Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [50]
I lose fingernail clippers at a great rate . . . and sunglasses.
If I need a screwdriver, I can only find the one with the Phillips head when I’m dealing with a single-slot screw. And, naturally, vice versa.
Where do all the flashlights I buy go?
Someone gave me a beautiful fountain pen for Christmas. I can’t find it. I don’t use it; I just don’t want to lose it.
At this very moment I cannot find my driver’s license. I’m driving 150 miles upstate tomorrow and it’s illegal to drive without a license, but I’m going to make the trip anyway.
“I really do have a license,” I’ll explain to the policeman if I’m arrested for speeding. “I just can’t find it.”
This goes over big with policemen. I know because I’ve tried it before.
I have regular places where I look for things I can’t find. They’re never in those places. We have dozens of little drawers in tables and
Born to Lose 103
chests around the house, and I always look in those for things I can’t find. Nothing. I’ve looked in those drawers ten thousand times and have yet to find a single missing item in them. I don’t know why I persist in looking there.
In the office, Jane is good at finding things but she often doesn’t realize I’ve lost what she finds; so she doesn’t tell me she has it. The items are just the same as lost as far as I’m concerned.
Several years ago, I got a small lump of money for one of my books, so I decided to invest in the stock market. Someone knowledgeable about money told me to buy Exxon. I bought Exxon. It did very well, but after the unpleasantness in Alaska, I was embarrassed to be an Exxon stockholder and decided to sell my shares. If I ever ran for office, some reporter would discover that I owned a small amount of Exxon stock and ruin my chances for election by revealing it.
I’d sell the stock in a minute if I could find the stock certificates. The man who sold the stock to me said there was a process I could go through to recover my stock without the certificates. It would cost me about 1 percent of the stock’s value. This fellow sent me a letter describing how to go about recovering my investment but I can’t find his letter.
The value of an item doesn’t seem to have anything to do with my ability to lose it. For example, I lose a lot of things of very little value in the refrigerator. Last Saturday, I wanted lunch and remembered I’d put some leftover rice in the refrigerator. I could not find it and everyone else swears they didn’t eat it.
Things are even easier to lose in the freezer than in the main part of the refrigerator. If our refrigerator could be preserved for scientists of the year 3000, they’d find a treasure trove of gustatory Americana in there that I’ve lost.
My idea of heaven would be to die and awaken in a place that has all my lost things.
My Name’s Been Stolen
Two years ago, someone broke my car window, took some things from the glove compartment and a suitcase I had left on the back seat. Twenty years ago, I had a motorbike stolen from my garage. In the Army, at Fort Bragg, someone went through my footlocker and took $20 I had saved for the day I could get a twenty-four-hour pass. These were the only brushes with crime I’d had in my life until recently. Now, several thieves have taken something of great value from me—my name.
More than a year ago, people started sending me copies of an e-mail that was appearing on computers all over the country. It was a list of about twenty comments, each one or two sentences long, under my byline. The piece was titled, “In Praise of Older Women—By Andy Rooney.” It was sappy and obviously nothing I might have written, but harmless. While I didn’t like the idea of someone using my name as his own, I didn’t try to do anything about it.
Several months after I first saw the e-mail, a man named Frank Kaiser wrote asking why I had put my name on something he had written in 2000 for his syndicated column called “Suddenly Senior.” I called Frank immediately and he accepted the fact that someone else had taken what he wrote and put my name on it.
There