Brief Encounters Read online

  Alas, the calls and our “relationship” came to an end as suddenly as they had begun. Sometimes it seems it was all a dream. (Yes, I sat by the phone a couple of times more.) And it just hit me that at least one of those chats might survive, on an old answering machine tape, a machine that sometimes failed to shut off when talk began. Anyone out there good at searching? Come on over.

  JANUARY 13, 2012

  Should News Come with a Warning Label?

  We’re told that anger is good for you. Getting it all out and all that.

  But we’re also told the opposite is true. That worry, stress, and gut-grinding anger produce and lay down in the body injurious plaques and acids and biles that can and should worry you and your insurance company.

  So with all the shocking, ghastly items reported in recent days—soccer goons brawling and leaving scores of people dead; a policeman shot in the head, and the accused gunman cocky and smirking in custody; truck drivers who (although copious Red Bull swiggers) still manage to nod off, committing human mayhem; the supposedly respectable teacher accused of having covered kids with cockroaches, molested them, and recorded his handiwork with his camera; and on and, yes, I’m afraid, on.

  Let’s agree to forget an NBC game show (Fear Factor) in which contestants—eager for their fifteen minutes—were induced to drink donkey semen. Lest it be accused of poor taste, the network spared us the airing of it. (Should they be required to reveal who thought of the idea?)

  Surely such punishing news is hazardous to your health. Should newspapers, like cigarettes, be required to carry a printed health warning?

  I’m wondering whether I cling to certain things that anger longer than other people do. The mere name Dick Cheney, for instance, still does something measurable to my pulse rate. He whose “priorities,” as he put it, didn’t happen to include his own military service. In his and his war-inflicting boss’s eyes, serving was, as the phrase goes, for other people.

  Why do such out-of-the-past items still get to me, starting those harmful juices flowing, in some cases decades later? Why can’t I, oysterlike, cover the Cheney irritant with the magic fluid that that remarkable shellfish coats his painful grain of sand with?

  And what, of all the recent stories to get mad about, have my ulcer-making bodily substances chosen to fasten upon?

  Vassar.

  In case you missed it, this august institution managed last week to break the hearts of dozens of would-be students eager to study there.

  If there were a contest for devising an action that would emotionally crush a large, large number of innocent, unsuspecting kids, Vassar’s “error” might just take the prize. Let’s look at what they did.

  They informed a large number of applicants to the freshman class that they—with Vassar’s congratulations—had been accepted.

  Sheer joy.

  And then—after screams of delight and friends’ congratulations, after champagne corks had popped, elated relatives had been informed and, who knows, perhaps clothes shopping was contemplated—there came a second message.

  Sorry, we were wrong.

  I don’t doubt they’re sorry. But couldn’t they have done a little better than hide behind what’s become the modern blunderer’s favorite cowardly refuge, “computing error”?

  Computing error? Nice to know that no humans erred at Vassar. A head might roll.

  Parents have reported heartbreak and sadness. At least one student almost catastrophically canceled her other applications. Thanks to Vassar’s incompetence, kids looking forward to the adventure of freshman year may now, if something doesn’t go right in the spring, spend it turning beef at McDonald’s.

  One heart-deprived columnist wrote that “life is unfair” and that while the episode was “a bummer” it was “not the end of the world”—and that kids as a result might learn something about life. She recommended a “this, too, shall pass” approach.

  It’ll pass! Same to you, lady, when you get your kidney stone!

  You, too, may wonder why I’m so worked up over this. It’s because I can identify. I recall opening with trembling fingers the letter from Yale that would surely tell me politely that it was not to be, but thanks.

  My mind’s eye can still see the very typeface of the word “Congratulations.”

  I can’t even imagine what a Vassar-like follow-up—“Whoops. Sorry”—would have done to me.

