Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [65]
And how much have you climbed? I must have lifted myself ten thousand miles straight up with all the stairs I’ve negotiated in my life. There are seventeen nine-inch steps in our front hallway and I often climb them twenty times a day, so I’ve lifted my two hundred pounds two hundred and fifty feet on the stairs in the house in one day alone. That doesn’t include the day I climbed the Washington Monument with the kids or the time my uncle took me up the Statue of Liberty.
And how many pairs of shoes have I worn out walking and climbing all that distance? I’m always looking for the perfect pair of shoes and I’ve never found them yet, so I buy more shoes than I wear. There must be six old pairs of sneaks of mine in closets around the house. All in all, I’ll bet I’ve had two hundred fifty pairs of shoes in my life. Easy, two hundred fifty.
How long would your hair be if you’d never cut it? Everyone has wondered about that at some time. What length would my beard be if I hadn’t shaved every morning? And, it’s a repulsive thought, but I suppose my fingernails would be several feet long if I hadn’t hacked them off about every ten days. I don’t know. Does hair stop growing once it gets a few feet long? I don’t ever recall seeing anyone with hair ten feet long. My hair must grow at least an inch a month. That’s a foot a year. I’ve certainly never seen anyone my age with hair sixty feet long.
This is the kind of thinking that helps make life seem longer to me. When I think of how many times I’ve been to the barber or even to the dentist, life seems to stretch back practically forever.
The one statistic I hate to think about is how many pounds of food I’ve consumed. Pounds would be an unmanageably large number. I’d have to estimate it in tons. I must have eaten ten tons of ice cream alone in my lifetime.
It makes life seem long and lovely just thinking about every bite of it.
The Glories of Maturity
I don’t do as many things I don’t like to do as I had to when I was young. Except that you have more years ahead of you, youth isn’t necessarily
a better time of life than any other. When I was young, I was always
having to do things I hated.
School was harder than work has ever been. I enjoy working and I
never enjoyed studying. I liked learning but found the process of education tedious. There are still nights I dream I’m back in school with an
exam the next morning. The scenario is always the same. I haven’t read
any of the books and I skipped class most of the time so I’m totally unprepared for the exam.
Staying up all night to study for an exam was a terrible experience,
and I did it a lot in college. My parents and all the teachers said cramming didn’t work but they were wrong. It may be the wrong way to
learn but cramming is a good way to pass an exam. It just hurts a lot
while you’re doing it.
I no longer stay up all night for anything. If I have something I
should have written and haven’t, I go to bed and try to get it done the
next morning. If I don’t get it done? Sue me.
There is no single thing in my adult life so regularly unpleasant and
burdensome as homework was in my youth. If I bring work home from
The Glories of Maturity 139
A young Andy outside his home in Albany, New York
the office now, it’s because the work interests me. It is not drudgery and if I don’t feel like doing it, I put it off.
There are still things that come up in my life for which I’m unprepared but they don’t bother me the way they did when I was a teenager. They no longer seem like life-or-death situations. If my income-tax stuff isn’t all together when I go to my accountant, so what?
Love is more pleasant once you get out of your twenties. It doesn’t hurt all the time.