But Enough About You: Essays (47 page)

—
Forbes FYI
, September 2001

What’ll they think of next?

—SAMUEL GOLDWYN, ON BEING SHOWN A SUNDIAL

Set alarm for 4:00 a.m. in order to begin dressing process of child. (Note: Allow at least a half hour for locating left mitten, which child does not remember having used for toy soldier’s sleeping bag the night before.)

Drop child off at resort’s Ski Bunny program. Banter cheerfully with staff as you attempt to pry hysterical child from your legs. Affect bemusement over his insistence that he does not
want
to be enrolled in Ski Bunny program. Tell staff that child “actually loves” skiing and is really adorable once he stops screaming. Slip staff twenty-dollar bills for “treats.”

Head off with wife, teary over “abandoning” child.

Stand in thirty-minute-long lift line. Attempt to console wife by remarking how impressed you were by the “professionalism” of the Ski Bunny program’s staff. Also remark that you had forgotten how cold it sometimes gets in Vermont, and how windy, with today’s nippy, gale-force wind blowing down from Baffin Island. Impress her by calculating that the wind-chill factor comes out to thirteen degrees below zero.

As you reach the head of lift line, remain calm as public-address-system loudspeaker announces: “Will the parents of [your child’s name] please report to the Ski Bunny program immediately.”

Arrive to find child physically intact but hyperventilatingly adamant that he will not remain another minute in Ski Bunny program. Despite their “professionalism,” staff members eagerly concur.

Agree to wife’s proposal that you have “fun bonding” experience by teaching child to ski yourself, as she disappears in search of chemical “warmers” to counteract numbness in extremities.

Fasten harness around child and, using reins, repeatedly pull
delighted child a hundred yards up baby slope, until your knees begin to make crunching sound similar to snapping stalks of celery, audible even through thickly insulated ski pants.

Convince child that he is “ready” to go with you on ski lift. Emphasize how much “fun” it will be.

Attempt to reassure child as gusts of Canadian air rock the ski lift wildly from side to side, a hundred feet above the slopes. Explain, too, that it is “normal” for the ski lift to stop every three minutes for long periods. Tell him that you cannot feel your nose, either.

Slowly but surely accept the fact that you have erroneously got on a lift to the summit, thereby committing yourselves to a bonding experience you’ll both remember for years and years.

As end of lift approaches, attempt to persuade panicking child that the machinery was not expressly invented for purpose of mangling him.

With dubious child held firmly between your legs, begin snow-plowing down several thousand yards of ice covered with a thin veneer of artificial snow. This is Vermont, after all—but think of how much money you saved by not going to one of those expensive places out west!

Try to ignore acute shooting pains in your lumbar region by focusing on interesting new pain on insides of your knees. Remind yourself that with recent advances in arthroscopic surgical technique you’ll be walking normally in weeks.

Whoopsie daisy! Apologize to child for falling on top of him. Try to make him laugh by pointing out that tip of his ski is embedded in your left eye.

When lumbar pain increases to unignorable level of intensity, tell child your are going to have “even more fun” by hooking yourselves together with the “kiddie harness.”

Fall on ice and, spinning like a wildly thrown Argentine bola, cartwheel down the mountain. Reassure child that death is not imminent by shouting “Whee!” and “Isn’t this neat?”

Attempt to stop by grabbing on to leg of passing skier. Profusely apologize to skier, who, it turns out, is a successful negligence lawyer from Manhattan.

Continue bola-like descent. At bottom, hand over frozen, traumatized child to furious wife, who, having stuffed her clothing with two hundred dollars’ worth of chemical warmers, resembles a scarecrow.

Remain flat on back for duration of scathing lecture on your incompetence as a ski instructor. (Note: Your wife does not care that you have no feeling in your legs.)

—
The New Yorker
, March 1997

As someone who has received his fair share of rejection letters over the years, let me extend a collegial hug to the many fine and talented but high school students who will be receiving college rejection letters this spring.

This year’s classic
Oops
award goes to U.C. San Diego, whose admissions department (by the way, why do they call them “admissions” departments when their primary focus is really more on “rejections”?) sent out an e-mail to 47,000 high school seniors, congratulating them on being admitted. The only problem was that 28,000 of them had already been rejected earlier in the month. The admissions director quite properly accepted all responsibility but, in a clear ethical lapse, did not publicly disembowel herself on the front quad.

On occasion, colleges even manage to screw up acceptance letters. Some years ago, Arizona State University famously sent out a letter that began:

To the parent or guardian of Truman Bradley

Dear Parent or Guardian:

Congratulations on 987-65-4321’s admission to Arizona State University! We commend you for the significant role that you have played in helping him to prepare for this exciting and critically important time. A.S.U. is committed to providing an outstanding collegiate experience, and we are pleased that he has chosen to take advantage of this tremendous opportunity. We are fully prepared to assist 987-65-4321 in making a successful transition from high school to college.

At least they got Truman’s Social Security Number right. His father had the wit to respond:

Dear ____:

Thank you for offering our son, 987-65-4321, or as we affectionately refer to him around the house—987—a position in the A.S.U. class of 2003. His mother, 123-45-6MOM and I are very happy that such a prestigious institution of higher education such as A.S.U. has extended this offer.

