Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit

by Andy Rooney

  I hate to see a story about a bank swindler who has jiggered the books to his own advantage, because I trust banks. I don’t like them, but I trust them. I don’t go in and demand that they show me my money all the time just to make sure they still have it.

  It’s the same buying a can of coffee or a quart of milk. You don’t take the coffee home and weigh it to make sure it’s a pound. There isn’t time in life to distrust every person you meet or every company you do business with. I hated the company that started selling beer in eleven-ounce bottles years ago. One of the million things we take on trust is that a beer bottle contains twelve ounces.

  It’s interesting to look around and at people and compare their faith or lack of faith in other people with their success or lack of success in life. The patsies, the suckers, the people who always assume everyone else is as honest as they are, make out better in the long run than the

  Intelligence 143

  people who distrust everyone—and they’re a lot happier even if they get taken once in a while.

  I was so proud of myself for stopping for that red light, and inasmuch as no one would ever have known what a good person I was on the road from Harrisburg to Lewisburg, I had to tell someone.

  Intelligence

  I f you are not the smartest person in the world, you usually find some way to be satisfied most of the time with the brain you’ve got. I was thinking about all this in bed last night because I made a dumb mistake yesterday and I was looking for some way to excuse myself for it so I could go to sleep.

  The thing that saves most of us from feeling terrible about our limited intellect is some small part of our personality or character that makes us different. Being uniquely ourselves makes us feel better about not being smart. It’s those little differences we have that keep us from committing suicide when we realize, early in life, that a lot of people have more brains than we have.

  There are two kinds of intelligence, too. One can be measured in numbers from tests but the other and better kind of intelligence is something no one has ever been able to measure. The second kind is a sort of understanding of life that some of the people with the most intelligence of the first type, don’t have any of. They may have scored 145 in the I.Q. tests they took in school but they’re idiots out in the real world. This is also a great consolation to those of us who did not score 145 in our I.Q. tests.

  It almost seems as though the second type of intelligence comes from somewhere other than the brain. A poet would say it comes from the heart. I’m not a poet and I wouldn’t say that but it does appear as though some of the best decisions we make spring spontaneously to our minds from somewhere else in our bodies.

  Enjoying a good laugh with Lesley Stahl, Art Buchwald, and Mike Wallace (hands clasped); note reads: Andy—Straighten up, dammit! Thanks—Mike

  How do you otherwise account for love, tears or the quickened heartbeat that comes with fear? All these things strike us independently of any real thought process. We don’t think things through and decide to fall in love or decide to cry or have our heart beat faster.

  There is so much evidence that there’s more than one kind of intelligence that we can relax, believing that we have a lot of the less obvious kind. I prefer to ignore the possibility that someone with a higher I.Q. than mine might also have more of the second kind of intelligence. One person should not be so lucky as to have intelligence of both the brain and the heart.

  I wish there was some way to decide who the five smartest people are in the world because I’ve always wanted to ask them the five hardest questions. I haven’t decided who the five smartest people are and I haven’t settled on all five questions, either.

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  One question I’ve considered for my list is this:

  “Are people smarter than they were a thousand years ago?” It’s a hard one. Athletes are running faster, jumping farther and lifting heavier weights. This suggests our brains must also be performing better.

  On the other hand, are our eyes and ears any better than the eyes and ears of the Romans who watched the lions eat the Christians in the year 200 a.d.? Probably not. My guess would be that our eyes and our ears haven’t changed for better or for worse except as we abuse them through misuse.

  If our eyes and ears haven’t changed in size or improved in performance, the chances are our brains haven’t either. I forget when they invented the wheel but did it take any less intelligence to invent the wheel centuries ago than it took this century to invent the windshield wiper, the ballpoint pen or the toaster oven?

  It must have been 2:30 before I finally fell asleep.

  Directions

  E arly next year I’m going to take a week off and read the directions for all the things I’ve bought that came with the warning read directions carefully before operating.

  There’s no sense reading directions to something before you understand a little bit about it, because they don’t mean anything to you. You have to know enough about something to be confused before directions help. Once I’ve pressed some wrong buttons or tried to open something by pressing on it when I should have been pulling on it or sliding it sideways, then I can understand the directions.

  I have a whole box of directions I’ve never read. Many of them are still in their plastic wrappers. When Christmas comes again, I’ll probably be getting more. Last Christmas my kids gave me a new camera. I’ve shot ten rolls of film with it and I’ve made about all the mistakes there are to be made. It will be fun now to see if the directions have any good suggestions.

  It is always surprising to me to see how many issues divide our population almost in half. For example, I think it’s safe to say that we are about evenly divided between people who read directions before operating, as they’re warned to do under threat of death, and people who don’t ever read the directions. The same people who don’t read the maps in the glove compartments of their cars are the ones who don’t pore over the instructions for operating their new washing machine or video cassette player.

