by Alan Alda
Be flexible about your dreams. Say hello to change. I had an economics teacher in college, Mr. Partlan, who said, “Don’t be afraid to change your mind about your career. You can keep changing till you’re forty.” I know people who are changing in their sixties. Be supple. Be loose. Life is one surprise after another.
College has been like climbing a mountain. You had to persevere, stretch your reach, endure the loneliness of the midnight book. And now you’re at the summit—and what do you see in front of you? More mountains. The only thing you can be sure of is that there will always be more mountains.
But I know you’ll be okay. Your laughter, your honesty, your youthful energy and optimism—that makes me know that life is possible.
Because you can wrap your brain around a tough idea, because you can learn an art—tell a joke, play the piano—because you can laugh with a lusty abandon: Because of simple things like these, I know that nature will survive.
I wish I had a better world to give you. But maybe we can work on one together now.
So long, my child. Hello, my friend.
Elizabeth graduated, and we took off on a trip together. Arlene had come up with an antidote for the time I had been away from our daughters while I worked in California. As soon as she graduated, each daughter could choose a trip anywhere in the world, and she and I would go there together. Eve chose Greece, Beatrice chose China, and Elizabeth decided on a trip on the Orient Express from Paris to Venice, then Salzburg and Vienna.
It didn’t start out as the trip of our dreams—or, at least, not mine. We waited at the train station in Paris, with our bags splayed out on the floor, listening for the announcement to board the train. Nothing came over the speakers. We waited an hour and still nothing. Finally, with a half hour to go, I left Elizabeth to watch the bags while I went to see the stationmaster.
“Non,” he said, “le train est parti.”
I had spent my junior year of college in Paris, and unfortunately, I had no trouble understanding him.
“The train couldn’t have left,” I told him in impeccably accented hysteria. “My daughter and I have tickets for that train.”
“No, no,” he said, using two no’s where one would have been superfluous, if not offensive. “They left three hours early. They notified all their customers.”
“They didn’t notify me.”
“Possibly you bought your ticket in America.”
“I did.”
“Perhaps it’s that.” This was followed by a shrug described either as Gallic or sadistic, depending on how much you’re willing to forgive the French in exchange for Château Lafite.
“No, no, no,” I said, seeing his two no’s and raising him one. “It is necessary that we get on that train. This is a very important trip for my daughter. It is absolutely necessary that we get on that train.”
“Mais, le train est parti.”
I was in no mood for French logic. “My daughter will be desolated. This is not possible.”
“Well, you might try getting on the Blue Train, which hasn’t left yet. It runs much faster than the Orient Express. If you get off in Dijon, you can flag down the Orient Express when it passes through.”
Flag down the Orient Express. How was I supposed to do that?
“Just go to the stationmaster and tell him you have to stop the Orient Express.”
It was absolument absurd that a stationmaster in Dijon would stop a train just because I told him to, but I thought of Elizabeth, waiting beside the bags.
“All right, but I want you to put that in writing. ‘To the stationmaster of Dijon: I authorize you to stop the Orient Express.’ And sign it ‘the Stationmaster of Paris.’”
“That’s not necessary.”
“It is absolutely necessary.”
“If you don’t leave now, you’re going to miss the Blue Train.”
“Not without written authorization.”
“I have nothing to write on.”
He was driving me crazy. A stationmaster without a letterhead. How could the man exist in Paris without official paper?
“Here, write on this.” From the top of a filing cabinet, I grabbed a brown paper bag with a couple of grease stains on it from his lunch. He took the bag from me with an expression that was a precisely calculated mix of disdain and pity and wrote what I dictated in a nice, florid hand. I insisted he sign it “the Paris Stationmaster.” I thanked him and left.
I grabbed up Elizabeth and the bags, and we ran for le Train Bleu. There were no seats left, and we stood all the way to Dijon while a group of young sailors blew smoke at us that they sucked from their Gauloises.
Finally, at two in the morning, we were the only people to get off the train in Dijon. The place was deserted, and as the Blue Train pulled away into the black night, we saw a tiny shack at the end of the platform with a dim light burning in the window. I walked down to it and knocked on the door. It opened just a crack.
“Oui?”
“Good evening. It will be necessary to stop the Orient Express.”
“No. The Orient Express does not stop in Dijon.”
“Tonight, it is necessary that it stop. We have tickets.”
“I cannot stop the Orient Express.”
“Really?” I pulled out the brown paper bag. “Read this!”
He looked as if I had offered him a rodent. “What’s that?”
“That is official authorization from the Paris stationmaster. The Paris stationmaster. We must stop that train.”
He took the bag from me and read it carefully. “You got this from the Paris stationmaster?”
“That’s right. In Paris.” I felt I couldn’t say the word Paris too many times.
Silently, he nodded. “All right, I’ll stop it.”
A few minutes later, the Orient Express pulled to a halt and some disgruntled train workers got off, wanting to know what the problem was. I showed them our tickets and told them we wanted to be taken to our compartments. Well, they said, the compartments have to be made up. It will take a while.
