred remains of a crash and find me with my pants down sitting on a toilet.
—I call the pilot the night before takeoff to make certain that he isn’t drinking and that he is in bed early.
—I am able to relax a bit after the seat belt sign goes off and the pilot comes on the intercom. If they’ve turned off the warning light and the pilot doesn’t have anything to do but talk on the intercom, I figure all is well in the cockpit. On some flights, the pilot never comes on the intercom. I order another drink when that happens.
—I pray a lot. There are no atheists in a foxhole, and I doubt there are any in a 727 that is passing through heavy turbulence after takeoff from Philadelphia at night. I try never to have any dirty thoughts on an airplane, so God will like me and listen to my prayers.
Even if airplanes weren’t frightening, they still would be a large pain. The food, of course, is awful; all airports are crowded; and there’s usually a baby crying on every airplane (must be some sort of FAA regulation).
Planes are also frequently late, they can’t take off or land in heavy fog, and sometimes too many planes are waiting to land or take off. Waiting to take off isn’t that unsettling, but circling around waiting to land, knowing that a frustrated and overworked air controller is the only thing between you and a mid-air collision, is not a happy thought.
Keeping up with airline fares these days is also a big headache. I always feel guilty when I fly because I might not have gotten the best fare. You have to be careful trying to get too good a deal, however. I saw advertised recently a flight between Atlanta and New York for $26. I called the airline to inquire. The hitch was that you had to ride in a crate in the cargo hold.
Think how much better the world would be today if the airplane had never been invented. There wouldn’t be any threat of nuclear war. How are the Russians going to drop a bomb on us without an airplane? They sure couldn’t throw it out the back of a panel truck.
And if flying had never been invented, we wouldn’t have spent all that money on the Space Program, in which we sent a bunch of people to the moon to find out that it looks a lot like Nevada.
If we didn’t have airplanes and still took trains, we would know a lot more about our country. You would be surprised how much of the country you can see from a train window. Did you know, for instance, that there are more piles of junk in Newark, New Jersey, than anywhere else in America?
If there were no airplanes, we wouldn’t have to put up with Frank Borman, and no matter what a terrorist threatened to do, there is no way he could hijack a train to Cuba. And did you ever lose your bags on a train trip? Of course not. I took a flight between Atlanta and Charlotte once, but the airline sent my bags to Caracas.
Planes cause people to be in a rush. They cause them to go a lot of places they probably wouldn’t go to if they thought about it long enough — places like Nassau and New York City and Cannes, France, where I flew to once. After about an hour, watching barebreasted women gets boring; then you have to go back to the hotel, where every Algerian and his brother-in-law is in the lobby having a loud argument.
And finally, if we hadn’t been smart enough to invent airplanes, we likely wouldn’t have been smart enough to invent computers, either; and I definitely could do without computers. In fact, I may be one of the last holdouts against computers, and I can prove it by explaining that I am typing these very words on a 1959 manual Royal typewriter for which I paid ninety bucks and wouldn’t sell for five times that, because I don’t know if I would be able to find another one.
People in the swing of modern ways often say to me, “Why don’t you get yourself one of those word processors? It would make writing a lot easier for you.”
No, it wouldn’t. First, I would have to sit for hours at a time staring at a television screen with words on it. It would be like watching one of those cable television stations where they play music in the background and words appear on the screen, giving you the news and baseball linescores.
If I watch one of those stations for longer than ten minutes, I get sick to my stomach. It’s the same feeling I get when I try to read in a car.
Also, I don’t know where the words go in one of those word processors. You type a lot of words onto the screen, which will hold just so many, and then they disappear. What if they accidentally went into somebody else’s word processor? Not that anybody else would want my words, but some things I write never appear in print and would tend to embarrass me if somebody else were to look at them.
All of journalism has gone to computers these days. In fact, nobody types on paper anymore. When I was an editor, we had paper all over the place, especially on the floor. It gave the office a homey look. Now, there is no paper and there is carpet on the floor. I walk into a newspaper office today and I feel like opening a checking account.
