I'm a Stranger Here Myself

by Bill Bryson

  For nearly every other type of product—frozen pizzas, dog food, ice creams, cereals, cookies, potato chips—the choices were often literally in the hundreds. Every new flavor seemed to have pupped another flavor. When I was a boy shredded wheat was shredded wheat and that was it. Now you could have it coated in sugar or cinnamon, in bite-size morsels, with slices of genuine bananalike material, and goodness knows what else.

  And this applies to everything. You can now choose, apparently, among thirty-five varieties of Crest toothpaste. According to The Economist, “The average supermarket in America devotes 20 feet of shelving to medicines for coughs and colds.” (And never mind that of the 25,500 “new” consumer products launched in the United States last year, 93 percent were merely modified versions of existing products.)

  After twenty years in England this copious abundance was, as you might imagine, almost intoxicating. Lately, however, I have come to suspect that perhaps you can get too much choice. I found myself edging around to this view recently when I was at the airport in Portland, Oregon, standing in a line of about fifteen people at a coffee stand. It was 5:45 A.M., not my best time of day, and I had just twenty minutes till my flight was to be called, but I really, really needed to get some caffeine into my system. You know how it is.

  It used to be if you wanted a cup of coffee that’s what you asked for and that’s what you got. But this place, being a 1990s sort of coffee stand, offered at least twenty choices—plain latte, caramel latte, breve, macchiato, mocha, espresso, espresso mocha, black forest mocha, americano, and so on—in a range of sizes. There was also a galaxy of muffins, croissants, bagels, and pastries. All of these could be had in any number of variations, so that every order went something like this:

  “I’ll have a caramel latte combo with decaf mocha and a cinnamon twist, and a low-fat cream cheese sourdough bagel, but I’d like the pimento grated and on the side. Are your poppyseeds roasted in polyunsaturated vegetable oil?”

  “No, we use double-extra-lite canola extract.”

  “Oh, that’s no good for me. In that case, I’ll have a New York three-cheese pumpernickel fudge croissant. What kind of emulsifiers do you use in that?”

  In my mind’s eye, I saw myself taking each customer by the ears, shaking his or her head slowly eighteen or twenty times, and saying: “You’re just trying to get a cup of coffee and a bread product before your flight. Now ask for something simple and scram.”

  Fortunately for all these people, until I have had my first cup of coffee in the morning (and this is particularly true during hours in single digits) all I can do is rise, dress myself (a bit), and ask for a cup of coffee. Anything else is beyond me. So I just stood and waited stoically while fifteen people placed complex, time-consuming, preposterously individualized orders.

  When at last my turn came, I stepped up and said: “I’d like a large cup of coffee.”

  “What kind?”

  “Hot and in a cup and very large.”

  “Yeah, but what kind—mocha, macchiato, what?”

  “I want whichever one is a normal cup of coffee.”

  “You want americano?”

  “If that means a normal cup of coffee, then yes.”

  “Well, they’re all coffees.”

  “I want a normal cup of coffee like millions of people drink every day.”

  “So you want an americano?”

  “Evidently.”

  “Do you want regular whipped cream or low-cal with that?”

  “I don’t want whipped cream.”

  “But it comes with whipped cream.”

  “Look,” I said in a low voice, “it is 6:10 A.M. I have been standing for twenty-five minutes behind fifteen seriously selective people, and my flight is being called. If I don’t get some coffee right now—and by right now I mean right now—I am going to have to murder someone, and I think you should know that you are on the short list.” (I am not, as you will gather, a morning person.)

  “So does that mean you want low-cal whipped cream or regular?”

  And so it went.

  This abundance of choice not only makes every transaction take ten times as long as it ought to, but in a strange way actually breeds dissatisfaction. The more there is, the more people crave, and the more they crave, the more they, well, crave more. You have a sense sometimes of being among millions and millions of people needing more and more of everything, constantly, infinitely, unquenchably. We appear to have created a society in which the principal pastime is grazing through retail establishments looking for things—textures, shapes, flavors—not before encountered.

  The last time I went for breakfast, I had to choose among nine options for my eggs (poached, scrambled, sunny side up, over easy, and so on), sixteen types of pancake, six varieties of juice, two shapes of sausage, four kinds of potato, and eight varieties of toast, muffin, or bagel. I have taken out mortgages that involved less decision-making than that. I thought I had finished when the waitress said: “Do you want whipped butter, pat butter, butter-margarine blend, or butter substitute?”

  “You’re joking,” I said.

  “I don’t joke about butter.”

  “Then pat butter,” I said weakly.

  “Low-sodium, no-sodium, or regular?”

  “Surprise me,” I answered in a whisper.

  To my astonishment, my wife and children love all this. They love going into an ice cream parlor and being able to choose among seventy-five flavors of ice cream, and then seventy-five types of topping to put on that ice cream.

  For my part, I find increasingly that I miss the simplicity, the almost willful paucity, of the English way of doing things. Confronted with a glass case filled with twenty-seven types of pizza or a food court stand offering 126 possible permutations of pretzel, I just wish for a nice cup of tea and a simple, virtually flavorless bun, but I’m afraid I am the only person in the house who feels that way. I trust that my wife and kids will eventually grow sated by all this, but there is no sign of it happening yet.