I was in no mood for delays. I had power now. I had stopped the Orient Express with a paper bag. I didn’t know the official title of the person in charge, but I said, “Je veux voir le directeur du train!” instinctively certain that this was the way to say it.
They looked puzzled. “The director of the train? Who is that?”
“The chief. The master. The captain.”
“He’s asleep.”
And here, I rose to my full height. “Pourquoi doit-il dormir,” I said, “pendant que moi, je marche dans la rue?” (Why should he sleep, while I walk in the street?) My fifteen months in France had been a painstaking preparation for this one grand turn of phrase, which they tried to dismiss as sounding idiotic.
“Please get on board. We can’t stay all night in Dijon.”
They could pretend I hadn’t scored on them, but I ushered Elizabeth onto the train with the clear knowledge I had beaten them in their own language.
Once on the train, the trip didn’t improve. The train must have been built a hundred years earlier, and the bed was designed for people who were a foot shorter than me. I slept with my knees up near my chin.
All the while, Elizabeth was enjoying this with a delighted, mischievous smile. Her playfulness didn’t seem to have a bottom to it. There was one place she had to visit in Vienna: the Prater. This, she said, was an amusement park with spectacular rides. There was nothing like it in the world. I was there to do anything she wanted, and we went. It turned out that she wanted us to go on a ride that barreled through space at about ninety miles an hour, doing loops and finally plummeting dizzyingly toward the earth. I didn’t think I was interested.
“Oh, come on. Don’t be a fogy.”
Reluctantly, I got behind her on the ride, and the gondola started its slow climb to the top. Well, it’s not so bad, I thought as we leveled off at the summit. Then the front end of the gondola tipped down, and I realized we were going to die. We plummet
ed—and then, with no warning, we suddenly rose up toward the sky again. My face smashed into the back of Elizabeth’s head, and my nose went numb. “Isn’t this great?” she said.
We twisted to the right, then the left, then we dove, climbed again, then headed straight for the earth. We were both screaming like chimpanzees. Finally the ride came to a halt. Every muscle in my body was trembling.
Elizabeth turned and looked at me with a grin. “Let’s go again.”
When we got home from our trip, Elizabeth began working on a career as an actress. She studied, she went to auditions, and she got an occasional acting job. Little by little, though, she began to realize that she didn’t enjoy acting as much as she thought she would. One night she worked on a movie, playing a cop with just a line or two. She had to run to a corpse and say something procedural. But after several takes, her thighs ached. She was hungry and cold. And there wasn’t much acting involved. She began to realize that even when she worked she didn’t enjoy it that much. She’d been wonderful in The Four Seasons—spontaneous and lighthearted and tearful when that was needed. She had been in the film and the short-lived television series based on the film. But now she began to think about her life in a different way.
As a sophomore at Kenyon, she had spent a semester at the National Theatre Institute school and became friends with deaf actors from the National Theatre of the Deaf. She was fascinated with sign language and the deaf community and when she decided to leave acting, she went to graduate school in special education, and became a teacher of the deaf.
Her first student was a girl she followed throughout her day, in a school for hearing children, translating for her in sign language. Her joy in her student’s progress made her glow. She had gone from performing for thousands to teaching one single person, and it couldn’t have made her feel more fulfilled. It was what I had hoped for her in her life, and she had found the way all by herself. She hadn’t needed my words of wisdom at her graduation.
I thought I was giving the commencement talk that day, but the locusts gave a better one. They left a more lasting impression. They were the ones with the subtle, life-enhancing message. Going about their lives, they followed the signals inside them. When it was time to be dormant, they took a rest. When it was time to swarm, they swarmed all over us.
I doubt that Elizabeth remembered that I asked her to be flexible that day and to be true to herself. But that’s what she did. Like the innocent, curious locusts, she followed her nature, she listened to her heart. And her simple doing of it meant more than my talking ever could.
Chapter 6
* * *
A Passion for Reason
Thomas Jefferson and I might not have become friends if we hadn’t been brought together by Julann Griffin.
Julann had stuck a pin in a map, and it landed on a town in Virginia, so she sold her house, bought a farm, and moved to Palmyra, not far from Jefferson’s Monticello. I always admired her courage for picking up and moving; her willingness to step out into randomness and take a walk. Past the age of sixty, she wanted to set out on a new life, to leave California, where she lived then, and she decided to stick a pin in a map. Julann is open to unconventional ideas, and she felt, I think, that her unconscious, or the spirit world, or some unseen power, would guide the pin. Whatever power it was, it didn’t do too badly, because within a few months, she had an old house on a thousand acres, a pond full of fish, an old graveyard, some chickens, and a huge pig named Nancy. She loved the place and invited us to stay with her for a few days.
When we got there, Arlene and I both had bad colds. Julann went to a closet, opened a large case in which she kept homeopathic medicine, and gave us two glass vials. When we got upstairs to our room, we regarded each other with what you could call a questioning look. As I understand it, the theory behind homeopathic medicine is that you ingest a highly diluted dose of a substance that will induce the same symptoms you’re suffering from, with the hope that the body will fight off all similar symptoms.