When I write, I like to hear some noise. I enjoy hearing the tap-tap-tap of the keys on my Royal manual. When I hear that sound, especially if I hear it without interruption, I know I’m getting something accomplished. As with any machine, however, minor problems occasionally occur with my typewriter. For instance, I once wrote an entire book without the letter “e” available to me, because the “e” character had broken on its key.
When I handed in my manuscript, the editor said, “What are all these blank spaces on your manuscript?”
“Wherever you see a blank space,” I said, “that’s where an ‘e’ goes.”
There’s also the small matter of maintaining a fresh ribbon in a manual typewriter, and sometimes the keys get stuck together and you get ink all over your hands trying to pry them apart. I’m constantly getting the “g,” “j,” and “f’ keys stuck together, because I have bricks for hands. But at least my manual typewriter can’t be knocked out by lightning and won’t go on the fritz if I happen to spill coffee on it.
Frankly, I don’t dislike computers as much as I dislike people who spend a lot of time operating them. They speak to one another in a language I don’t understand, and I’m convinced they think they’re a lot smarter than people who don’t know anything about computers. I have a feeling that these are the same people who carried around slide rules when I was in high school and college and thought spending an afternoon discussing logarithms was keen fun.
Computers also have become an excuse. For example, “Pardon me, but is flight 108 to Cleveland on time?”
“Sorry, sir, but our computer is down.”
I think what they really mean is that they have lost flight 108 to Cleveland but won’t admit it. That’s something else I never had to deal with when I rode trains.
“Is ol’ 98 running on time?”
“She was about two minutes late into Steamboat Junction, but she’s highballin’ now.”
Once, a large company owed me some money. It never came. I called and inquired about my check.
“Our computers have been down,” I was told.
“Isn’t there a company officer somewhere who can simply write a check and then you could mail it to me?”
“All our checks and mailing are done by computer.”
I know what they were doing. They were using my money to pay for the repairs on their stupid computers.
I’m afraid we are ruining an entire generation of Americans by getting our children involved in computers at a very young age. In some elementary schools today, kids bring their own computers to class. All I needed in elementary school was a box of crayons and milk money.
You give a kid a computer and strange things can happen. One of the little boogers eventually will figure out how to launch a Pershing missile, and try explaining to what’s left of the Kremlin that little Johnny Manderson of Fort Worth, Texas, was just kidding around on his computer. I say put a twenty-one-year-old age limit on computers and send the kids outside to play ball or go drag racing. Should a kid really know his user I.D. before he knows how many fingers to hold up for his age?
My first experience with computers came when I entered college. They handed me computer cards as I enrolled in different classes. Each computer card had written on it, “Do not fold, bend, staple, or mutilate.” I wondered what would happen if I should fold, bend, staple, or mutilate one of the cards.
My curiosity finally got to me, so I bent and folded and stapled and mutilated and even poured catsup on my computer card. There were no serious injuries or substantial penalties forthcoming, but it took me two quarters to get my standing as a home economics major changed.
All sorts of things puzzle me about computers:
—Computer shopping: Do we really want to shop by computer? The instant you see a TV commercial, you press a button on your computer and a conveyor belt delivers Ginsu knives to your kitchen and deducts $14.95 from your account. Could you really tell if a pair of loafers would fit by looking at them on a video monitor?
—Easy-to-use computers: That’s easy for somebody else to say. I can barely operate a bottle of aspirin.
—Talking computers: Now there are even cars that talk to you. “You need gas, you need gas,” says your car. Talking cars give me gas.
—Understanding computers: Where do all those cables on computers go to? Is there a little Oriental guy in a room somewhere with an abacus going a mile a minute? What’s the difference between “software” and “hardware”? Is one part wool and itches a lot? Is a “semiconductor” a person who works for the railroad part-time?
—Computer dating: What if the computer doesn’t mind girls who don’t shave their legs and gets me a date with one? I’m the one who has to kiss her goodnight, not the computer.
—Personal computers: I don’t want to get personal with a computer. I wasn’t compatible with three wives. How am I supposed to be compatible with IBM?