  My wife drives a Saab and during the three years we’ve had it, I’ve used it a dozen times. For the life of me I can’t figure out how the heater works. I almost froze last winter driving into the city one day. This summer I drove in with it on a hot day and fussed with the controls the whole hour trying to get the air conditioning to work. That night I complained to my wife about how complicated the controls were. I said I was going to read the directions about how to work the air conditioning.

  “Forget it,” she said. “It doesn’t have air conditioning.”

  In spite of some bad experiences, I’m a firm believer in the trial and error method of learning. If I were asked to take the space shuttle into outer space, I’d first want to climb on board and start fooling with the controls before I read anything about it. If I do read the directions about something before I know a single thing about it, I get so discouraged I give up. If, on the other hand, I bumble along making mistakes, confident that I can always look at the directions if I have to, then I usually find out how to do it the hard way.

  Direction writers have improved over the years. Even the directions that come with a piece of Japanese electronic equipment are written in better English than they used to be.

  You’d think it might be dangerous to ignore written directions but usually those little red tags say something like danger: under no circumstances should this be put in a bathtub full of water!

  They warn you against some very obvious things. Most of us know by now that you don’t put a toaster in the dishwasher and that you shouldn’t drop the television set when you’re bringing it in the house.

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  On the other hand, it has been my experience that fragile this side up can usually be ignored with no ill effects. Unless you’ve bought a cutglass crystal pitcher that comes filled with champagne, there aren’t many things you can’t carry upside down.

  I’m going to look through my box of directions for the on
es about my camera but usually if I really want the directions for one specific piece of equipment, those are the directions I threw out.

  The Quality of Mercy

  When a man came and knocked on our back door and asked for something to eat, my mother always fried him two eggs and made him toast and coffee but, no matter how cold it was, she made him eat it outside. Her quality of mercy was tempered with caution.

  This was during the Depression in the late 1930s when I was growing up in Albany, New York. There was seldom any question that the man was anything but hungry. He was not looking for money with which to buy whiskey. All the man ever wanted was food. I remember asking Mother why no women ever came begging for food. She didn’t know.

  All this came flooding back to me last evening when I was standing in line at Grand Central Station to buy a train ticket. There were five or six people in front of me and the line was moving slowly. I contemplated switching to another line, but experience has taught me this is usually a mistake so I started reading my newspaper.

  In the middle of a paragraph, I sensed someone standing next to me. I looked up and into the eyes of a small young woman wearing a belted trench coat that wasn’t very clean. She had straggly, dark blond hair and, while she was not unattractive, she appeared to be no cleaner than her coat.

  “Could you spare a quarter?” she asked.

  She said it perfunctorily, in a manner that suggested she’d said it thousands of times before. “No,” I said, without malice. I looked into her eyes but didn’t get any feeling I was seeing her. There was a curtain behind the cornea so I turned back to my newspaper. I wasn’t reading it anymore, though.

  “No” had not been exactly the right answer, I thought to myself. Of course, I could have spared a quarter. I must have had nearly fifty dollars in my pocket, three of them in change.

  Why hadn’t I given this poor soul something? Or is she a poor soul? Where did she come from? I wondered. What are her parents like? What did her classmates in school think of her? Does she have friends? When did she eat last? Where did she sleep?

  If it was peace of mind I was looking for, it would have been easier to give her the quarter. I can’t get her out of my mind and yet the people who drop change in cups and hats anger me. It seems like cheap gratification that does more for the psyche of the giver than the receiver. I don’t like their smug assumption that they are compassionate people.

  I pretended to be reading the paper for thirty seconds more and then looked up to see where the young woman had gone. She was standing a short way off, on the heartless marble floor of the station, doing nothing. I thought how close to barefoot she looked in her thin, old leather shoes.

  Most beggars in New York City are either con artists or alcoholics. She didn’t seem to be a con artist or an alcoholic, and I don’t know what someone looks like who’s on drugs or smoking marijuana. You can’t make enough begging to be a drug addict, anyway. Drug addicts steal. She didn’t look like a thief.

  There aren’t a lot of beggars in New York but there are all kinds, and every passerby has a decision to make. The black kids stand at the clogged entrance to the bridges and tunnels and slop soapy water on your windshield with a dirty sponge. If you give them a quarter, they clean it off. If you don’t, they don’t. I’m torn between compassion and anger at times like this. It’s blackmail but it’s better than stealing and I laugh and give.

  The ordinary street beggar will not be helped by what anyone gives him, though. And, anyway, I have the feeling the saddest cases and the ones who need money most desperately don’t beg for it.

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  Everyone in New York is approached at least once a month. You have to have a policy. Mine is simple! To beggars on the street, I give nothing. I wish I was certain I’m right, I keep thinking of the young woman in Grand Central and the two fried eggs.

