Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [49]
At home in the country, in Lake George
to break something again someday . . . me, maybe. They’re an unpleasant reminder of that possibility every time I see them, though, and I think I may throw them out. If anyone breaks a bone, we’ll just start fresh with a new pair. Crutches cost about twenty dollars. It would be worth coming up with that when we need them rather than having these crutches staring me in the face every time I go downstairs. On the other hand, maybe I’d better keep them just in case.
It’s this kind of thinking that makes me realize I lack the executive’s decision-making ability. I hem and haw, never quite making up my mind whether to keep something or throw it out.
For example, I finally got at going through about five big cardboard boxes of scripts I wrote for a radio show with Garry Moore and Durward Kirby. The show was on five days a week for ten minutes each day. I wrote it for five years, so you can imagine the stacks of paper involved. The scripts I have even include the commercials.
For twenty years I’ve saved these scripts with the five boxes taking up valuable space.
What am I saving them for? I thought to myself. In a hardheaded moment, I dragged a major plastic trash can down to the cellar from the garage and started dumping the scripts in it.
I needed help carrying the can upstairs, and when I finally got it out in the driveway for the trash pickup, I started idly looking through some of them.
Gee, I thought to myself, some of these are pretty good. Like most writers, I’m not my own harshest critic. Ten minutes later, I was taking the scripts out of the trash container and putting them back in the boxes.
This is no way to clean up.
Margie saves clay flowerpots. I hate clay flowerpots and, if I think I can get away with it, I throw them out.
She hates the coffee cans, old broken dishes, odd lengths of wood and the assorted junk I save, and she throws out any of them she thinks I won’t notice. Sometimes there’s been an undeclared war between us. If I find she’s thrown out some of my treasured junk, I retaliate with her flowerpots.
The boxes of scripts are back down in the basement now, right where they were before. Saving them was part sentiment, part the practical thought that I might find a use for them someday, but it was neither of those that brought me to the point of putting them back in the boxes. What did that was something different altogether.
It occurred to me that for twenty years I’d kept them; for twenty years they’d taken up space; for twenty years they were part of my life. If I threw them out then, all the space they’ve taken and all the thoughts I’d had about them in those twenty years would have been for nothing. In that case, I might as well have thrown them out the day I wrote them. This is the kind of thinking that makes a saver. A good saver can always think of a reason not to throw something out.
Being, as I am, a world-class saver, don’t look for those crutches in my trash can anytime soon, either.
Born To Lose
I’m a world-class loser.
There are very few people better at losing things than I am. Last night, as I was getting into bed, I thought to myself, “Maybe
losing stuff would make an essay.” So I scribbled some notes about it on a piece of paper, turned out the lights, and went to sleep.
I cannot find the piece of paper I wrote the notes on about losing things. I got down on my hands and knees and looked under the bed. Nothing. It’s not mixed in with the sheets. It’s not in my pajama pocket and it isn’t on my dresser. I’ll find it a week from now.
Over the years, I’ve lost thousands of things. One reason I lose so much is that I have so much. I am an acquirer of things, a possessor. Once I get something, I keep it . . . unless I lose it, of course. It’s hard to find a place to put all of my possessions, so they’re just left around. They tend to get lost or, perhaps, covered over by other possessions.
My shoehorn was gone this morning. I had to stand there trying to worm my feet into my shoes without