In selecting a college for 987, we are looking for a place that will prepare him for the technological challenges of the 21st century.

Patrick Mattimore of
Examiner.com
wrote a funny and sadly informative piece two years ago about students who award prizes for best and worst rejection letters. That year, Harvard won in the category of “most obsequious while maintaining utter insincerity.” As he described it:

“Harvard lets students know how ‘very sorry’ they are to reject them. They then bestow three wishes, none of which they grant. First, Harvard wishes that they were writing with a different decision. Second, they wish that it was possible to admit the rejectee. Finally, they hope the student they deny will accept their best wishes.”

Another category was concision. Normally, it takes at least two
words to introduce the dismal theme (“We regret”). But Northwestern improved on that. Its rejection letter began, “After . . .”

In the category of “Most Emphatic,” Cornell was the clear winner. It sent out an e-mail informing the rejectee to piss off, and then added that he would be getting a follow-up letter
confirming
his/her unworthiness.

The “grand prize for total insensitivity” went to Reed College. When a student wrote its admissions department to ask if they’d received all his application materials, they sent him back “what was apparently intended to be an interoffice memo.” It read: “He’s a deny.”

A nifty site called
www.collegiatechoice.com
contains a few primo examples of these, among them the ASU’s letter accepting 987-65-4321. It was all too much, apparently, for a young man named Paul Devlin. After getting the heave-ho from one too many colleges, he wrote a letter that was published in
The
New York Times
. It began:

Dear Admissions Committee:

Having reviewed the many rejection letters I have received in the last few weeks, it is with great regret that I must inform you I am unable to accept your rejection at this time.

This year, after applying to a great many colleges and universities, I received an especially fine crop of rejection letters. Unfortunately, the number of rejections that I can accept is limited.

All I can say is, any “admissions” department that would turn down someone who can write a letter like that is in the wrong business.

Seeking consolation for young people who will endure these terrible letters this spring, I went to a site called—literally enough—collegedropoutshalloffame.com. What better solace than knowing who among the rich and famous flunked out, dropped out, or never went at all.

To name a few, in more or less alphabetical order:

Edward Albee, playwright. Trinity College, three semesters.

Woody Allen. A double dropout! (NYU and City College.) Mr.
Allen wrote somewhere that he was “thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics final. I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.”

Kevin Bacon, actor. Dropped out of high school. Wait—wasn’t his first big role playing the really smart, screwup kid in the movie
Diner
? The one who knows all the answers on
Jeopardy
? But come to think of it, wasn’t he a Bernard Madoff victim? Hm.

Warren Beatty. Northwestern, one semester. Comforting to know that a college dropout can end up with a classy lady like Annette Bening.

Carl Bernstein. His fellow reporter Bob Woodward went to Yale. Is there a moral here?

Yogi Berra. The most quotable American philosopher in history. Beside him, Socrates was a hack metaphysician.

James Cameron, director of
Titantic
and
Terminator
. QED.

George Carlin, the smartest comedian since Lenny Bruce.

Andrew Carnegie. Became one of the richest human beings in history and endowed more than three hundred public libraries.

Scott Carpenter, Mercury astronaut. Whoa—an
astronaut
? Are astronauts
allowed
to flunk out? (He missed the final exam at U.C. Boulder on heat transfer. If he’d been smart, like Teddy Kennedy at Harvard, he could have hired someone to take the test for him. But wait a minute—Teddy got caught. Never mind.)

Winston Churchill never attended a day of college and won World War II. (With a little help from a Harvard man.)

So, parents, if your wonderful, smart, and generally deserving sons and daughters get a “he’s a deny” letter or its equivalent, give them a printout of this. It will give them audacity of hope.

Audacity of hope . . . isn’t that the title of a book by that guy who started out at Occidental, transferred to Columbia, and finished up Law Review at Harvard?

—
The Daily Beast
, April 2009

Members of the graduating class:

On my way in from the airport, as I was composing my thoughts for my talk to you, a phrase kept coming back to me. I believe it was a great American, La Rochefoucauld, who first said,
“Ou est la plume de ma tante?”
These immortal words—or, as the first Americans would say,
mots
—seem to me to sum up the very spirit of your generation.

When La Rochefoucauld said that, during the cold winter at Valley Forge when vastly outnumbered Americans assisted only by Guatemalan mercenaries faced the overwhelming forces of Genghis Khan, knowing where your aunt’s pen was could mean the difference between having something to write with and trying to make yourself understood to an impatient Mongol warrior by scratching “I surrender” in the dirt with a stick. We lost a lot of
plumes
at Valley Forge, and even more aunts, but then, as Herodotus says, “History is worth a few dead aunts.” How true.

Your future, however, is much brighter than it was for the aunts of Valley Forge. As I look out on your faces, a veritable pointillist pageant of diversity, I am reminded of what Descartes, the father of contract bridge, once said, namely, “If you want to get to know someone really well, you must first smell his mocassins after he has walked a mile in them.”

Descartes was, of course, speaking metaphorically. And yet, in a larger sense, he was echoing the sentiments of Lao-tse, breeder of the malaria-carrying African dipterous insect that bears his name twice, who so memorably said, “If you want to get to Hang-chou before Fang Li, feed gravel to his ox.”