You know something else about computers? There’s nothing funny about them. In doing research for this chapter, I looked in several computer magazines. There was not a single joke section or cartoon in any of them.
The big question we must all ask is, Where is this computer business going to end? How much of our lives are they going to take over? The first computer filled a warehouse. Now, a computer the size of your fingernail can do the same amount of computing. Will they eventually be like contact lenses, only worse? You see somebody down on their hands and knees and you say, “Lose something?”
“Yeah,” comes the answer. “I dropped my computer. I know it’s here in the grass somewhere.”
Computers can even talk to each other now, so what’s to keep them from plotting against us? And here is something else to worry about: What if all the computers on earth went down at one time? Life as we know it would come to a standstill all over the planet. The only people who would know how to carry on would be natives who live in the African bush who never have heard of computers, and me, who has steadfastly refused to learn to operate one.
Frankly, I’m sort of looking forward to that day. I could dress up in a loin cloth with my friends from the bush, and we could dance up and down and I could laugh and say, “I told you so,” and poke all those uppity computer-types in their butts with my spear.
I want to get even with computers and the people who build them and the people who run them. That desire peaked recently at the airport in Jacksonville, Florida.
I was awaiting a flight. I went into the airport lounge to have my normal six or eight pre-flight double screwdrivers. There was nothing that looked unusual about the bar—just a couple of barmaids serving a weary traveler here and there.
“Can I help you?” one of the barmaids asked me.
“Double screwdriver, please,” I said, “and a little heavier on the screw than the driver, if you will. The weather’s bad out and I have to fly.”
The barmaid didn’t understand my little joke.
“What I’m trying to say,” I explained, “is could you give me a little extra vodka and a little less orange juice in my drink. I’m nervous when I fly, and the more I drink, the more comfortable is my flight.”
“All I can give you,” replied the barmaid, “is what the computer shoots out.”
“I beg your pardon?” I asked, somewhat in shock.
“The cash register has got this computer in it, and it’s hooked up to the little hoses that we pour the liquor out of. All I do is mash the button, and the computer squirts out a shot, and it all gets rung up on the cash register.”
“Let me see if I have this straight,” I said. “You have no power whatsoever over how the drinks are poured? A computer measures the amount of booze I get in my drink, and there’s no way you can change that?”
“Right,” said the barmaid.
“In that case,” I said, “bring me the coldest beer you have.”
“Ain’t got no cold beer,” said the barmaid. “The cooler’s busted.”
The flight was delayed two hours because of the bad weather. I caught a cab to the nearest convenience store, bought two quart bottles of beer, and drank them out of a paper sack, eating peanuts and Slim Jims and watching the rain fall. Computerized drinking is the final straw, I thought to myself, and I prayed silently for the day that somebody, or something, would pull the plug on all this madness.
* * *
My incompatibility with modernity does not cease with airplanes and computers. Here are some other modern conveniences that aren’t.
—Telephones: Do you really think we’ve made a lot of progress in telephones? We haven’t. Telephones, when I was a kid, were very simple to operate. You didn’t even have to dial the blasted things. You just picked up the receiver, and when somebody else came on the line, you said, “Hilda, get me the courthouse.”
Gossip was a lot easier to keep up with then, too, if you were on a party line. And telephone operators would make long distance calls for you, and if the line was busy, they would say, “Would you like for me to keep trying and call you back?” That was service.
I’m very confused about telephones today. I am not certain who’s in charge of the telephones anymore, and there are all sorts of things you have to decide when you have a telephone installed.
Telephones used to be black. That was it. They were sort of short and squatty and black. Today, you can have a telephone in the shape of a pretzel if you so desire. A pink pretzel. “Watson, come here, you savage.”
Telephone numbers used to be fun, too. You dialed PLaza 7-3622, or WEird 9-6238 (if you were calling somebody in California). There weren’t any area codes, either, and there were no such things as credit card numbers.
