Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [58]
The next day the neighbors are interviewed by a television reporter. They all say he was a nice quiet boy who always went to church. They don’t bother to say that he was a bully, that he’d been stealing all his life and that he was rotten through and through.
We keep letting ourselves off the hook. No one wants to judge anyone else by strict standards for fear he’ll be judged by them too. No one wants to say to someone on the job, “You just aren’t good enough. You’re fired.”
Broke
Has everyone been desperately broke?
Maybe not. I always assume that there are very few experiences or emotions that aren’t universal. I’ve been seriously broke twice in my life.
Broke 123
It’s a feeling you never forget and although it’s been twenty-six years since I didn’t know which way to turn for money, I never see anyone out of a job and without a dollar in his pocket without knowing how he feels.
There are still times when I think about being broke. At night when I empty the change out of my pocket and put it on top of my dresser, I often recall, in those terrible old days, adding up my change to see if I had two dollars.
There are chronically poor people who would laugh at what I went through because it wouldn’t seem very bad to them. My wife and I were never hungry. My father was retired but he had made a comfortable living even during the Depression, and my wife’s father was a doctor. They wouldn’t have let us get to the point where we were out on the street and without food, but you know how that is. There’s an unwritten code. There are people you don’t ask for money and my father and my wife’s father were two of them.
I don’t know who makes those rules but we all know them. Certainly if I’d asked, either would have given me money. Maybe that was it. They’d have given it to me, not loaned it to me. They would have been disappointed that I had to ask.
My father’s brother was a salt-of-the-earth lawyer in a small town in New York State, fighting petty political corruption and providing free legal services to people who couldn’t afford to pay him. He and my aunt never had children and I was the closest thing to a son he had. When he came to visit us when I was a child he would often slip me a five-dollar bill as he was leaving. You don’t forget an uncle like that.
In desperation one year, I went to him and asked for five hundred dollars. One of the terrible memories of my life is that I never repaid him. He died three years later without ever having been able to take pleasure from thinking that his favorite nephew was a responsible person. He didn’t need the money but he must have looked for some token payment from me and I never made it. I always meant to but I never did.
About fifteen years ago we were doing better but we needed $2,500 to help pay for one of the kids’ college tuition and my wife went to the bank for a loan. Banks are a better place to go for a loan than an uncle is. They aren’t disappointed if you don’t pay them back. They get you.
By this time I was making enough money so we weren’t in desperate need of the loan, so as the joke goes, we didn’t have any trouble getting it. The interest was probably 7 percent.
A year or so later I asked my wife if we were going to pay off the loan in a lump sum, or just continue paying the 7 percent interest each year. Being in no way a business tycoon, I had the feeling we should pay it off. She does all our bookkeeping and banking, and she didn’t think we should. She was right. I’m not sure to this day if we ever paid off the loan.
Now, of course, I appreciate that it’s the only good joke we ever played on a bank. We won because interest rates rose. If we have the $2,500, and it’s invested, maybe in the same bank’s money-market fund, and we get 9 percent interest, we are beating the bank for 2 percent on $2,500. It is not at all like failing to pay back my uncle.
This all occurred to me today because yesterday an old friend asked me to loan him money. Of course I’ll loan it to him but I wish he hadn’t asked. It breaks the unwritten law. It changes our relationship.