  Still, looking on the bright side, at least I am well-fixed for incontinence diapers.

  Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding. I am constantly filled with wonder at the number of things that other people do without any evident difficulty that are pretty much beyond me. I cannot tell you the number of times that I have gone looking for the rest room in a movie theater, for instance, and ended up standing in an alley on the wrong side of a self-locking door. My particular specialty now is returning to hotel desks two or three times a day and asking what my room number is. I am, in short, easily confused.

  I was thinking about this the last time we went en famille on a big trip. It was at Easter, and we were flying to England for a week. When we arrived at the airport in Boston and were checking in, I suddenly remembered that I had recently joined British Airways’ frequent flyer program. I also remembered that I had put the card in the carry-on bag that was hanging around my neck. And here’s where the trouble started.

  The zipper on the bag was jammed. So I pulled on it and yanked at it, with grunts and frowns and increasing consternation. While Mrs. Bryson dealt with the checking-in process, I went off into a self-absorbed little world of my own, one that involved just me and a recalcitrant zipper. I pulled and tugged and fiddled, and pulled harder and harder, with more grunts and growls, until the zipper abruptly and lavishly gave way. The side of the bag flew open and everything within—newspaper clippings and other loose papers, a 14-ounce can of pipe tobacco, magazines, passport, English money, film—was ejected over an area about the size of a tennis court.

  I watched dumbstruck as a hundred carefully sorted documents came raining down in a fluttery cascade, coins bounced to a variety of noisy oblivions, and the now-lidless can of tobacco rolled crazily across the concourse disgorging its contents as it went.

  “My tobacco!” I cried in horror, thinking what I would have to pay for that much tobacco in England, and the
n changed the cry to “My finger! My finger!” as I discovered that I had gashed my finger on the zipper and was dripping blood in a lively manner. (I am not very good around flowing blood generally, but when it’s my own—well, I think hysterics are fully in order.) Confused and unable to help, my hair went into panic mode.

  It was at this point that my wife looked at me with an expression of wonder—not anger or exasperation, but just simple wonder—and said: “I can’t believe you do this for a living.”

  But I’m afraid it’s so. I always have catastrophes when I travel. Once on an airplane, I leaned over to tie a shoelace just at the moment that the person in the seat ahead of me threw his seat back into full recline, and I found myself pinned helplessly in the crash position. It was only by clawing the leg of the man sitting next to me that I managed to get myself freed.

  On another occasion, I knocked a soft drink onto the lap of a sweet little lady sitting beside me. The flight attendant came and cleaned her up, and brought me a replacement drink, and instantly I knocked it onto the woman again. To this day, I don’t know how I did it. I just remember reaching out for the new drink and watching helplessly as my arm, like some cheap prop in one of those 1950s horror movies with a name like “The Undead Limb,” violently swept the drink from its perch and onto her lap.

  The lady looked at me with the stupefied expression you would expect to receive from someone whom you have repeatedly drenched, and uttered an exceptionally earnest oath that started with “Oh” and finished with “sake” and in between had some words that I have never heard uttered in public before, certainly not by a nun.

  This, however, was not my worst experience on a plane flight. My worst experience was when I was writing important thoughts in a notebook (“Buy socks,” “clutch drinks carefully,” etc.) sucking thoughtfully on the end of my pen as you do, and fell into conversation with an attractive lady in the next seat. I amused her for perhaps twenty minutes with a scattering of urbane bons mots, then retired to the lavatory where I discovered that the pen had leaked and that my lips, tongue, teeth, and gums were now a striking, scrub-resistant navy blue, and would remain so for several days.

  So you will understand, I trust, when I tell you how much I ache to be suave. I would love just once in my life to rise from a dinner table without looking as if I have just experienced an extremely localized seismic event, get in a car and close the door without leaving fourteen inches of coat outside, wear light-colored pants without discovering at the end of the day that I have at various times sat in chewing gum, ice cream, cough syrup, and motor oil. But it is not to be.

  Now on planes when the food is delivered, my wife says: “Take the lids off the food for Daddy” or “Put your hoods up, children. Daddy’s about to cut his meat.” Of course, this is only when I am flying with my family. When I am on my own, I don’t eat, drink, or lean over to tie my shoelaces, and never put a pen anywhere near my mouth. I just sit very, very quietly, sometimes on my hands to keep them from flying out unexpectedly and causing liquid mischief. It’s not much fun, but it does at least cut down on the laundry bills.

  I never did get my frequent flyer miles, by the way. I never do. I couldn’t find the card in time. This has become a real frustration for me. Everyone I know—everyone—is forever flying off to Bali first class with their air miles. I never get to collect anything. I must fly 100,000 miles a year, yet I have accumulated only about 212 air miles divided among twenty-three airlines.

  This is because either I forget to ask for the air miles when I check in or I remember to ask for them but the airline then manages not to record them or the check-in clerk informs me that I am not entitled to them. In January, on a flight to Australia—a flight for which I was going to get about a zillion frequent flyer miles—the clerk shook her head when I presented my card and told me I was not entitled to any.