I have a friend who has one those new Sprint calling services. First, he has to dial a local number to get himself a dial tone (or should that be punch tone?) in order to make a long distance call. Then he has to punch in something called an “access code.” Then he has to dial the number he’s trying to reach.
“First,” he was explaining to me, “I punch in the local number, 355-0044, which is seven digits. Then I punch in my access code, which is 525-833-611, nine more digits. Then I punch in the number I’m calling, say, 1-817-423-5578. That’s another eleven digits, and that’s a total of twenty-seven digits. And just about the time I’m punching the last of them, my finger always slips and I have to start over.”
I hate recording devices that answer telephones, too, because they entice people to create cute recorded messages.
“Hi, this is Bob. Well, actually it’s not. This is Bob’s machine. Bob got it from his mom for his last birthday. Mom said she was going to get Bob a puppy, but she was afraid it would just mess all over the carpet and Mom is very clean-conscious, so she got him this machine. Bob is out right now, but he will be back later, so at the sound of the tone, please leave your name and number and any message, and when Bob comes home he will call you back ... Beeeeeeeeeep!”
I can’t help it. Whenever I call a number and get one of those recordings, I always leave a message designed to frighten whoever owns the contraption:
“Bob, this is Davenport at the IRS, and we urgently need to see you. Do not make any plans that can’t be broken for the next seven years.”
Whoever invented call-waiting for telephones should be taken out and shot. Nothing infuriates me more than to be talking to somebody on the telephone when that little click goes off, and they say, “Would you mind holding for just a second?”
Damn right, I mind holding. You called me; I didn’t call you.
People who have these devices on their telephones have large egos. So what if somebody calls and gets a busy signal because the person is on the phone talking to me? Who could be calling that is that important? I suspect that they really don’t work. People simply have clicking noises put in their phones so that when I’m talking to them, I’ll think they’re very important and popular because a lot of other people are trying to reach them.
—Showers with complicated knobs: These are found mostly in hotels. Remember how simple showers used to be to operate? There was a knob with an “H” on it and one with a “C” on it. You turned the “H” knob for hot water and the “C” knob for cold water, and you could get your shower just right.
I go into hotels now where it would take a degree from MIT to figure out which way to turn the handle to get hot and cold water. I’m surprised that scalding hasn’t reached epidemic proportions in this country.
—Self-service gas stations: You go to one pump if you have a credit card, another if you have the correct cash, or another if it’s Tuesday and you’re wearing green slacks. I have closed deals on houses in less time than it takes to figure out how to pump ten gallons of gasoline into my automobile.
—Beepers: You can run these days, but you can’t hide.
—Eyeglasses that are supposed to turn dark when you walk outside and then clear up when you go back inside: They never clear up enough when you go back inside. I had some glasses like that. Every time I walked inside a building, somebody tried to buy pencils from me.
—Talking soft drink machines: I like to put my coins in the machine and get a soft drink. If I wanted conversation, I’d talk to my car.
—The designated hitter in baseball: This has nothing to do with gadgetry, but it’s another ridiculous modern idea. It keeps too many old, slow, fat people in the game.
—Electric shoe shiners: They don’t work. When I have my shoes shined, I want to hear a rag pop.
—Beer with lower alcohol content: This allows too many sissies into good beer joints and taverns.
—Automatic pinsetters in bowling alleys: They put a lot of good pin boys out of work, and how do those things operate in the first place?
—Commodes in public places that flush automatically: I think it is my right as an American to be able to flush any commode I might be using when I’m good and ready.
* * *
There rests in most of us, I suppose, a longing for the simpler past. I’m convinced that simplicity breeds contentment, but how can one be content when constantly befuddled by a thousand different electronic gizmos that we really don’t need, and by a constant stream of new ideas that don’t give a national damn for tradition?
As I grow older, I become more and more comfortable ignoring these changes and trends. I don’t have to do things any more just because everybody else is doing them. Who knows? Maybe by the time I’m forty, I will be able to tell somebody who wants me to be in Bakersfield by five o’clock to go stick their head in their Jacuzzi; I’m taking the train.
The thought is a delicious one.