  Finally, I admit with some difficulty that I’m sorry for Vassar. It can’t be pleasant for so distinguished an institution of learning to take such a squalid pratfall in public. And we’re told constructive criticism is always better than carping. So how about:

  1. Set a splendid example for the world. Admit those kids whose emotions you’ve trampled on. At half tuition.

  2. Or, help them get into another school and pay for some of it.

  Unrealistic? I suppose so. But surely all those fine Vassar minds combined can think of something better than Too bad.

  I love the statement in The New York Times by a young victim who said that maybe it’s for the best, that she had dreamed of going to Vassar to major in computer science but that “Vassar doesn’t even know how to use a computer on the biggest day of our lives.”

  Is it vile of me to hope the talk of possible lawsuits isn’t idle?

  I hope Jane Fonda cancels her alumnae donations over this.

  FEBRUARY 3, 2012

  Schooling Santorum

  Truth be told, I’d planned on a lighthearted topic for today.

  But in line with last time’s subject—the deleterious effect the news can have on your health—those threats to the blood pressure continue with no shortage of headache and stomach-acid-stirring topics to jostle our wellness, if not our actuarial tables. A few minutes of CNN this morning did it.

  Just about any pair of random news items is enough to make you reach for the Bisodol. Today’s two: the stupidity of the Koran burning by American military personnel and our baffling, cowering impotence in the face of Bashar al-Assad’s bloody slaughter, in Syria, of man, woman, and child—victims apparently not as worthy of our caring, or of life, as their counterparts were in Libya. You can get ill from this.

  And there’s still Rick Santorum, alas. As Joan Rivers might say, “Please!!”

  We learn from him that contraception is a sin. Giving birth (sorry) to the possibly rude question of how the Santori as a couple and as obedient Catholics managed to have only eight children over all those years if they didn’t, well … never mind.

  Remember the “rhythm” method, humorously called “Vatican Roulette”? A friend of mine says he knows full well that he and his sister “owe our existence to it.” An apt name, roulette being the worst-odds sucker game in the casino: Let’s do it, dear. The odds are only 37 to 1 against us.

  Maybe they cheated now and then. The thought might not have arisen were I not typing this shortly after one of the most soundly defeated incumbent senators in recent history spent part of his time at the—one dearly hopes—final “debate” reeling off the number of times he was forced to vote contrary to his beliefs!

  We’re taught in early schooldays by our wise teachers and kindly parents that it is not nice to comment on or make fun of people’s appearance. But does Santorum look like a president?

  Not that you have to be of majestic aspect, I suppose, but he’s really pushing it. When you think of Lincoln or FDR, to name but two, Santorum in comparison looks like someone who’d play a character called Ricky in a mildly amusing sitcom.

  Try to picture Rick’s countenance Photoshopped into that famous picture from World War II, sitting in Roosevelt’s place, side by side with Stalin and Churchill in Yalta. It would look like two redwoods and a spirea bush. Is that bland Santorum visage suitable for Mount Rushmore? That would look like the Great Four and Pee-wee Herman.

  The sweater vests don’t help.

  My soul similarly rolls over and groans whenever Santorum uses the phrase “homeschooling.” I first heard about it in th
e dim days when the John Birch Society was a going thing. (Young folks, I don’t blame you for not believing that this organization held that President Dwight Eisenhower was a “conscious, dedicated agent” of the Soviet Union.) Some benighted McCarthy-admiring parents decided to pluck their children from the clutches of “commies” teaching our kiddies their godless doctrine.

  I have lost track of distant relatives of mine, parents who also snatched their young kids from school and, for their remaining school years, stuffed them mainly with the Bible. (I’d love to know how they did on their SATs.)

  I feel sorry for the poor kids whose parents feel they’re qualified to teach them at home. Of course, some parents are smarter than some teachers, but in the main I see homeschooling as misguided foolishness.

  Teaching is an art and a profession requiring years of training. Where did the idea come from that anybody can do it? How many parents can intuit how to do it? (Pardon unconscious rhyme there.) My parents were teachers, and the thought of homeschooling sent them rolling before they were in their graves. Especially when parents, complaining of their kids’ schooling, wrote in report card responses things like “I am loathe to critacize”; “my childs consantration”; “normalicy”; “my daughter’s abillaties”; “her examatian grades”; “she should of done better”; “greater supervizion,” etc., into the night.