  “Why?”

  “The ticket is in the name of B. Bryson and the card is in the name of W. Bryson.”

  I explained to her the venerable relationship between the names Bill and William, but she wouldn’t have it.

  So I didn’t get my frequent flyer miles, and I won’t be jetting off to Bali first class just yet. Perhaps just as well, really. I could never go that long without eating.

  “Science finds the secret of aging,” announced a headline in our paper the other day, which surprised me because I’ve never thought of it as a secret. It just happens. No secret in that.

  As far as I am concerned, there are three good things about getting older. I can sleep sitting up, I can watch “Seinfeld” reruns over and over without being able to say definitively whether I have seen them already, and I can’t remember the third thing. That’s the problem with getting older, of course— you can’t remember anything.

  For me, it’s getting worse. Increasingly I have telephone conversations with my wife that go like this:

  “Hello, dear. I’m in town. Why am I here?”

  “You’ve gone to get an ink cartridge for your printer.”

  “Thank you.”

  You would think that as I get older this would get better because there is less of my mind to grow absent, but it doesn’t seem to work that way. You know how as the years tick by you find yourself more and more standing in some part of the house you don’t often visit—the laundry area perhaps—looking around with pursed lips and a thoughtful gaze, trying to remember why you are there? It used to be with me that if I retraced my steps back to where I began, the purpose of this curious expedition would come to me. No more. Now I can’t even remember where I began. No idea at all.

  So I wander through the house for twenty minutes looking for some sign of recent activity—a lifted floorboard perhaps, or a burst pipe, or maybe a telephone receiver on its side and a curious little voice squawking: “Bill? You still there?”—something in any case that might have prompted me to get up and go off in search of a notepad or stopcock or goodness knows what. Usually in the course of these wanderings I find some other thing that needs attending to—a lightbulb that’s burned out, say—so I go off to the kitchen cupboard where the light bulbs are kept and open the door and . . . yes, that’s right, have no idea why I am there. So the process starts again.

  Time is my particular downfall. Once something moves into the past tense, I lose all track of it. My sincerest dread in life is to be arrested and asked: “Where were you between the hours of 8:50 A.M. and 11:02 A.M. on the morning of December 11, 1998?” When this happens, I will just hold out my wrists for the handcuffs and let them take me away because there isn’t the remotest chance of my recalling. It has been like this for me for as long as I can remember, which of course is not very long.

  My wife does not have this problem. She can remember everything that ever happened and when. I mean every little detail. Out of the blue she will say things to me like: “It was sixteen years ago this week your grandmother died.”

  “Really?” I reply, amazed. “I had a grandmother?”

  The other thing that happens a lot these days is that when I am out with my wife somebody I would swear I have never seen before comes up and chats with us in a friendly and familiar fashion.

  “Who was that?” I will ask when he has departed.

  “That was Lottie Rhubarb’s husband.”

  I think for a moment, but nothing comes.

  “Who’s Lottie Rhubarb?”

  “You met her at the Talmadges’ barbecue at Big Bear Lake.”

  “I’ve never been to Big Bear Lake.”

  “Yes you have. For the Talmadges’ barbecue.”

  I think again for a minute. “So who are the Talmadges?”

  “The people on Park Street who had the barbecue for the Skowolskis.”

  By now I am beginning to feel desperate. “Who are the Skowolskis?”

  “The Polish couple you met at the barbecue at Big Bear Lake.”

  “I didn’t go to a barbecue at Big Bear Lake.”

  “Of course you did. You sat on a skewer.�
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  “I sat on a skewer?”

  We have had conversations like this that have gone on for three days, and I have still been none the wiser at the end.

  I have always been absentminded, I’m afraid. When I was a boy I had an afternoon newspaper route in the wealthiest neighborhood in Des Moines, which sounds like a plum assignment but was not because, in the first place, rich people are the biggest skinflints at Christmas (especially, let the record show, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur J. Niedermeyer of 27 St. John’s Road, Dr. and Mrs. Richard Gumbel in the big brick house on Lincoln Place, and Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Drinkwater of the Drinkwater banking fortune; I hope you are all in nursing homes now) and because every house was set back a quarter of a mile from the street at the end of a long, curving drive.

  Even in hypothetically ideal circumstances, it would take hours to complete such a route, but I never got to such a point. My problem was that while my legs did the route, my mind would be in that state of dozy reverie that characterizes all absentminded people.

  Without fail, at the end of the route I would look into my bag and, with a long-suffering sigh, find half a dozen papers left over, each representing a house I had visited—a long drive I had trudged up, a porch I had crossed, a screened door I had opened—without actually leaving a newspaper behind. Needless to say, I would have no recollection of which of the eighty properties on my route these were, so I would sigh again and walk the route a second time. By such means did I pass my childhood. I wonder if the Neidermeyers, Gumbels, and Drinkwaters had known what hell I went through every day to get them their stupid Des Moines Tribune whether they would have been quite so happy to stiff me at Christmas. Probably.