Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [4]
He does not fuss about his looks. He buys good clothes but is permanently rumpled. You could put him in an Armani suit right off the rack and he would look as if he had slept in it. He is not inclined to ornamentation in his person, or in his writing. He is fond of quoting Thoreau that “if one has anything to say, it drops from him simply and directly, as a stone falls to the ground.” He writes in simple declarative sentences that bear no excess. His clothes are wrinkled but his sentences are not.
As a writer, and as a man, he thinks he can create his own world. He doesn’t care much for reading, except the New York Times. He likes to say, “I’m a writer, not a reader.” He does not read fiction and I suspect he has read only a few books cover to cover since he was in college, and maybe not even then. His primary contribution to culture in the family was bringing home a 45 rpm copy of Del Shannon’s “Hats Off to Larry.” He says, “I am not interested in being diverted from my own thoughts.” He doesn’t like listening to music or going to the Broadway theater, although he has had season tickets to the New York Giants most of his xviii Introduction by Brian Rooney
adult life. His genius as a writer is not knowing much about what anyone else says or thinks. It’s knowing exactly what he thinks.
Like good writing, he also knows good furniture and food and has worked to make his own, with varying success. He has a collection of expensive tools and piles of beautiful wood. He makes furniture, but if he makes a four-legged table, one leg is likely to be a tad short. He is impatient with details so when he makes a mistake he doesn’t start over, he patches with glue, putty, and shims and keeps going. His pleasure is more in having the idea and doing the work than having the finished piece.
He is an excellent cook and rarely uses a recipe. His popovers may be the best anywhere in America: tall and hollow, crisp on the outside, buttery on the inside. He can grill a steak to the perfect pink, make Beef Stroganoff and curried shrimp. He believes there are few things that cannot be made better with salt, garlic, and butter. He makes his own ice cream because that’s what you did growing up during the Depression, and it’s always fun to lick the paddles when it’s done. He makes peppermint ice cream for Christmas.
He is absentminded. One night, back when $ 100 was serious money and he didn’t have much, he paid a taxi driver with a hundred dollar bill, thinking it was a single. Making chicken soup with the pressure cooker, he forgot about it until the top blew, spraying greasy broth all over the kitchen walls. He still refers to it as “The Great Chicken Soup Disaster.” One year he made wine and corked it in soda bottles. That winter we would wake up in the middle of the night to muffled explosions in the basement.
My father resists authority. He doesn’t like bosses or people in uniform. Sometimes in New York, just for fun, he’d hail a police car and when it stopped he would say, “Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you were a taxi.” Several times he has been arrested while standing up to cops who overstepped their authority, only to be kicked loose by the desk sergeant.
He has lived by a series of rules he set for himself and people around him. He says, “There are standards in this world.” His rules are a mixture of low-brow philosophy and simple maxims for an orderly life that have both literal and figurative meaning. When we were kids he’d in
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struct us: “The last one in at night turn out the light over the garage.” Anyone who didn’t