  To deny kids the adventure and socialization of going to school, thereby missing out on the activities, gossip, projects, dances, teams, friendships, and social skills developed—to deny kids this is shortsighted and cruel. I think of the mournful homeschool kid watching his friends board the school bus, laughing, gossiping, and enjoying all that vital socialization we call schooldays.

  Besides, aren’t you arguably a better person for having gone to school rather than having had it funneled into you by dreary old Ma or Pa in their faded bathrobes at home?

  And what is the argument for it? For some, is it to protect their innocent ones from hearing words like, oh, sex and contraception? From forced association with those less desirable ethnically? Maybe it’s to keep them safe from radical notions like the idea that fossils and carbon dating aren’t put there by the Devil to fool the scientists, but prove the world has billions, not thousands, of years on it.

  Surely, there are parents caught in mediocre school districts with little choice but to give their kids the best shot at a rounded exposure to arts, letters, the sciences, and so on, and are admirably able to do so at home—thereby sparing them the teachers who can’t spell and who tell the kids, as in one friend’s case, that the band around the center of the earth on the globe is called “the equation.”

  Who knows what sorts of fears haunt the minds of homeschooling parents? I guess it’s always possible, when Sally or Billy is walking to school, that a dark figure might leap out of the shrubbery, maniacally shrieking, “There’s climate change!”

  Again, teaching takes skill and education and dedication. Homeschooling as an idea is on a par with home dentistry.

  FEBRUARY 24, 2012

  Road to Ruin

  More and more as the years dissolve, every time I get behind the wheel I think how remarkable it is that anyone who drives, or rides—or in New York City, walks—is alive.

  Rarely do I, at the moment of ignition, fail to hear in my mind’s ear the voice of old Ben Washburn, the mechanic from my childhood in Nebraska, recite his mantra for me as I watched him work on wrecks. In those insane days before seat belts, he’d always point out the cannonball-sized hole on the passenger side where the unlucky head went through the windshield.

  His mantra: “Every time you get into a goddamn car you’re a-enterin’ a death machine.” In a more expansive mood, he might add, “Either your death or somebody else’s.” If that second line came, then so did, with a little dramatic nudge in the voice, “I’ve seen it too many damn times.”

  As a young kid (as distinct from all those old and decrepit kids, I guess that phrase means), I’d encountered more than my share of ghastly blood-and-brains-all-over-the-highway traffic accident aftermaths.

  We’ve all seen, or been in, or narrowly averted a deadly accident. And had those assorted little chilling moments of “Whew! I failed to look left … but got away with it this time.”

  Still, I’ll bet you haven’t been through the following frightful happening. If you think you have, I probably will have told it wrong.

  Somewhere in the eighties (the twentieth century’s, not mine) I was home from New York in Lincoln, Nebraska, and I borrowed my parents’ car to go for an extended spin. My father, a worrying soul about my driving wisdom, pointed out that the weather was a bit dicey, flirting with thirty-two degrees. I assured him I hadn’t lost my driving skills by living in New York City and knew how to turn into a skid, etc. (I didn’t admit that I liked to skid on icy roads and frequently did so when no one was around, entertaining myself with my skid-and-spin-stopping prowess.)

  Just short of my goal, Grand Island, where we used to live, I decided to make a side trip to a beloved Western historical museum in the town of Hastings. I remembered it fondly, having bought treasured, real arrowheads there as a kid—from five cents for a bird-point up to twenty-five cents for a handsome spear-point, all gleaned from the surrounding and magical Nebraska prairies.

  About ten miles short of Hastings, rolling along nicely in a light, cold rain—on that dangerous invention, a two-lane highway—it happened.

