Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [114]
Flight times should be recorded from the time they close the door for takeoff to the time they open the door to let passengers off. The advertised time of my flight was five hours and fifty-seven minutes. From the time we had to be on board to the time we were allowed off, it was seven hours and twelve minutes.
At baggage claim, the carousel went round and round. My bag never came ’round. At the lost baggage office, I waited in line. They were doing a booming business. I finally got to talk to a woman behind the desk, who said my bag would be arriving on the next flight. I opted to have the bag sent to my hotel.
In Beverly Hills, I went to the hotel I’ve stayed in a hundred times. It’s also expensive but I could stay there for weeks for what first class costs on American.
In my room, I called American baggage service at 12:30 and was told my bag had been found and would be delivered “within six hours.” I once worked at MGM, so I drove around some old familiar places, including Malibu Beach, wasting time waiting for my bag. I needed things in it to dress for dinner with friends. When I got back to the hotel, I called American again and got the “six hour” announcement again. It had now been five.
There was a huge window over the bathtub in the hotel room and by pressing a button next to the light switch, you could open a curtain that allowed you to look out on a palm frond garden.
I took a shower more to waste time than from necessity—I wasn’t that dirty—and dried off with a thick towel that was six feet long. It made the bath towels at home seem puny.
After the shower, I read the paper and waited for my bag, which didn’t come. It was delivered sometime after midnight, so I went out to dinner in khaki pants and slept in a terrycloth robe.
Sunday night, I ate dinner in my room because I wanted to watch 60 Minutes. Mike Wallace interviewed Putin. Morley Safer’s report on West Point was good. I could have done without Steve Kroft’s chat with Ray Romano, but I watched it almost to the end. Almost. Next thing I knew, I woke up and they were showing the 60 Minutes credits. I had missed the best part of the show.
I’ll tell you about my trip home another time. It wasn’t as good as the trip out.
Appendix
The Following Things Are True
ninety-nine Opinions I’m Stuck With
A writer doesn’t often tell a reader anything the reader doesn’t already know or suspect. The best the writer can do is put the idea in words and by doing that make the reader aware that he or she isn’t the only one who knows it. This produces the warm bond between reader and writer that they’re both after because it feels so good.
The fact is, there really isn’t anything new in the world and what I’ve always hoped to do with my writing is to say, in so many words, some of the ideas that lurk, wordlessly, in the minds of a great many people.
There’s no way of knowing how we get to believe what we believe. We’re all trapped within ourselves. We have this much and no more. We have our genes and our youth, during which our opinions are formed.
Most of us don’t change those opinions once we get them. Instead, we spend a lot of time looking for further proof that we’re right.
If we formed our opinions the way we should, we’d get all the facts together and then compare them, using logic and good sense to arrive at the right places. We don’t do it that way very often, though, and as a result we acquire a lot of wrong answers that we’re stuck with for life. I haven’t changed my mind about anything since I was twenty-three. In my head I know I must be wrong about some things but in my heart I don’t think so.
As an indication of what you’ll find in the body of this book, what follows is a hundred opinions I’m stuck with. There ought to be something here to anger almost everyone:
1 . I do not accept the inevitability of my own death. I secretly think there may be some other way out.
2. It’s good