Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [69]
Direction writers have improved over the years. Even the directions that come with a piece of Japanese electronic equipment are written in better English than they used to be.
You’d think it might be dangerous to ignore written directions but usually those little red tags say something like danger: under no circumstances should this be put in a bathtub full of water!
They warn you against some very obvious things. Most of us know by now that you don’t put a toaster in the dishwasher and that you shouldn’t drop the television set when you’re bringing it in the house.
The Quality of Mercy 147
On the other hand, it has been my experience that fragile this side up can usually be ignored with no ill effects. Unless you’ve bought a cutglass crystal pitcher that comes filled with champagne, there aren’t many things you can’t carry upside down.
I’m going to look through my box of directions for the ones about my camera but usually if I really want the directions for one specific piece of equipment, those are the directions I threw out.
The Quality of Mercy
When a man came and knocked on our back door and asked for something to eat, my mother always fried him two eggs and made him toast and coffee but, no matter how cold it was, she made him eat it outside. Her quality of mercy was tempered with caution.
This was during the Depression in the late 1930s when I was growing up in Albany, New York. There was seldom any question that the man was anything but hungry. He was not looking for money with which to buy whiskey. All the man ever wanted was food. I remember asking Mother why no women ever came begging for food. She didn’t know.
All this came flooding back to me last evening when I was standing in line at Grand Central Station to buy a train ticket. There were five or six people in front of me and the line was moving slowly. I contemplated switching to another line, but experience has taught me this is usually a mistake so I started reading my newspaper.
In the middle of a paragraph, I sensed someone standing next to me. I looked up and into the eyes of a small young woman wearing a belted trench coat that wasn’t very clean. She had straggly, dark blond hair and, while she was not unattractive, she appeared to be no cleaner than her coat.
“Could you spare a quarter?” she asked.
She said it perfunctorily, in a manner that suggested she’d said it thousands of times before. “No,” I said, without malice. I looked into her eyes but didn’t get any feeling I was seeing her. There was a curtain behind the cornea so I turned back to my newspaper. I wasn’t reading it anymore, though.
“No” had not been exactly the right answer, I thought to myself. Of course, I could have spared a quarter. I must have had nearly fifty dollars in my pocket, three of them in change.
Why hadn’t I given this poor soul something? Or is she a poor soul? Where did she come from? I wondered. What are her parents like? What did her classmates in school think of her? Does she have friends? When did she eat last? Where did she sleep?
If it was peace of mind I was looking for, it would have been easier to give her the quarter. I can’t get her out of my mind and yet the people who drop change in cups and hats anger me. It seems like cheap gratification that does more for the psyche of the giver than the receiver. I don’t like their smug assumption that they are compassionate people.
I pretended to be reading the paper for thirty seconds more and then looked up to see where the young woman had gone. She was standing a short way off, on the heartless marble floor of the station, doing nothing. I thought how close to barefoot she looked in her thin, old leather shoes.
Most beggars in New York City are either con artists or alcoholics. She didn’t seem to be a con artist or an alcoholic, and I don’t know what someone looks like who’s on drugs or smoking