Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [90]
Twenty-six years later, my little Tiger, painted British Racing Green, with its huge 289-cubic-inch Mustang engine, will still blow past almost anything else on the road, although I don’t drive it that way. You couldn’t buy it from me for $50,000, because there’s nothing I could get for $50,000 that I’d enjoy so much.
I don’t drive it more than ninety days out of the year because I put it up during the winter, not wanting to subject it to the deleterious effects of ice and salt on the roads.
An enterprising group at my college, Colgate University, organized a reunion last summer of everyone who had ever played football there. I can take or leave most reunions, but this one sounded like fun and Hamilton, New York, is only a few hours from our country home. I set out early one morning to drive the 120 miles in my top-down Tiger.
I haven’t felt so free-as-a-breeze as I felt on that drive in a long time. I had no obligations to anyone. It didn’t matter what time I got there so I couldn’t be late, and I didn’t have to do anything when I arrived except eat, drink, and enjoy seeing old friends.
I went with Robert Frost and chose the road less traveled. I took the small, winding, blacktop country roads for most of the trip.
There are a lot of people with things to sell on our roadsides these days. I suppose I passed fifty garage sales, lawn sales or tag sales. We’ve all bought more than we need or can use over the years and we’re looking for a way to unload them on unsuspecting passersby who think, as we did when we bought them, that they’re treasures.
There doesn’t seem to be much difference between a garage sale, a lawn sale and a tag sale. I passed one sign that said:
TODAY! LAWN SALE IN GARAGE IN BACK
Andy in his prized Sunbeam Tiger with his grandchildren; Alexis Perkins (front); Ben Fishel (left)
and Justin Fishel (right) (back)
A great many people must have bought new lawnmowers this year because I passed at least fifteen secondhand mowers with FOR SALE signs on them. Even though it was a summer day, there were electric and gas-driven snow-removal machines, too. We had so little snow the previous winter that a lot of people obviously decided those machines weren’t worth the space they were taking up in their garage.
There were places that had signs out front saying ANTIQUES, but it didn’t look to me as though they had anything very old in them. Most of what they were selling could have been in a tag sale. Half dozen of the so-called antique stores had wagon wheels out front to lend authenticity to their claim of having antiques inside. I went in a few but I didn’t buy anything. Most of what they were selling for antiques would have been called junk if I’d had it in the back of my garage or in the basement.
The towns and villages I drove through were not wealthy, but every one had at least two churches and some as many as four. They had just built a new church in Winfield but I couldn’t see what denomination it was. I don’t think it’s important. Most of the churchgoers in town probably believe pretty much the same thing no matter which church they go to. The difference between a Baptist and a Methodist or a Presbyterian and a Catholic in America’s small towns is more social than philosophical.
It’s too bad religions can’t get together and share a building. They’d have better churches that way. That’s how the great cathedrals of Europe were built. Everyone in town pitched in. Americans like their individual little churches, though, no matter how plain they are and there’s a case to be made for preferring one to a Gothic cathedral.
It was Founders’ Day in Sharon Springs. The fire trucks were assembling at one end of town for a parade with odds and ends of uniformed people. As I drove slowly through town, I passed perhaps thirty people seated at intervals on folding chairs, along the main street,