  Morning People and Night People

  A re you consistently dumber during some hours of the day than others? I certainly am. I’m smartest in the morning. You might not think so if you met me in the morning, but that’s the fact. After about 11:30 a.m., my brain begins getting progressively duller, until by late afternoon I can’t remember my middle name. It is morning as I write. My middle name is Aitken.

  Each of us has his best hours. The people who have to have a cup of coffee to activate their brain in the morning are the slow starters. I have a cup of coffee to get my body going, but my brain starts up without it.

  It’s always best if what we are coincides with the way we wish we were. It doesn’t happen often to most of us, but both morning people and night people seem to be pleased with themselves the way they are.

  I know I’m pleased to be a morning person. I think it’s best. I associate it with virtue. It works out best for me, too. Not perfect, but best. I get to work very early, taper off around noon and have a very unproductive period between about 1:30 and 4:30. Unproductive periods are important too, you know.

  Somewhere around 4:30, my brain begins to stage a mild comeback, but by then it’s time to quit and go home.

  I feel sorry for the people who think best in the evening and I’d like to tell you why. Night people awaken grudgingly. They dread getting up but eventually drag themselves out of bed, put themselves through their morning ablutions and stumble to work hating every minute of it. By noon their metabolism is finally moving at the same speed as the current of activity that surrounds them and they begin to blend in. It is now lunchtime.

  In the early evening, after the sun has gone down and the rest of the world is settling in, they’re ready to go. They waste some of their smartest hours, when they should be most productive, watching some of the dumbest shows on television.

  Prime-time television was designed for those of us who are smartest in the morning. By 8 p.m., we’ve lost most of our critical faculties, and “Dallas” and “Laverne and Shirley” are just perfect for our level of intellectual activity. Even if we don’t like them, they don’t bother us enough to make it worth our while getting up to turn them off.

  The night people sit there doing the crossword puzzle or reading the paper and grumbling because there’s nothing on the tube worth watching.

  It seems apparent to me that we ought to rethink the whole pattern of our daily lives. We’ve got to make some changes.

  If each of us really does need seven hours’ sleep, it would probably be better if we took it in shorter periods. I often get more sleep than I need or want all in one piece during the night. Even when I go to bed at 11:30 and get up at 5:45, which is my habit, there’s something wrong with just lying there in one place for six hours and fifteen minutes.

  I’ll bet it would be better for both our brains and our bodies if we took our seven hours in sections instead of all at once. Say we slept for three hours between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m., two hours from noon until 2 p.m. and another two hours between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. This would give us the same seven hours, but better distributed over the twenty-four-hour period.

  There are some problems that would have to be worked out, of course. The reason all of us now try to get what is known as “a good night’s rest” is not because that’s the way our bodies like it, but because the whole civilized process of going to bed and getting up is such a time-consuming activity that we couldn’t afford to do it three or four times a day. And, of course, if it took the night people a couple of hours to get going again after each sleep period, they’d be less help than they are now. A personal opinion, you understand.

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  And, of course, there are other questions that would have to be resolved. When, for instance, would we change our underwear, take a shower and make the bed?

  The Sound of Silence

  There’s no telling what wakes you on those nights you can’t sleep. Last night, I awoke at 2:20. It was the sound of falling snow that did it. I knew it was snow because there was not a single, solitary sound. The silence of falling snow is deafening.r />
  I lay there for several minutes, trying to breathe quietly so as not to obliterate the soundlessness. Finally, I couldn’t handle my doubt any longer. I got up (I’m fighting off “arose”), pulled back the curtain and looked out on the backyard. Sure enough, there it was—gently falling snow hitting the ground silently, covering the little slate walk and clinging, half an inch thick, to tiny branches that are themselves no more than half an inch thick. It perched on top of the points of the picket fence in a beautifully symmetrical peak that no human hand could fashion. They say no two snowflakes have ever been the same but we don’t know, do we? I saw two that looked very much alike.

  There are all kinds of sounds in nature that are better than noise. Some sounds are good or bad depending on where you are and what you’re doing when you hear them. Nothing is worse than a downpour of rain when you’re caught out in it without a coat or umbrella. But inside, the sound of the same downpour is a pleasure that makes you appreciate your shelter.

  Of all the sounds combining weather with nature, none is so persistently loud and impossible to turn off as the roar of the sea rolling up onto a broad, sandy beach. I envy people who live on expensive property near the ocean. There’s the roar as thousands of tons of water advance on a broad front along the width of the beach, or the crash when the waves hit the immovable rocks that cup the shoreline at either end of a sandy crescent. There is the soft, seething sound as the water recedes. It pauses briefly out at sea, gathering strength for its next attack. A beach confounds angry waters by accepting them and defeating their destructive intentions, waiting patiently for the waves to go back where they came from, out to sea.