But the substance is so diluted that there isn’t even a molecule of it left in the solution, just some supposed molecular memory. So what good can it do? On the other hand, how could it hurt? So we took it.
An hour later, we were dumbfounded. My cold was gone, and so was Arlene’s. We told Julann with amazement that we actually felt better, but she took its efficacy so for granted that we avoided using the word placebo. Julann liked to experiment and invent. She once concocted an antimosquito lotion made of herbs and vodka that worked so well, we urged her to market it. She said she would, but she couldn’t remember what herbs she’d used. And the vodka made the stuff too expensive. But her bent for invention made Thomas Jefferson’s house, which was a few miles from her farm, one of her favorite places.
She drove us there and introduced us to Dan Jordan, who runs the place. He took us on a tour of the ingenious gimmicks in Monticello: the giant clock Jefferson had designed for the hallway, with weights that went all the way down through a hole in the floor to the basement; the cabinet that servants would fill with dishes of food in the kitchen and then swung on a hinge so they would appear magically in the dining room. Dan let me sit in a leather chair with large wings that had been designed by Jefferson. I was sure that Jefferson, who was partly deaf, had formed the wings of the chair into a parabola in order to hear conversation better. Dan said I had a pretty creative thought, which was a gracious way of saying it was just the other side of unlikely. But I clung to the idea—even after I sat in it and felt no improvement in my own poor hearing. I’ve always been a little more creative than necessary.
A couple of years later, Dan called and invited me to give a talk at Monticello. I certainly like hearing myself talk, but I had no idea what I’d say. “Thanks,” I said, “I’m fascinated with Jefferson, but I don’t think I know enough about him to give a talk.” He hinted that I could just speak for a few minutes about how much I admired Jefferson. People would be glad to hear whatever I had to say. Who would these people be? I wondered. Who would be listening to me? “Oh,” he said, “the board of trustees and some Jefferson scholars. A few historians.”
I froze.
He was asking me to talk about Jefferson in front of historians? Wouldn’t that be sort of insane?
“Sure,” I said. “That sounds like fun.”
I put down the phone and started making notes on what I knew about Jefferson. After a few minutes, I had a mostly blank page. But I had five months to get ready. I went to a bookstore and bought everything with Jefferson’s name on the cover. I especially liked one book by Silvio Bedini that concentrated on Jefferson as a scientist. I was having a great time reading about him, but after a while, a thought crept over me like a cat’s paws on your lungs just before it squeezes the life out of you. These people have not only read this stuff, they probably wrote some of it. How could I say anything they hadn’t heard before? How could I make it worth their while to sit there while I opened and closed my mouth? This was going to be impossible. There was no way I could come up with something new or interesting.
And that was when I understood why I had agreed to talk: exactly because it terrified me.
Terrifying myself, it turns out, is one of the ways I have of feeling alive. It gives a sense of accomplishment to my life.
Nothing feels as good to me as doing something I know how to do. But if I do it too many times, it feels easy and a little slick; it loses some of its pleasure. So I have to keep looking for things that are just a little harder. This produces a feeling that’s very close to accomplishment—if I can actually do it, of course. And this time, as the months went on, the pages stayed white.
I wanted to say something new, but not so new that it wasn’t true. I didn’t want to get overly creative, as when I sat in Jefferson’s wingback chair, inventing things for him he hadn’t invented himself. A few months on, I got a call from Dan, gently checking up on me. “How’s it going? Can we give you any help with background material?”
“Well, I’ve got a lot of stuff here.”
“What are you reading?”
“A lot. I like the Bedini book.”
“Bedini is good. You’re safe with Bedini.”
His tone was cheerful, but it was becoming clear that, although the invitation was to say anything I liked about Jefferson, I wasn’t supposed to say something stupid. That seemed like a good idea to me, too.
I tried one tack after another. I knew I should somehow make a personal connection to Jefferson, but what would it be? He had lived so long ago; he was a genius in so many ways. Aside from helping found a country and becoming its secretary of state, its vice president, and twice its president, he was an inventor, educator, musician, mathematician, geographer, philosopher, botanist, physicist, linguist, agronomist, archaeologist, meteorologist, paleontologist—and either he made important contributions to these fields or he created them. He was one of our greatest writers; he could fit the dreams of a nation into a handful of words and make them ring down through two centuries. Where, exactly, did my life intersect with his?
The months started flying by like the scene in a 1940s movie where the pages fly off the calendar, and I was getting nowhere. Finally, I noticed I was having a recurring daydream in which I stood in front of an imposing gathering of historians on the grass in front of Monticello, and as I looked down at my speech, I saw twenty blank pages. I realized it was time to do something drastic. So I stuck a pin in a map.
I was scheduled to fly to China a month before my talk to interview scientists for Scientific American Frontiers. And that’s where I stuck the pin. I decided that somewhere in China, someone would tell me something about Jefferson that no one had ever heard before in the States. Someone would give me such fresh insight into the man, I would come back with a thought worth listening to. China was the place.
