Bermuda Shorts - James Patterson [58]
The only time I regretted walking off campus on that long-ago spring morning was more than a decade later, the morning after playing a concert at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. I had gotten up early to go to the campus laundry, and as I started doing my clothes, a couple of students queried me about the content and structure of the songs they had heard us play the night before. They wanted to know the purpose of the rowdy progressive politics lurking in the lyrics. They wanted to know the process by which the lyrics, the music, and the message were all laced together; was the end result, which seemed to them a frenzy of abandonment and fun, simply a spontaneous entertainment? And how much of what they thought they heard did we intend for them to take away from the event? Ragged out, tired, and delighted someone had noticed, I gave a serious answer. “I can’t imagine going through all we do to place ourselves in front of an audience to then not have anything to tell them. So certainly, we mean every word. But that’s no reason it shouldn’t be fun.”
Later, I went to explore the campus bookstore, and found a coffee shop in the lobby. There were big cozy chairs scattered all around; the place was teeming with students on a Saturday morning, flopped in chairs, lying on cushions on the floor, all reading, writing, or quietly discussing. One wall of the coffee shop had a rack of books all written by professors who teach or had taught there. I grabbed one off the shelf, poured myself a java, and nestled into a corner and spent an hour drinking it all in. I never wanted to leave campus. And in a sense I never have. I just had to arrive here, on my own terms.
Don’t Answer the
hone!
I‘ve stopped answering the telephone and so should you. Why? It came to me recently, clear as a bell. We’re not supposed to answer the phone, that’s why.
“He doesn’t even hear it anymore,” my wife says about me and the telephone, and it’s true.
“I’ve been at Jim’s house when the phone rings, nothing happens!” a friend of mine quips as he sips good whiskey after a delicious and satisfying home-cooked dinner at our place. The fire is blazing, drinks flow, the conversation is lively and convivial. Then, with timing as perfect as in a TV sitcom, the phone rings. Silence. It rings three more times until the voicemail robot answers it. “See?” he delivers his punch line. “Nothing happens!” and everyone shrieks with laughter.
Actually, I am quick to explain, something did happen. The phone rang. A robot at the phone company intercepted the call, my friend got to give me a good-natured hard time in front of everyone, and we never broke stride. I secretly suspected the caller to be one of these very same wisenheimers secretly hitting the auto-call-Jimmy button on the cell phone in his pocket. Fine with me. Let them have their fun.
Certainly, all those present that night will remember it the next time they call and I don’t answer. As far as they are concerned, I will forever be sitting here, drinking, alone, sitting right by the phone, listening to it ring, knowing it’s them, and deliberately not answering. And that hurts their feelings.
I think my friends secretly get it, however. We are together, having a wonderful time. If I’m not expecting a call important enough to break up the evening, why answer the bell? Is there some DNA code encrypted in our brains that commands us to respond just because a bell goes off? Or maybe we are the victims of conditioning, the kind of conditioning that starts with something as innocent as the bells that ring between periods at school. Those bells were put in place during the Industrial Revolution to train kids to be good factory workers. Now we are accustomed to being buzzed, dinged, belled, bullied, and beeped throughout the day—told to put on our seat belts or empty the dryer, informed that the microwave is done, the coffee is made, our lights are still on, and this wonderful piece of surrealist absurdity, the