  As I was passing another car at a moderate forty-five m.p.h. or so, my windshield wipers stopped working. They didn’t stop going back and forth; they just stopped removing the drops. Puzzled at how the blades of two windshield wipers could have worn out at the exact same time, I “heard” my father’s voice, as I always do when passing another car to this day: “Get the hell around ’em!” Obeying by adding a little gas, I noticed that, although accelerating, I wasn’t passing the car I was allegedly passing.

  From this point on, everything took on the quality of a dream—the kind where you can’t get any traction.

  What had a moment earlier been big raindrops on the windshield, which were instantly swept away by the wipers, were now nickel-sized globs of what looked like library paste. And they were sticking in place. The wipers made a distinct scraping sound rubbing over them.

  And now a bread truck coming my way, without slowing, flew off the road and slammed into a ditch, sending the driver’s head forward with an appalling bounce. Just then, my father did another cameo appearance in my head. “Whatever you do, for God’s sake don’t ever get caught in”—and here came the bone-chilling phrase—“freezing rain!”

  I had.

  I guess I had always thought that freezing rain was another way of saying hail. Or maybe sleet. How dumb.

  The reason I wasn’t passing the other car was that the world had turned to glass. Wet glass. I remembered in a flash a bonus question on a ninth-grade science test in Mrs. Gloye’s class: “It would be desirable to eliminate all friction from the world. Yes. No.” If, upon reading this, anything resembling thought flitted across my brain just then, it must have been, “Yeah, things wouldn’t wear out.” I got it wrong.

  Now I saw how wrong.

  The total loss of friction is unimaginable and nightmarish. Everything in the world—cars, telephone poles, electric lines, grass, the highway, the signs, a dead raccoon—looked glass-coated and gleamed like diamonds. The car I had tried to pass made a half circle and went sideways off the road, missed me by so little that I waited for the crunch, and smacked into a telephone pole. The whole thing cast a glaring light on the stupidity of my answer to Mrs. Gloye’s friction question.

  Again I could hear A. B. Cavett’s voice from way back, probably to my mother, admonishing, “If freezing rain ever happens to you, for God’s sake keep your foot off the brake—don’t touch it—and let the car come to a stop.”

  Thanks to this, I guess, I was the only car still on the road. Everybody else must have reflexively hit the brake. But no one
seemed to need treatment, and I decided to try for Grand Island.

  Somehow I got the car turned around in what must have been a hundred itty-bitty back-and-forths, virtually in place. Crossing the Platte River bridge, normally the work of a minute, took about a half hour of gently touching the gas, sliding slowly into the rail, bumping it, turning the wheel a bit, sliding and bumping the rail again … for what seemed like a week.

  Eventually creeping into Grand Island, I urged the car into a parking space on the main street. The rain had only just begun to freeze there, providing no end of sadistic entertainment.

  In what a writing teacher might mark “Unlikely exaggeration!” everybody who came out of a store fell down.

  When a four-way light changed, those getting the green continued. So, to their surprise, did those getting the red. Half a dozen cars were sucked into a cluster at the intersection with a sickening timpani of booms, thumps, and crunches.

  In the ensuing days, Grand Island’s fender repairmen must have earned retirement to Florida.

  I remember feeling sorry for the victims, and at the same time sorry for everybody who wasn’t there to enjoy the free comic spectacle of all those helpless bumper cars and spectacular Buster Keaton pratfalls.

  Shamefully observing, sitting snug inside your car, you’d catch yourself going: “I hope that pompous, stuffy-looking guy coming out of the dime store … Yup! There he goes!” (So far as I know, no one reduced the comedy quotient through lethal injury.)

  To my surprise, despite the front-row seat to the tumble derby, I had fallen asleep, sitting there in the car. The numbing tension and concentration required to urge the car along the face of the ice-coated bridge and roads of Nebraska at a barely detectable speed for what had felt like hours had taken their toll.

  When I awoke, a slight rise in the temperature had resolved the beastly situation. The dream had ended and the world was merely wet again.